Category: Blog

February 20, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Sometimes courts get it right – even Nebraska courts.

In the case of Alberts vs. Alberts, both the trial and the appellate court made the right decisions.  Thomas and Joan Alberts were married in 1997, had two children, separated in 2011 and Joan filed for divorce in 2013.  There were multiple issues at trial about marital property and of course about child custody.  Predictably, the trial court’s temporary orders gave Joan primary custody and allowed Thomas only every-other-weekend visitation.

But during their separation Thomas always cared for the children at Joan’s house after she left for work and after the kids returned from school in the afternoon.  Thomas was a fit, loving and caring father.  His provision of care for the children allowed Joan to work long hours and pursue continued education that enhanced her earning potential.

But post-separation, Joan entered onto a campaign to alienate their younger child, Isaac, from his father.  This the court duly noted.

It is the court’s strong conclusion that Joan has actively worked to alienate [Thomas] from his children. It believes just as strongly that [Thomas] puts the interests of his children before anything else. While [Thomas] is not a perfect parent, the Court reposes significantly more trust in his parenting abilities. Given the strong history of discord between these two, the fact that Joan has chosen to disregard the Court’s previous directions aimed at establishing a coparenting relationship between [the parties], and the parental alienation instigated by Joan which is obvious from the record, the Court chooses to award legal custody of the minor children to [Thomas]. Physical custody will be shared on a rotating weekly basis.

That was the right thing to do and both the trial and appellate courts understood the fact.  The two exes were at each other’s throats.  They seem to have hated each other, but loved the children.  Joan actively tried to alienate Isaac from his father, but Thomas did nothing of the sort.  Therefore, giving sole legal custody to Thomas made sense.  He had the children’s best interests at heart and, since the two adults couldn’t work together, reposing sole legal custody in one facilitated the child’s healthy upbringing.

Likewise, equal physical custody was probably the right approach.  A week-on/week-off schedule makes parental alienation difficult or impossible.  As soon as the alienating parent begins to convince the child that the targeted parent doesn’t love them, is violent, crazy, or whatever fiction the alienator chooses, the child returns to the targeted parent and learns once again that the fiction is just that.  It’s one of the great virtues of equal parenting that it all but obviates parental alienation.

While a joint physical custody arrangement might seem at odds with the district court’s award of sole legal custody to Thomas and the court’s emphasis on the “strong history of discord” between the parties, the evidence shows that a physical custody arrangement involving fewer parenting time transitions and a regular, predictable schedule was best for Alika (the older child).  (Parenthetical mine.)

In short, both courts did the right thing by these children and their parents.

Are Nebraska courts starting to “get it?”  Certainly, equal parenting forces in the state have made it hot for those who oppose a child’s right to maintain meaningful relationships with both parents post-divorce.  That’s included a number of initiatives that have by turns embarrassed and brought into disrepute various anti-shared parenting entities in the state.  The decertification of the bar association was one such incident and the public humiliation of its then-president Marcia Fangmeyer for blatantly lying about a shared parenting bill, in which I was a happy participant, was another.  The multiple revelations of the Saini analysis of custody decisions undercut essentially every argument against shared parenting.  Likewise, the lawsuit against the Administrator of the Courts that forced the publication of the “education” received by family court judges in the matter of children’s welfare and parenting time has been of great importance.  That “education” was so at odds with the truth and the shenanigans engaged in by state employees to ensure that judges didn’t hear the truth about the matter couldn’t have set well with the judges themselves, the legislature or the public.

But perhaps the most important factor has been the steady drumbeat of opinion pieces published in all the prominent state newspapers by shared parenting advocates.  That, plus the fact that anti-shared parenting forces have nothing with which to counter those arguments and, at least to a great extent, have stopped trying, just may have pushed Nebraska judges in the right direction.

Whatever the case, a win’s a win and Alberts vs. Alberts is a win.  It’s a win for Isaac Alberts and a win for sanity in the process of deciding custody and parenting time.  And it’s a win for all those who know that parental alienation is a form of child abuse and that alienators must be held to account by the judges in whose courts they appear.

February 18, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

When you’re the First Minister of Scotland, as Nicola Sturgeon is, apparently you think you can peddle patent nonsense to the people you supposedly represent and they’ll buy it, no questions asked (Express, 2/17/19).  That’s what Sturgeon did not long ago, but it turned out that the Great Unwashed were more skeptical than she’d planned on.

Sturgeon pronounced herself the country’s “first mammy,” and told the children in foster care that “I love you all.”  Well, isn’t that special.  I’m sure her words warmed her heart, but others remained icy.  Why?

It seems that Scotland, under Sturgeon’s loving eye, has become second only to Finland in the whole of Europe and beyond in the number of children taken into care.  Scotland takes a whopping 145 kids per 10,000 into foster care.  I’ve complained for years that the U.S. takes too many, but our ratio is 59 per 10,000, or about 41% of Scotland’s rate. 

Those who, unlike Sturgeon, know a few facts about what kids go through in foster care are livid about that record.

Campaigner Jim Mackie, from Garmouth, Moray, who has submitted a petition to Holyrood calling for a review of the care system, said: “Nicola Sturgeon hasn’t got a clue.”…

Maggie Mellon, a veteran social worker and former chair of the Scottish Child Law Centre, said: “It’s good that Nicola Sturgeon feels responsibility for children in care but the evidence is children are increasingly being taken into care instead of parents being given the support they need. What she should be doing is trying to keep children out of care.

“It is easy to say ‘I love you all’ but in fact children in care are treated quite badly, they have worse education outcomes, are more likely to be unemployed, more likely to end up in prison, more likely to suffer mental health problems and more likely to have children who are themselves taken into care.

