July 7, 2017 by Robert Franklin, Esq, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization
Sigh. Sometimes it seems the news media can’t get a thing right when it comes to fathers and their children. And the simple fact is that much of that failure isn’t failure at all; it’s intentional. I just did eight pieces on some (not all) of the ways in which a Washington Post article on parental alienation and family reunification programs was either false or misleading in almost every detail.
Now there’s this (New Zealand Herald, 7/6/17). It’s astonishingly bad and, in keeping with the genre, anti-dad and anti-kid. The background on the article is that the New Zealand government asks single mothers to identify the fathers of their children. If they refuse, they can be docked $22 per week per child from their children’s benefit. Now, for a single child, that would add up to a bit over $1,000 per year, i.e. not much.
But to the article’s writer and to everyone she spoke with, asking mothers to comply with the law and identify the fathers of their children is an anathema.
Green Party co-leader Metiria Turei called Section 70A a misogynistic piece of legislation that needed to be scrapped…
Auckland Action Against Poverty spokeswoman Vanessa Cole called the policy sexist and racist. Over 50 per cent of the penalised parents were Maori.
And further in keeping with the genre, writer Sarah Harris didn’t get around to speaking with even one father to get his perspective on the matter. Indeed, she didn’t quote a single person who was willing to point out the many obvious reasons why the government of New Zealand might want fathers to be aware of their kids. Not one. It seems to be the preferred practice for MSM writers in this field.
Now, as in the United States and elsewhere, the reason for identifying fathers is to dun them for child support. The New Zealand government no more cares if the dads see their kids than the Man in the Moon. It wants to pay less to single mothers in benefits, and the shortest route to that goal is to identify the father. He then pays child support, relieving the state of paying benefits to the mother.
Amazingly, although the article mentions in passing the reason for the legislation it never once mentions that these single mums about which it pretends to care would in fact be better off identifying the fathers and receiving child support than the meager sums on offer from Work and Income (Winz) that’s part of the Ministry of Social Development. And if Dad is too poor to pay or can’t pay as much as the benefit, Winz is still there to pick up the difference. So, as a jeremiad on behalf of poor single mothers, the article is a complete sham.
What it’s about and what the two women quoted are promoting is the state paying mothers to maintain complete control over unmarried fathers’ parental rights. They want the obligation to inform the father that he has a child to be dropped entirely and the state-paid benefits to continue. That way any mother who doesn’t want the father involved in the children’s lives can simply refuse to tell him about his kids and the state will support her and her decision. This, we are told is “complex and personal.” No, there’s nothing complex about it. Every day we see mothers attempting, often with the assistance of the state, to marginalize fathers in the lives of their children.
For years, radical feminist activism has attempted to substitute the state for fathers. This article and the quotations therein are more of the same. They want all power over children to be in mothers’ hands and the well-being of children be damned.
Mothers are about twice as likely to abuse or neglect a child as are fathers. And copious scientific evidence tells us that children need both parents to make the best of their lives. Possibly the sole public policy that even backhandedly attempts to insure that children have fathers is now under attack as “misogynistic.”
That of course is shameful, beneath contempt. But by now we’ve come to expect no better.
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