"Taken into custody"

Solution:

1. Just don't get married and/or have brats with or without benefit of clergy.

2. Stay the hell out of Massachusetts! It is rumored that a Ted Kennedy Loc Ness type beastie still roams in the waterways there! No rational reason for an MRA to venture into that fog shrouded region that civilization forgot!.

"The only hope is if religious leaders fight for change."
Ouch. Replacing one evil (current family laws) with another (religion).

ifeminists - an operation that tries to use men's rights issues to support the agenda of the religious right?
Note how the article seems to suggest that forcing people to stay together in a "classical" family is the solution, _not_ giving custody to the father in more cases. For the religious right, children DO belong to the mother, according to their old ideals. Then as a matter of logic, the mother must be forced to stay.

Let's be very careful with such allies.

Yes, I agree-- let's not trade one uberarch for another! The article author's comments and your response to them show the secular/religious divide in the MR movement. There are others, too of course (well anyone reading this site knows this already!) but this is possibly the biggest and most important. I am firmly in the secular camp myself and really don't want to see a "return to traditional family values", as this is a euphemism for yoking some poor man (and woman) irretrievably to one another and not letting them escape one another. We certainly don't need a return to stocks in the public square! But we're in the secular camp. The other main camp among MRAs is the religious "traditional values" crowd. They have their place and their right to their beliefs just as we do. They may not be as numerous as the secularists, but they are nonetheless as much a part of the MR movement as anyone else who holds the same general belief about how men have been getting the shaft in an inexcusably bad way.

I have believed for a long time now that the best way to deal with differences in ideology is to focus more on what *actions* we can take together, and less on the beliefs we hold in our heads *as such*. Find things we agree on and pool our efforts-- the coalition (or committee, if you can stand that word) model of getting things done. It is not as intense or focused as the single-platform, single-plank approach, but it is better at getting more people invested in the effort, and there is strength in numbers.

...written by a feminist male or female. I am especially skeptical if it is by a female though.

Women tend to lack moral compasses and just go on how they feel about the situation at the moment having no real innate sense of justice.

*E-Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/No_Feminazis/
*Site and Blog: http://www.freewebs.com/nofeminazis/index.htm

*"the most outrageous aspect is the total and i mean TOTAL silence from women. hell, they could care less. makes me sick." ~ donnieboy5

..the problem is that, with articles such as this one, men's rights can be dismissed very easily as some sort of conservative backlash to re-institute traditional society structures.
I don't know about the US but here in Europe, this can well be lethal for any attempts to bring forward men's rights. And already being caught up in the fight between these two camps is a very bad thing.

Nonetheless, even the most fanatical Christian may see an advantage in our goals, but we must make sure he's not the one defining what we do.