“The focus should be on supporting actual parents, who are increasingly having to turn to food-banks and can’t afford heating because of the introduction of Universal Credit.

“More and more local authorities can’t afford to provide that support so social workers can’t really offer anything apart from removal into care.

“It’s easy to say she is Scotland’s ‘chief mammy’ but have children in care got her address if they become homeless? No. If a teenage girl in care falls pregnant, will Nicola Sturgeon offer to raise the child like a mother or grandmother would?

“No. It would be good to know what it actually means for any young person on the street, desperate and miserable or being abused in care. How can they get in touch with their mammy?”

Ouch.

Mellon’s words of course will come as no surprise to anyone who follows the tribulations of child protective agencies anywhere.  It’s the same story from state to state and country to country.  More and more children are taken into care because the government that set itself up as the fallback parent refuses to provide the money to do what should be done.  In Mellon’s words, that would mean “the focus should be on supporting actual parents.”

What a concept.  That the state should, first and foremost, devote its resources to assisting parents who need it seems to be obvious.  But it’s almost entirely escaped legislatures that budget funds and the agencies that receive them.  They overwhelmingly think first of taking children out of their homes and traumatize them terribly in the process.  Then they place them with adults who are strangers to the children, who have only limited love to give them and are often mediocre parents themselves. 

Here in the U.S., children in foster care are much more likely to be abused or neglected, be the target of physical or sexual abuse, use controlled substances, run away from home, etc. than are other kids.  I doubt the situation in Scotland is much different.  So taking children from their parents should be a last resort only.  But it’s not.  All too often, it’s the first and only choice of caseworkers.

Adding Orwellian insult to injury, Scotland has decided to name the various state authorities that constitute its “care” system “corporate parents.”

There are 142 “corporate parents” in Scotland, including every council, every health board and every government department. The Scottish Government claims “the First Minister is recognised by care experienced children and young people as de facto ‘Chief Corporate Parent’.”

Yes, that term delivers quite the message of love and tenderness, doesn’t it?  “We’re the state and we’re here to care for you.”  What child’s heart wouldn’t be warmed?  Dickens couldn’t have imagined anything more damning.

About the only good piece of news in the linked-to article is this:

The First Minister was speaking at Who Cares? Scotland event in Glasgow on Friday to mark Care Day, which marks Holyrood passing the controversial Children and Young People (Scotland) Act. It introduced a named person for every child – although this part of the legislation was later thrown out by the UK Supreme Court…

Thank heaven the “named person” provision of the law was overturned.  I wrote about that back when the legislation was being considered.  Amazingly enough, the legislation provided for the appointment of a “named person” for every child in the country.  The named person was given the power to second-guess a wide range of decisions that parents normally make.  Here’s a portion of what I wrote back then:

If the named person (who ironically need not be identified) decides the child “has a wellbeing need,” the named person can cause an intervention into the child’s life and the family’s affairs. What’s a “wellbeing need?”

A child has a wellbeing need if the child’s wellbeing is being, or is at risk of being, adversely affected by any matter.

Could they have defined the term any more loosely? According to it, any named person can intervene in a child’s life and the parents’ decision-making at any time for any reason. Did the child fail to study for tomorrow’s test? He/she is clearly “at risk of being adversely affected by any matter,” so it’s time for the state to step in. Did he/she walk outside barefoot? Ditto.

Is it any surprise that the government that wrote and passed that law now finds itself taking record numbers of kids into “care?”  The government that did so clearly doesn’t trust parents and believes that strangers are better suited to decide about children’s lives and well-being than are parents.  So the Scottish care system takes more kids into care per capita than does any country in Europe save one.

Long ago, the camel got his nose under the edge of the tent.  If we’re not careful, the whole stinking beast will be in there, living our lives with us, eating our food, sleeping with us, etc.  Reform of child protective laws is of the utmost importance.

Meanwhile, it’s good to see that the Scottish people aren’t buying what Nicola Sturgeon’s trying to sell.

February 17, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Signs and wonders.  Carlos and Jemima Guimaraes have filed suit against Dr. Chris Brann.  Really, they have.  I’m not making this up(Houston Chronicle, 2/14/19).

A wealthy Brazilian couple, sentenced to federal prison for helping kidnap their grandson, sued their ex-son-in-law this week, alleging that he defrauded the court in the trial that led to their convictions.

Carlos and Jemima are, as I’ve written numerous times, the parents of Marcelle Guimaraes, who, over four years ago, kidnapped her son Nicolas from his home in Houston to her native Brazil.  That was done with the active participation of Carlos and Jemima.  They were apprehended in Florida and brought to trial in Houston on criminal charges related to their role in the kidnapping.  They were convicted and given the lightest of taps on the wrist by the federal judge presiding in their case.

Now they’ve decided to sue Dr. Brann.  Their theory appears to be that he lied to the court when he said Marcelle abused Nico.

At a news conference Thursday morning, the Guimaraes’ lawyer, Jeff Diamant, said Brann had twisted the narrative of his marriage to their daughter, portraying himself as the victim of domestic violence when he was in fact the perpetrator.

Here’s how I would translate that message: attorney observes wealthy couple who are unhappy with their conviction for abetting the kidnapping of a little boy.  Attorney convinces couple he can help them achieve the “justice” they believe they’ve been denied.  Wealthy couple is used to getting their own way in their native Brazil and therefore is ready to believe attorney.

