Once more, a woman attempts to shame men into not responding rationally to consequences of female actions:
There is a message to be delivered to men, and it may not be popular. We hear a lot about the injustices visited on fathers over divorce and access: for the record, I am largely on their side and dislike the thoughtless and sentimental favouring of mothers in residency disputes. We also hear a bit about the flailing ineffectiveness of the former Child Support Agency. What we do not often hear is the bald, uncompromising truth that if you father a child, you set up a non-negotiable duty.
Sorry, men, but it really is so. We may live in a shag-happy porno culture, where flings and “hotties” and zipless one-nighters are seen as the norm; we may be liberal about divorce, stepfamilies and serial cohabitation. Some of this is good, some of it bad. But none of it negates biology, or the entry-level ethical fact that when a sexual act creates a human child, that child is as much of a moral burden to its father as to its mother. Unless it is a matter of sperm donation or formal adoption with a clear contract, the man has, at the very least, a duty to monitor the child’s physical safety.
This is absolutely and utterly false under the current legal regime. It is totally unconscionable to claim that men who have been forcibly stripped of their paternal rights by the unilateral decision of the mother supported by the anti-paternal legal system have any duty whatsoever to the children that have been taken away from them. If it is the man’s decision to leave the family, then yes, his paternal responsibilities remain intact. If he fathers a child unintentionally his paternal responsibilities remain, barring the commission of intentional fraud on the part of the mother.
But if his paternal responsibilities have been stripped from him by the unholy alliance of ex-spouse and state, if he has been threatened with the full force of the law if he so much as attempts to contact them without the permission of the mother, then the onus for the children’s well-being lies with those who have assumed the full responsibility for it. It is absurd to write, as this woman does, that “men who turn aside from this duty should be looked at askance, stigmatised as dishonest weaklings.” The fact is that men who do not turn aside from this “duty” under these circumstances and this system are doing nothing more than enabling it. The writer’s real agenda is revealed in this sentence.
“Most mothers do their best but some are weak, depressed, drugged, or just lovelorn and intimidated by violent boyfriends.”
In other words, it’s the same old line that is based upon the underlying assumption that because women are children who can’t be held responsible for their actions, every female failing must ultimately be blamed on men. Clearly the logical solution is beyond her, which is to stop permitting mothers to unilaterally exclude fathers from the lives of their children. The concept is really not that hard to understand. Assuming that one considers the rule of law to be legitimate, once a man has been stripped of his status as a father by other parties, he no longer has any paternal responsibilities. They have been assumed by the parties that stripped it from him.