MANN Feature: The Battle for Men's Rights in Scotland

Douglas Rome, a Scottish poet and professional journalist, sent in an engaging essay about the current happenings of the men's movement in Scotland, and the struggles it is facing. Of the many things one might call Douglas Rome, complacent isn't one of them - his writing style mixes news journalism with confrontational editorial commentary that makes no apologies. Douglas covers the status of several key men's rights issues, including father's legal rights, male suicide, false rape accusations, and more. Click Read More below for the essay.

The Battle for Men's Rights in Scotland

By Douglas Rome, douglas-rome@lineone.net

Dumfries, Scotland

Embattled men in Scotland have won crucial new rights in the teeth of bitter opposition from the Scottish matriarchy. The Scottish Executive -- the new devolved government in Scotland -- has started an inquiry into women's violence against men.

For decades, feminists have insisted that domestic violence is inflicted exclusively by men on women. Now, after unrelenting pressure by the men's movement, the Executive has been forced to concede otherwise. Announcing the inquiry to the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, the social justice minister (and feminist ) Jackie Baillie said (through gritted teeth) that the results should be known by early next year.

It is not known yet who will lead the probe or how far-ranging its research will be; but campaigners for men's rights have made it clear that if the inquiry team works to a brief dictated by the feminist agenda, they will not accept its (predictable) conclusions. Activists in the men's movement say that as it was their campaign that forced the government into action, they should have a key role in the inquiry.

And in another significant advance for Scottish men, the Executive is to give unmarried fathers full legal rights over their children in reforms planned for Scotland's family laws. Forty per-cent of Scottish children -- about 18,000 -- are born to unmarried couples, but the fathers have no automatic legal rights over their health, welfare and education. All that will change as the Executive strives to create more stability for children for whom often-feckless mothers have sole responsibility.

Alastair McLaughlan is typical of the fathers who have been deprived of their rights. When he and his partner split up, he discovered that because they were not married, he had no legal right to a say in his son's future. Like thousands of other Scottish fathers, he thought that because his name was on his son's birth certificate, his legal rights and responsibilities were guaranteed.

Alastair says: "With no rights or responsibilities, you are right at the bottom of the ladder. The state is telling you that if you want to be a father to your children, you have to prove you are suitable. You are guilty until proven innocent." Under the present discriminatory family laws, if a father wants legal parental rights, he has to marry the child's mother, register an agreement with her, or get a court order.

Alison Clelland, convenor of the Child Law Centre in the Scottish capital city Edinburgh, said the proposed changes would benefit children. She said: "I know of many clients who think that because their name is on the child's birth certificate, they have some rights. They don't. If they have been involved with their children's lives, that seems to them very wrong and unfair -- and the centre agrees with them."

The changes to the family laws will affect only fathers whose names are on their children's birth certificates. The draft bill goes out for consultation next year: for Scotland's deprived and derided unmarried dads, it can't become law quickly enough.

Meanwhile, men's rights campaigners in Scotland are focusing on two more issues that are central to the struggle between the genders: the national tragedy of young male suicides and the alarming rise in the number of false rape allegations by vindictive or deranged women. Men account for three out of every four suicides in Scotland. The Scottish suicide rate is one of the highest in Europe. Suicide kills more young men here under the age of thirty-five than die in road traffic accidents. Since 1989, suicides and undetermined deaths have risen by more than one-fifth. The latest figures for Dumfries and Galloway, the region of Scotland where I live, show that male suicides outstrip female suicides by a ratio of five to one.

Of course, the regional health authority here is worried about men's plight...so very worried that its major promotion this year is the creation of a website devoted to "domestic abuse" -- one that uses the distortions of the women's movement (and public funds ) to repeat feminist cant about male violence. Go to www.dumgal.gov.uk/domesticabuse to see what I mean. Then ask spokeswoman Helen Norman how the health authority plans to help the male victims of women's violence mentioned on her site. You can email her at HNorman@dghb.scot.nhs.uk -- although you may have to wait for a reply.

The Scottish Executive is funding an inquiry into suicide and homicide by people suffering from mental illness. I trust that it will ignore the "explanations" offered by psychiatrists and all the other functionally-useless "behavioural experts." According to most of them, young men kill themselves because of some obscure (and never convincingly defined) chemical process in the brain. Significantly, the mind-doctors never talk about the one indisputable fact of the suicide rate among young Scottish males: that its rise runs parallel with, and is inextricably linked to, the triumph of man-hating feminism in Scotland. Feminism -- more properly, womanism -- arrived here just in time to rescue Scotland's mildewed matriarchy from the oblivion so long yearned-for by decent people of both genders. The feminazi chorus began with the aberrant murmurs of Women's Liberationists in the late-1960s, swelling through three dark decades to the full-throated shriek of visceral misandrists who blame all men for everything that is wretched in their sterile lives.