The fact is that this lawsuit has essentially no chance of success.  That’s because all the issues it raises have already been decided and are thus precluded from being re-litigated by the doctrine of res-judicata.  If the Guimaraes had wanted to complain that Brann wasn’t telling the truth about his behavior during his marriage, they had ample opportunity to bring the matter up, produce countervailing evidence and let the trier of fact decide.

Come to think of it, that’s exactly what they did.  One of their main defenses in the criminal matter was that they were protecting Nico from further abuse by Brann.  The judge gave that defense careful consideration, even postponing for several days his decision on whether to enter the jury’s verdict or not.  Both the jury and the judge rejected the Guimaraes’ claim.

In fact, so did several other courts.  The family court in Houston found Marcelle to be the abusive parent and there was plenty of evidence to back it up.  One former nanny for Nico testified that Marcelle was an indifferent and sometimes abusive mother and that Dr. Brann was concerned, loving and nurturing.  At least one mental health professional said much the same.

Brann’s attorney, Alan Daughtry, called the lawsuit “frivolous” and “further harrassment” of Brann, a physician. He said Brann intends to file a motion to dismiss the suit.

“(The) claim of ‘fraud on the court’ has already been rejected, as Dr. Brann has prevailed on the merits before a federal jury, a federal judge, a Texas trial court judge, and the First Court of Appeals,” Daughtry wrote in a statement Thursday.

And then of course there are the courts in Brazil that have rejected all claims of abuse by Dr. Brann.  That’s the more remarkable because, at every turn, those courts have sided with Marcelle, even violating Brazilian judicial procedure and the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction to do so.

In short, numerous courts have considered the claims of child abuse made against Chris Brann and every one of them has rejected them.  You’d think that would persuade the Guimaraes that it’s time to drop the subject.  After all, they’ve won.  Brazilian courts have dragged out the process so long that they’ve decided, in violation of the Hague Convention, to embrace Marcelle’s kidnapping of her son and deny Dr. Brann any chance of getting his son back.

Her kidnapping has been given the Brazilian judiciary’s stamp of approval.  Nico will never come home.  What more do the Guimaraes want?  Yes, they have boatloads of money with which to harass and abuse Dr. Brann, and they appear intent on doing exactly that.  But, at long last, have they no decency, no shame?  Why don’t they just go home to Brazil and enjoy the grandson they’ve worked so hard to deprive of his father?

The civil court in which they filed their suit should dismiss it and levy damages and attorney’s fees against the Guimaraes for filing a frivolous suit.  Perhaps that will convince them that their fight is at an end and they should take their winnings and leave.

Signs and wonders.  That a fit and loving father should have his son taken from him, that all the courts in two supposedly civilized nations should be unable and unwilling to provide justice to him and his son and that two wrongdoers should file suit against him are all signs and wonders.  Signs of a deeply dysfunctional society.  Wonders that we have no notion that what we do regarding families brings us down – all of us.

February 15, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

When I was a young man, the “Counterculture” informed me and all of my cohorts, both male and female, that marriage was “just a piece of paper” and that no such piece of paper could improve one’s relationship with the opposite sex.  Marriage was an absurd irrelevancy, the product of an uncomprehending and pitifully unhip Past.  Like so much about the Counterculture, that proved to be false.  The notion was more about sending a message to straight society than getting facts right.

For whatever reason, that message has persisted in this culture.  Marriage rates are either declining or people are getting married later, so data on marriage among those under the age of, say, 35, are far below what they used to be.  In any case, young adults are postponing marriage till much later than previously and to some extent, aren’t marrying at all.

We’ve known for decades that the Counterculture message was false and nothing has intervened to suggest otherwise.  So this reportfrom the Institute for Family Studies comes as no surprise (IFS, 2/7/19).  Put simply, what married and cohabiting adults report is that marital relationships tend strongly to be happier, more stable and more strongly committed than cohabiting ones.  A recent study of 2,000 American adults supports those conclusions.

As to happiness,

In the survey, married adults were more likely to report being “very happy” in their relationship, even after controlling for education, relationship duration, and age.1 In fact, after adjusting for these variables, the married women had a 54% likelihood of being in the highest relationship satisfaction group and married men had a 49% likelihood. For cohabiting women and men, those likelihoods were 40% and 35%, respectively. These group disparities are statistically different.

(My guess is that that last word should be “significant.”)

And married couples reported greater levels of commitment to their relationship.

Overall, 46% of married adults were in the top relationship commitment group, compared to slightly over 30% of cohabiting adults (commitment was defined using three items that measured the extent to which individuals valued their relationship and wanted it to continue). Figure 3 below shows that even after adjusting for different life circumstances, married women and men were more likely to report the highest levels of commitment compared to cohabiting individuals. Again, these are statistically significant differences.

Finally, marriages tend to outlast cohabitative relationships.

Overall, 54% of married adults in the survey were in the top perceived relationship stability group, vs. 28% of cohabiting adults (this top category was defined as how likely respondents were to say they thought their relationship would continue). Figure 4 shows the differences after adjusting for age, education, and relationship duration. The differences that remain are statistically significant.

Of course some part of the differences between married and cohabiting couples may be a product of selection bias.  People more capable of commitment, happiness in relationships, etc. may tend to marry while those less so tend to live together without that piece of paper.  But the fact that these and similar findings have arisen time and again in study after study, plus the fact that they hold true across all lines of race, class, education, etc. strongly suggest that selection bias accounts for only a small part of the differences between married and unmarried couples.

All of this of course militates in favor of a cultural/societal commitment to marriage.  If we were smart, we’d promote marriage at every opportunity.  We’d point out the facts the research has always demonstrated.  But we don’t.  Indeed, we do the opposite; we discourage marriage and encourage divorce.  How smart is that?

We announce loudly and clearly to men that marriage is a minefield.  Any man who knows the facts knows that his wife can chuck him aside at any time for any reason or no reason.  When she does, she gets over half of what he’s worked to accumulate and a significant stream of income called child and spousal support often for decades into the future.  Did he commit strongly to his children?  Did he enthusiastically embrace his role as Dad?  Did he find his most powerful sense of self-worth in that role?  Too bad.  The court handed the children to her and he’s lucky if he gets to see them 25% of the time.

Why would a man marry under such circumstances?

Once married, if a woman finds her husband not to her liking, we offer her cash rewards for leaving him, plus the promise that, if she does so, she won’t lose her relationship with her children. 

So why remain married when divorce is in many ways preferable?

Married relationships are best for the individuals in them and for society generally.  So you’d think we’d reform our laws, practices and public messages to promote marriage.  Instead we do much to destroy the institution that’s the backbone of any healthy society.

Such is public policy – self-destructive and contrary to known science.  Make sense?

February 14, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The response in Quillette by 12 practicing and academic psychologists to the APA’s Guidelines for Psychological Practice for Boys and Men breaks down into four primary areas of criticism.  Briefly, the Guidelines are (a) not based in science, (b) based in ideology, (c) not therapeutic and (d) a violation of professional ethics and best practices.

So Stetson University psychology professor, Chris Ferguson was actually able to review the proposed Guidelines prior to their final draft.  He pointed out that they lacked a basis in biology, but, for the most part, his objections went unheeded.

Specifically, the guidelines lack a broad scientific base, particularly an understanding of biological contributors to gender identity, tend to use terms such as “traditional masculinity” in ways that lack conceptual integrity and are often stereotyped…

Unfortunately, from my view the APA has a poor track record of biased and scientifically misleading policy statements including practice guidelines. Usually such statements exaggerate the consistency, quality, and policy applications of a field of study. The APA’s statement on violent video games, my own field, does not resemble the actual science, which has not provided good evidence for links with aggression.

“Does not resemble the actual science…”  That’s about as damning a statement as it’s possible to make in this context, but others are equally so.  B. Christopher Frueh offers this on the deviation of the Guidelines from science:

The APA’s latest manifesto is an embarrassment to the discipline of psychology. It is an abdication of scientific responsibility, denying biological and evolutionary realities in favor of a progressive fantasy pushed by “social justice” and “feminist” ideologies. 

Not content with being anti-science, the 12 experts condemn the Guidelines as ideologically-driven.  Psychologist Pamela Paresky says,

The guidelines’ basic premises are rooted in a set of ideological biases that are likely to impair psychologists’ objectivity, ability to respect the dignity and worth of certain clients, and make it difficult if not impossible to establish a therapeutic relationship based on trust.

Natalie Ritchie is still more outspoken on the matter.

For years, feminism has fought a passive war of attrition on masculinity, starving it of honor. With its 2018 guidelines, the inherently feminist APA has gone on the offensive. This assault is not as simple as misandrist pay-back by feminism for a history’s-load of oppression. It has its roots in the feminist need to be man-identical. When your idea of gender equality is a 50/50 breakdown of men and women in any given situation—that is, when you think that 100 percent of women should do what 100 percent of men do—masculinity poses a threat. Making men less like men (and more like women) becomes a backdoor route to making women more like men. Such gender denial is the new Aryanism; unscientific, unprofessional, immoral. Insisting that each gender is “wrong” and must be more like the other to be “right” cripples both, and shrivels the human footprint to only what the genders have in common.

Psychiatrist Sally Satel emphasizes the role the Guidelines would play in defeating the therapeutic goal, i.e. the emotional help for and self-actualization of individuals.  By considering men and boys to be a group with certain common traits that form the basis of an individual patient’s emotional turmoil, the Guidelines tend to thwart any effort by a therapist to see a patient as unique.

The APA guidelines risk subverting the therapeutic enterprise altogether because they emphasize group identity over the individuality of the patient.  

Psychotherapy is the ultimate personalized medicine. The meanings patients assign to events are a thoroughly unique product of their histories, anxieties, desires, frustrations, losses, and traumatic experiences.

“Gender-sensitive” psychological practice, as the APA calls it, is questionable because it encourages clinicians to assume, before a patient even walks in the door, that gender is a cause or a major determinant of the patient’s troubles…

So when the APA encourages practitioners to engage in vaguely defined activities—“address issues of privilege and power related to sexism” or “help boys and men, and those who have contact with them become aware of how masculinity is defined in the context of their life circumstances”—it seems more focused on a political agenda than on the patient.

How could it not?

Finally, Paresky points out that the Guidelines violate several ethical precepts promulgated by the APA itself.

The APA’s code of professional ethics requires that psychologists respect clients’ “dignity and worth” and their “rights to self-determination.” It urges them to “take precautions” about “potential biases,” to refrain from taking on a clinical role when “other interests” could impair their objectivity, and reminds psychologists that they must “establish relationships of trust” with clients. The new guidelines violate these ethical standards. The guidelines’ basic premises are rooted in a set of ideological biases that are likely to impair psychologists’ objectivity, ability to respect the dignity and worth of certain clients, and make it difficult if not impossible to establish a therapeutic relationship based on trust.

Yes, the APA has now embraced a set of Guidelines for treating men and boys that violates the ethical principles of the APA.  That’s quite a feat.  As Paresky points out, any therapist applying the Guidelines would see his/her patient, not as a person, but as a member of a group.