In one of history's most successful propaganda campaigns, feminists persuaded the UK government to open its coffers without limit to Women's Aid, Victim Support, War Against Rape, Rights of Women, Zero Tolerance, Justice for Women, and all the other parasitic supplicants spawned by feminism. At the same time, it levered its zealots into powerful positions in the Government bureaucracy and -- its most significant achievement -- recruited them to the universities and other higher educational institutions. Campus feminism, under the seemingly innocuous syllabus label "gender studies", used Hitlerian indoctrination techniques to foster misandry in the minds of our brightest youngsters from the 1970s onwards.

What the misandrists didn't know (until now) is that among the students whose minds they tried to corrupt in all the major Scottish universities were male and female members of the antifeminist movement who recorded every hate-filled utterance of their feminazi teachers. When a true, gender-blind rule of law prevails in this country, and the mind-manipulators are brought to a rigorous final reckoning, they will have condemned themselves out of their own mouths.

A similar fate awaits those women who cry rape falsely. In 1991, Catherine Commins, then assistant dean of student life at the prestigious Vassar College in New York, extolled (without criticism or dissent) the value for feminism of making false accusations of rape. Her criminal endorsement of one of the gravest crimes was reported in Time Magazine's edition of June 3, 1991. Since then, the international cysterhood has taken up her call with evil glee; each year increasing numbers of men are jailed, and some executed, for crimes of which they are innocent.

It's difficult to imagine a crime more destructive than false rape; for, whatever the outcome of the trial, the victims' lives are wrecked. Even after they have been cleared by the courts, the unjustly accused men are branded forever: they carry a stain that everyone can see. They can change their names, their addresses and their jobs -- but, like men hunted as paedophiles by the vigilante mob, they cannot change the evil destiny forced on them by a lying woman.

Scottish men's rights campaigners, demanding laws to protect men from false rape allegations, say that men accused of rape should be given equal anonymity with their accusers. The campaigners want a register of false rape accusers -- similar to the British register of sex offenders -- and a study of how the legal system deals with false accusations. Malicious claims should bring sentences equivalent to those handed down for rape, they say.

The activists point to research in the United States which shows that a quarter of the number of men convicted of rape are innocent. "Impossible, unjust, an insult to women," screamed the matriarchy , which found a spokeswoman (of a kind) in Professor Sheila McLean of Glasgow University, an "expert" on medical and legal ethics. She dismissed the campaigners' proposals as "unworkable."

Mclean said that the notion of a "false accusers" register would serve no purpose as it was often difficult to establish whether allegations had been made maliciously. It would therefore be difficult to prosecute malicious accusers. McLean's idiocies show, perfectly, why moral philosophers change nothing (save, occasionally, each other's minds). Her position is best summed up thus: "We think this woman, or these women, is/are lying about being raped. That's a crime. But because we think we can't prove it, we're going to let the criminals carry on with the crime." If present interrogation techniques cannot bring the rape liars to justice, it's time we tried other methods, including the use of a "truth" serum such as sodium pentathol on both the accused and the accuser. Innocent men and women would have nothing to fear.

I acknowledge that this is an extreme step: it goes against every instinct for freedom that I own; it's incompatible with our noblest democratic traditions. But when we fight gender-fascism we fight the most powerful totalitarian force since Hitlerism. The existential plague that calls itself "feminism" is pure death instinct, visceral hatred on a global scale. It threatens all that's best in Western civilization. When we go to the arsenals of democracy for the weapons to fight it with, we find that all the guns are rusted. If I may adapt Churchill slightly, we must be prepared to mete out to the feminazis the measure, and more than the measure, of what the feminazis have meted out to us. And we must use the the most effective weapons we have.

All my life I have opposed capital punishment -- or murder by the state as we should more properly call it. But after a decade of chronicling the atrocities of feminism, I am beginning to change my mind. Rape liars smash lives. Perhaps they should pay with their own, or at the least be imprisoned for life without the possibility of parole. I think the same about the ultimate fate of the evil women in nursery group, primary school classroom and university lecture-hall who, at the behest of gender supremacy, have turned the best education system in the world into a death camp of the mind patrolled by the Gestapo thugs of political correctness.

In 1970, Germaine Greer published The Female Eunuch -- feminism's Mein Kamp -- in which she inquired: "Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly male?" That was the signal for her followers everywhere to launch the demonisation of men in terms which exactly mimicked the Nazis' vilification of non-Aryans before the Third Reich began its genocide of the Jews. Since then the feminazi assaults on all decency and humanity have grown in stridency and viciousness, unchallenged by supine judges in their complicit courts, to the point where natural justice demands as savage a response. Let me assure gender totalitarians everywhere: it is coming. The protean surge of the international men's human rights movement is the most thrilling development of my time. It is a great convulsion of rage, anguish, despair and love -- a veritable tsunami in the socio-cultural ocean. The great wave carries with it the hopes and dreads of a generation of men all-but-destroyed by feminism's insane supremacist imperative. It is about to engulf the enemy shoreline. Then "let the healing fountain start / in the desert of the heart."

By endless cunning, duplicity and secret conspiracy in the desert of its heart, feminism thought to neuter successive generations of men, to make them its slaves. Instead, at the end of one of the darkest nights of the Western soul, all that it has done is rouse a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.

Douglas Rome is a Scottish poet and journalist.

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