Changing men starts with the premise that there is something wrong with men. If these guidelines are followed, how will men who see themselves as “traditionally masculine” trust that their sessions will be used for their own goals of psychotherapy rather than to address their masculinity?

There is of course much more to the Quillette piece.  Everyone who cares about the well-being of men and boys should read it and avoid like the plague, any psychotherapist who follows them.  The Guidelines are not about helping men and boys, but about altering masculinity to fit the frankly loony notions of radical feminism that has never made a secret of its fear and loathing of men.  These are the people who are now going to help us?  Please.

Thanks to Quillette for a fine, informative and necessary forum on the Guidelines.

February 13, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

I return now to the APA’s Guidelines for Psychological Practice for Men and Boys.  I’ve already done a couple of pieces on them and much, much has been written elsewhere, almost none of it complimentary.  But Quillette’s effort to address the Guidelines can’t go unmentioned (Quillette, 2/4/19).  It’s perhaps the last word on what should be the end of the Guidelines.

Why discuss the Guidelines on a blog that deals with family court reform?  Because the same biases already evident in family courts are reiterated in the Guidelines.  They both promote and exacerbate all the anti-male tendencies that are so common in judges’ rulings on child custody and parenting time.  Worse, as a product of the APA, they may well be used by mental health professionals who advise judges on those issues.  If masculinity is accepted by them and by judges as “toxic,” what hope can there be for fathers seeking meaningful time with their children?

Quillette asked 12 scholars to comment on the Guidelines.  The results are devastating.  After this, the Guidelines should be scrapped altogether.  No mental health professional should use them for any reason and certainly not to address the problems of men or boys in a therapeutic setting.

So the 12 mental health professionals and academics who comment in Quillette use words that leave no doubt about how roundly they condemn the Guidelines.  So descriptors like “lack a strong scientific base,” “embarrassment,” “abdication of scientific responsibility,” “denying biological and evolutionary realities,” “lacks construct validity,” “violate… ethical standards,” “unscientific, unprofessional, immoral,” “risk subverting the therapeutic enterprise altogether,” “an ideological agenda,” and “will have zero effect” pepper the remarks of the 12 Quillette contributors.

Those are hardly pulled punches.  They aren’t words we often hear in the context of academic discourse.  They’re the words of outraged professionals who see their discipline being hijacked by a few practitioners to serve ends that bear little resemblance to what psychology is supposedly about – helping those with emotional/psychological problems solve them.  Indeed, as I’ve said before, no man or boy who falls under the sway of a psychologist wielding the Guidelines will exit the experience anything but further scarred.

So professor of psychology, W. Keith Campbell asks a pithy question:

What kind of society do you get when masculine values are centered on emotional self-focus rather than stoicism; cooperativeness rather than competitiveness; submissiveness rather than dominance; and kindness rather than aggression? Would men be happier and healthier in such a society?

Hmm, good question.  So how might we answer it?

Well, given how bad traditional masculinity is, reversed masculinity should be flourishing in other cultures. Oddly, the APA doesn’t offer any examples. 

That of course isn’t the least bit odd because there are no such examples. Campbell’s point is clear: the process of natural selection would require that a healthier, more productive mode of being for half the human population must prevail over “traditional masculinity,” if it were as dysfunctional as described and reviled by the APA.  The fact that no such thing has ever happened in human history and certainly doesn’t exist now demolishes the theory that a generally better form of masculinity is available for us to choose.

Campbell takes the matter one step further though and points out how traditional masculinity, with its emphasis on stoicism, hard work, etc. actually creates safe spaces for other types of masculinity to thrive.

The closest you find to the flipped masculinity script are peace-focused masculine cultures that exist as protected subcultures in larger liberal cultures (e.g., India currently protects Tibetan spiritual culture—explicitly nonviolent groups like the Jains, etc.). Without this protection, peaceful groups get killed off…  No traditionally masculine men at the border means no men of peace in the nation.

It’s a trenchant observation.  We all need to thank whatever gods may be for traditional masculinity, because without it, the rest of us would have life much harder and more dangerous than we do.  And, we don’t need to travel to India to find an example of peaceful sub-cultures that depend on traditional masculinity for their very existence.  Right here in the good old U.S.A. countless people, men and women alike, are free to pursue lifestyles, careers, hobbies, religions, etc. solely because traditional masculinity makes all that, and so much more, possible.

The same has held true for essentially all of human history.  Historian Ian Morris makes that exact point about the Roman Empire that repeatedly conquered peoples who soon found their lives made easier, safer and more prosperous due to the quintessentially traditional masculinity of Rome and her legions.

Campbell’s point should never be forgotten.  Masculine strength, masculine will, masculine stoicism, masculine ambition have, over the millennia made everyday human life far, far better than it has ever been.  Every attack on traditional masculinity is an attack on our own well-being and that of our children and our children’s children.

Is that really the road we want to travel with only ill-informed ideologues for our guides?

February 11, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Now it’s Montana’s turn in the spotlight (Daily Inter Lake, 2/10/19).  Like many other states, Montana’s child protective agency – the Division of Child and Family Services – is a study in dysfunction.  The usual factors make all but impossible the agency’s ability to do what it’s tasked with doing – protecting children from harm.  Indeed, all too often, it’s the agency that does the harm.

That’s because caseworkers report a management culture that errs on the side of taking children from parents.

Sources allege they have been asked multiple times to remove children when they believed it was unnecessary and removal would be traumatic for the child and would violate the “least intrusive, least restrictive” rule.

“Just before I resigned we were told to remove children if there was a question of safety, then continue the investigation,” [caseworker] Sylvia said. “I believe we were told to remove children unnecessarily and we broke up families needlessly rather than make a plan to keep families together safely.

What we usually see are child protective agencies getting it wrong both ways; they seem to either take children unnecessarily or fail to take those truly at risk of harm.  But the long and well-done article makes no mention of the latter problem, only the former.  In fact, supervisors often bully caseworkers into doing so.

“We are asking different results from the same administrators,” said Matt Furlong, vice president of Montana Child Protection Alliance, an organization that provides support to families whose children have been removed from a home. “We have a culture of bullying that is happening at the top and trickling on down.”

For example, Furlong said, one employee who was recently named a division administrator for Child and Family Services in 2018 was a longtime regional administrator who oversaw the Great Falls office that has been the focus of past abuse of power allegations. Yet the former regional administrator for that office now holds one of the highest jobs in the state division.

That bullying by supervisors sometimes includes, strangely enough, refusing to allow caseworkers to talk to each other.

Anne Gowen, who worked in Montana as a child and welfare worker and supervisor for nearly three decades, claims during her time at the Polson office in Lake County, the regional administrator “forbade workers to speak to one another” and intimidated employees, yet that administrator now works at the state department in Helena…

According to Sherman, the current acting regional administrator in the Kalispell office has asked workers not to collaborate with one another on cases, a request that has caused staff morale to decline.

Of course it has.  Unsurprisingly, in office after office, there’s been a “mass exodus” of caseworkers and supervisors who choose not to work under those conditions.  The result of course is that those who stay find themselves handling several times the number of cases recommended by industry standards.

The Child and Welfare League of America recommends caseloads between 12 and 15 children per worker at one time.

But Sherman said it wasn’t uncommon for her and her Kalispell colleagues to be handling three times that many cases at any given time. Another source with knowledge from the Butte agency said her workload was always double what it should have been. Ebelt recently said the Billings staff averaged caseloads of 60 children per caseworker.

That in turn makes it all but impossible for caseworkers to do their jobs competently.

Supervisors often overrule caseworkers’ decisions despite never having had contact with the family in question.

Before a child is removed, a caseworker must reach out to management before proceeding. Regional administrators and supervisors ultimately give the final call on whether or not to remove a child. Sylvia said this is sometimes an issue of “assessing from the desk,” in which management makes a judgment call to remove a child despite having not “laid eyes” on the situation, or in some cases, having allegedly not reviewed reports from caseworkers.

“If the powers at the higher level don’t listen to those who are doing the hard work and have feet on the ground, the system does not work,” Sherman said.

What an otherwise excellent article doesn’t ask is why the tendency of the agency always runs in the direction of taking kids from non-dangerous homes rather than leaving them in dangerous ones.  That is, why is the error always toward the same end?

The answer of course is money.  The federal government doesn’t pay states a penny for leaving kids in the home, but it does pay to remove them and have them adopted.

That part of the Adoption and Safe Families Act should be rescinded.  The lure of federal largess encourages the break-up of families and the break-up of families tends strongly to harm children.  There has to be a better way to protect children than paying states to destroy their relationships with their parents.

And there is.  Agencies that say they protect kids should spend much, much more time and money providing parents and families the resources they need to care for their children more effectively and better.

Furlong believes the state needs to step up to provide guidance for families whose children have been removed from the home.

He and others claim the department often fails to offer the tools or resources necessary to help struggling parents — something that works against the division’s goal of reunification.

Those resources can include everything from parenting classes to drug and alcohol abuse programs to daycare and the like.  But, due in large part to the ASFA, CPS agencies tend to see their mission strictly in terms of whether or not to remove a child from its home.  That culture needs to change.

February 10, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

It’s far from news that allegations of domestic violence are often used to gain an advantage in child custody cases.  Family lawyers have been admitting as much for decades.  So the facts behind domestic violence are necessarily of interest to anyone seeking family court reform.  The more judges, lawyers, custody evaluators, etc. learn those facts, the better their decisions are likely to be.

That brings me to the latest figures to come out of the Centers for Disease Control via its annual survey, the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, a.k.a. the NIPSVS.  Here’s an article on the most recent one (Save Services, 2/5/19).

What’s perhaps most noteworthy is the fact that, departing from the previous trend, men over the past 12 months were 31% more likely to be victims of DV than were women.  During the past year, 3.8% of men and 2.9% of women experienced some form of violence at the hands of an intimate partner.  Previously, we could pretty much rely on the rates of victimization of the sexes to be about equal, and of course that may turn out to still be the case when next year’s figures come in.  Or this might be the start of a new trend toward greater female abuse of men.  After all, this culture does little to discourage female violence against men.  It’ll take us a few years to figure that out.

What’s not new is that, in same-sex relationships, men are far less likely to engage in IPV than are women.  The lifetime victimization rate for lesbians was a whopping 65.7% and for gay males it was 40%.  That’s roughly in line with rates reported for Canada by its statistical agency, StatsCanada.

And, again in keeping with previous findings, victims of DV are neither interested in nor satisfied with involving the police in the situation, although women were significantly more enthusiastic about the police than were men.  Some 36.5% of female and 21% of male victims termed police involvement as “very helpful,” while 52% of men and 33.7% of women said the police were “not at all helpful.”

As a result, men are three times less likely to report such incidents to police, compared to women (12.6% versus 36.3%) (Breiding, M.J., Chen J., & Black, M.C. (2014). 

Again much like Canadians, Americans who are victims of DV don’t tend to call the police.  That’s in part because those who do say the police are generally not very helpful.  More often, as has been found by various studies, it’s because the victims don’t believe the incident warranted the involvement of state actors.

And that of course brings us to the main point.  If DV victims had greater trust in the police to make the situation better instead of worse, they’d be more likely to call when an incident occurs.  Even if the incident were viewed by the victim as relatively minor, he/she would still call the police if it were fairly certain that doing so would help.  But they don’t.  The reason they don’t is altogether reasonable and sound.

They don’t because the police (a) aren’t trained in the realities of DV and (b) don’t have much to offer most victims.  They don’t have much to offer because the “services” on offer tend to split up families, sometimes for long periods of time and those offered the perpetrator have no chance of improving his/her future behavior because they’re based in a toxic ideology that has always (and by now intentionally) gotten the nature of DV completely wrong.

The DV industry clings to its 45-year-old claim that DV is strictly a matter of men wanting to impose power and control over women.  Never mind that women commit more DV than do men, never mind that the power and control theory has been debunked many times and never mind that women have been found to be more controlling in their intimate relationships than have men.  The DV industry has never had much use for the realities of DV and yet, when a court orders a man to seek treatment for his perpetration of violence, he usually ends up in an ideology-infused group meeting that bears a greater resemblance to Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate than anything that might help him understand and alter his behavior.

Needless to say that, since the DV industry denies that women perpetrate domestic violence except in self-defense, there are essentially no treatment services for them.  A woman seeking to reform her abusive behavior may seek in vain for anyone who will even agree with her that she has a problem, much less help her solve it.

We say that domestic violence is an important issue to us and that we’ll accept nothing less than a total commitment to reform.  We lie.  Domestic violence is not important to us.  We know this because we accept for it an ideological framework that has always been utterly at odds with the facts about DV, why it happens, when, who commits it and how to improve matters.  The result is that, year after year, the problem continues because the ideology refuses to change.

We know what DV is and how to treat people who commit it.  We could start improving the matter tomorrow.  But we won’t.  We won’t, no matter how many statistics pile up, year after year, demonstrating that women are as violent in their intimate relationships as men, if not more so.

The U.S. government should de-fund all agencies currently receiving federal money to address DV that don’t demonstrate a full understanding of the issue, provide services to all victims irrespective of sex and offer treatment that’s based on our full and rich scientific understanding of domestic violence.  Until that happens, we’re just spinning our wheels.

February 8, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The movement for shared parenting in New Zealand is in its infancy.  Spearheading that movement is attorney Loren Portnow who recently penned an op-ed for the New Zealand Herald, the country’s largest newspaper, promoting a rebuttable presumption of equal parenting.  Unfortunately, the op-ed is inaccessible behind a paywall.

Back in 2014, family law in New Zealand underwent a limited reform.  Now the Ministry of Justice is reviewing those reforms and its report on them is due in May.  Portnow rightly points out that the review provides the government an opportunity to remake Kiwi law to provide for a rebuttable presumption of equal parenting.  Part of his argument involves the fact that the wave for shared parenting is rolling in the U.S. and cites, among other things, Kentucky’s recent success.

But there are other reasons that are unique to New Zealand.  For example, there are 63 courts in the country hearing family law matters that are expected to hear 61,000 cases per year.  When holidays and weekends are counted, that adds up to an average of 4.4 cases per court per day.  Make sense?

Plus, Portnow adds that, as of May last year, there was an 8,000-case backlog in the courts of Care of Children Act cases.  Portnow cogently wonders just how courts are supposed to act in the best interests of every child with such daunting caseloads.  Clearly, they do no such thing.  We’re forever told by those who oppose children having meaningful relationships with their fathers following divorce that judges decide custody matters carefully and on a case-by-case basis.  That conjures up images of judges meticulously reviewing large masses of evidence and thinking deeply about the circumstances of each case.

Nonsense.  Their primary goal is to move their dockets so the backlog of cases doesn’t grow even larger.  They do that by resort to pro-maternal custody as their default arrangement.  Study after study in the U.S. demonstrates that family law cases are about as individualized as frozen peas.

Portnow’s obvious point is that, with an equal parenting presumption, litigation would decrease, judges’ dockets would move more quickly and they’d have more time to devote to those rare contentious cases that truly need their attention.  What a concept.

Plus, “it is estimated that 10-20% of parenting dispute cases involve children who are suffering emotional abuse in the form of parental alienation.”  Those are cases that notoriously absorb far more judicial time and court resources than any others.  A presumption of equal parenting would go a long way toward eliminating parental alienation.  Why?  Parental alienation is, above all, an opportunistic phenomenon.  The parent who has the child most or all of the time has the opportunity to alienate the child because (a) he/she has the time to distort the child’s mind and perceptions of the other parent and (b) the other parent has little or no opportunity to change those perceptions.

A week-on/week-off schedule would make parental alienation close to impossible.  Whatever toxic seeds the would-be alienator could plant in the child’s mind about the other parent would, come the following week, be nipped in the bud.  The targeted parent would be revealed to be not the ogre claimed by the alienator, the child would see the truth and the alienation would fail to take root.

By reducing parental alienation of children, an equal parenting law would not only improve children’s welfare, but also reduce the dysfunction of everyday society that has to accommodate the bad behavior of alienated children and the adults they become.

We’ll see what the Ministry of Justice says in its report this coming May.  In the meantime, the movement for shared parenting in New Zealand is struggling to achieve lift-off.  Loren Portnow is doing his part to make that happen.

February 7, 2019 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

I write a fair amount about judicial bias against fathers and in favor of mothers.  But judges aren’t the only ones suffering from that particular illness, this guy is too (Globe and Mail, 2/4/19).

David Eddie is an advice columnist for a major Canadian newspaper.  That allows him to spread his peculiar brand of misandry far and wide, a task he doesn’t shirk. 

An anonymous man wrote to Eddie saying he had a one-night stand with a woman who’s announced she’s pregnant, despite telling him she was on the pill at the time.  She told the letter writer (I’ll call him Alex) that she’d also had sex with another man close to the time she did with him.  So at least she’s honest about the fact that there are two men, either of whom may be the father.  Alex told her he’d pay for an abortion if she wanted one, an idea she seemed amenable to at the time.  But he hasn’t heard from her since, leaving Alex to ask,

What do I do now? Do I man up and support the child even though I’m not 100-per-cent certain of being the father?

Now, if Alex had come to me for advice, I’d first and foremost have given him a bit of compassion for the fix he may be in.  Not so Mr. Eddie.  He could hardly be colder or more dismissive of Alex’s legitimate needs, concerns, etc.  Eddie treats Alex like a jerk.

Again if it were me, I’d have gone on to tell him the legalities of his situation, what he can do to ascertain paternity and what will likely happen if he’s the father.  I’d have said that he first needs to contact the mother and announce his wholehearted willingness to care for the child, if it’s his.  He needs to file the appropriate documents with the local family court to get a judge to order a paternity test.  He needs to file a petition to declare paternity and for custody and parenting time if he’s the dad.  And he needs to prepare himself for 18 years of being separated from his child and paying child support to a woman he barely knows.

So how does Eddie handle the matter?

First of all, I have news for you: Whatever DNA this child may carry, you are not his father. Not yet. Not by a long chalk.

Let me give a few (admittedly eccentric) brush strokes on what qualifies a person to be able to call himself a “father.”

Doing your best to keep the kid clothed and fed and uninjured and with a roof between his/her head and the rain and snow. 

Ah, I see.  Being a father isn’t a matter of simply siring offspring, but doing the many jobs of a hands-on dad.  Fair enough. 

Or is it?  In the first place, the law and the courts wouldn’t dream of treating fathers that way.  There, Eddie’s completely wrong.  There, the only question is the genetic one.  If the child has your DNA, he/she is yours and you will pay support for at least 18 years.  Period.  DNA supposedly gets Alex parental rights, but, as we all know, those are far more impressive on paper than they are in life.  Mom can deprive you of your child in a variety of ways and the only way you can enforce your rights is if you’re lucky enough to have the money to pay a solicitor very, very large amounts of money.  Even then you may lose.  So whatever moral high ground Eddie thinks he’s occupying, his distaste for men like Alex allow him to give the man bad advice.  Morality is one thing, the real world of law, courts, judges, child support and the like are yet another.  Eddie might want to think about that last sentence for a bit.  But I doubt he will.

Neither, I suspect, will he think about this:  for Mom, Eddie’s moral blandishments seem not to apply.  As we all know, under the law, mothers have parental rights automatically, solely due to their genetic connection to the child.  Fathers, not so much.  They have to pay a lawyer, file the right documents, go to court, etc. in order to have the law grant them parental rights.  DNA gives mothers parental rights and obligations, fathers only obligations.

Would Eddie preach the same sermon to the mother in this case?  Somehow I doubt it.

Now of course, lurking behind Eddie’s disdain for this man is the fact that he committed the sin of sins.  He asked her to have an abortion.

First of all, vis-à-vis keeping the baby, I say: her call. You stand back and let her make the decision on her own. I’m sure not everyone will agree, but as my wife tells our three boys: “If you impregnate a woman, even by accident, it’s her choice whether to have the child or not. You have no say.”

We all know the law on abortion, Eddie.  We all well know that Alex has no say in whether the woman terminates the pregnancy or not.  But amazing as it may seem, that’s not the end of the story.  Just because to abort or not is her decision, doesn’t mean Alex can’t express his preference, which is what he did.  That doesn’t make him a bad guy, only one who sensibly doesn’t want to get caught up in 18 years of raising a child with a woman he barely knows.  If women can have abortions, why can’t men state their preferences?  Because when women want to be relieved of parental obligations, they’re just exercising their rights, when men want to be relieved of parental obligations, they’re deadbeats, right?

Needless to say, Eddie wouldn’t dream of reading up on the reasons women give for aborting pregnancies.  The Guttmacher Institute and other organizations have studied exactly that question and the women’s answers run to form.  Overwhelmingly, women have abortions, not for reasons of health (either Mom’s or that of the fetus), but because they’re not old enough, don’t have the money, haven’t completed their education and/or don’t have a sound relationship with the father.  Think what you will about those reasons, they apply exactly as much to men as to women.

So Alex’s trepidations about fatherhood are precisely those of the countless women who decide to avoid the consequences of a pregnancy, but Eddie treats him like a pariah. 

Meanwhile, it’s not just Alex for whom Eddie reserves his contempt.

If the baby is not yours – well, I don’t think you’re under any obligation to raise another man’s child. Though maybe you should consider it. Might be good for you. Might cause you, to use your phrase, to “man up.”

Yes, the true father be damned.  Not content with insulting a man who, at one of the most vulnerable times in his life, has asked Eddie a very important question, he goes on to cavalierly suggest that Alex simply deny another man his right and opportunity to be a father.  Simply amazing.

The anti-father bigotry fairly oozes from Eddie’s pen.  If you want to know how perfectly fit fathers keep losing custody and parenting time, just read the article and know that plenty of judges don their robes and sit on their high benches holding the same hateful and nonsensical attitudes.

As I said, there’s a lot of that illness going around.  I wonder if there’s a pill for that.