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                       California Fathers' Summit

	This conference was called by Governor Wilson because of the
widespread concern about crime, educational failure, drugs, social decay,
etc. and the perception that these are connected with family breakdown, in
particular with the erosion of the weakest link in the family, the
father's role.
	Anthropologist Margaret Mead has emphasized that, unlike the 
mother's role, which is biologically based, the father's role is a social 
creation.  Male dogs and cats have no reproductive importance after their 
minuscule sexual performance is over.  The emergence of a similar male 
rolelessness in the inner cities was becoming apparent some decades ago 
and is now becoming obvious in the larger society. 
	At present the law appears to be less concerned with how to 
strengthen families than with how to provide for ex-families or 
fatherless families created by illegitimacy.  It is becoming better 
understood that these fatherless families breed most of the criminal and 
underachieving classes.  Many politicians think the problem is one of 
punishing the male criminals generated by such fatherless 
families--building more prisons, hiring more police, passing 
"three-strike" laws, squeezing money out of ex-husbands ("deadbeat dads") 
for the purpose of subsidizing ex-wives or ex-girlfriends and "their" 
children.  
	Success in providing for these fatherless families means there 
will be more of them, that fathers will become still less needed and less 
motivated, and in consequence there will be further weakening of families 
and more of the resulting pathology this conference is concerned about.  
The weakening of male motivation means less male productivity, less male 
willingness to undertake family responsibilities, more fatherless 
families, more fatherless children, more crime, less economic growth.  A 
society which cannot motivate its men to be family providers will 
deteriorate, as ours is doing.  A society which threatens husbands with a 
fifty percent divorce rate combined with virtually automatic loss of 
children and home and property is forfeiting this motivation.
	It is too little understood how male motivation is related not 
only to family and social stability but to the economic growth of 
society.  Thanks to family stability and the male motivation it created, 
the twenty years following World War II were a period of astonishing, 
indeed unprecedented, growth.  America's industrial plant, already the 
wonder of the world during the war, doubled during those twenty years, 
the GNP grew 250 percent and per capitainutes" ran a program called "New 
York Is Falling Apart," showing streets sinking into the ground, bridges 
cconvenienced and dead."  
	Judith Wallerstein says only half of the male students she 
followed in her study of divorced families completed college, forty 
percent of the young men were drifting--on a downward educational course, 
out of school, unemployed.  When so many of them have seen their fathers 
expelled from the homes they bought for their families, when they 
themselves face the same fifty percent chance of divorce and the y wonder 
why they should work as their fathers and grandfathers did in the years 
after the War.
	If you ask a man why he works at his job, he will bring out his 
wallet and show you pictures of his family.  This motivation has been 
weakened even for the lucky fifty percent who still have families.  Males 
have lost confidence that society wants them to be heads of families 
rather than providers for ex-families.  This is what men hear when 
President Clinton tells them, "We will find you.  We will make you pay." 
	Most men still would like to be fathers, but our society is 
giving them little assurance that they can have families--that they will 
be able to spend their own paychecks to provide for their own families 
rather than to subsidize ex-wives and pay for other things judges and 
bureaucrats deem proper.  
	A judge will try a divorce case in the morning and place the 
children in the mother's custody.  He will try a criminal case in the 
afternoon and send a man to prison for robbing a liquor store.  The 
chances are three out of four that the criminal he sends to prison grew 
up in a female headed household just like the one he himself created that 
morning when he tried the divorce case.  He can't see any connection 
between the two cases.  The reason he can't is the time lag.  The 
children he placed in the mother's custody were perhaps toddlers who 
would not yet rob liquor stores or breed illegitimate children.  But they 
will grow older.  They will become teenagers, boys capable of committing 
crimes of violence, girls capable of breeding illegitimate children.  And 
then the chickens will come home to roost.  
	In 1980, crime increased by a startling seventeen percent.  L.A. 
Police Chief Daryl Gates was flabbergasted.  Nothing in the economy, he 
said, could account for such an increase.  What did account for it was 
the huge increase in divorce and illegitimacy in the mid-1960s--plus the 
anti-male bias of the divorce courts which changed the father headed 
families into female headed families.  The judges who placed the children 
in these families hoped they could force the fathers they exiled to 
subsidize the families they destroyed--to pay to have their children 
brought up in female headed households where they were more likely to be 
abused, neglected, impoverished, delinquent and sexually confused.  They 
would like to blame the fathers for their own inability to create an 
alternative to the family. 
	The welfare system is equally responsible for subsidizing 
(therefore creating) female headed households.  Like the divorce court 
judges, welfare bureaucrats would like to make biological fathers pay.  
They fail to understand what Margaret Mead explained, that fatherhood is 
not a matter of biology but a social creation.  If these (merely) 
biological fathers are to pay, they must become (or be allowed to remain) 
real fathers in Mead's sense, men with a role such as that taken away 
from ex-husbands by the divorce court.  They need to be given better 
motivation than "We will find you.  We will make you pay."  This latter 
motivation will not create real fathers.  Real fathers must be created, 
as Mead says, by society.  Our society is doing the opposite--destroying 
millions of fathers through its divorce courts and its welfare system.
	Much of the social breakdown now going on is the result of the 
attempt to find taxpayer-funded alternatives and ex-husband-funded 
alternatives to fatherhood, the creation of which must always be one of 
society's primary responsibilities.  The anthropologist Bronislaw 
Malinowski said that if the family ever ceases to be the pivotal 
institution of society, we shall be confronted with a social catastrophe 
compared to which the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution are 
insignificant.
	There is no substitute for it.  We should stop trying to find one 
and recognize that the weakness of today's family is the consequence of 
society's failure to support the father's role, the role most in need of 
society's support.  The biological weakness of the father's role is not a 
reason for throwing fathers out of the family but a reason for 
strengthening their role within it.
	A Georgia judge named Robert Noland routinely places children in 
the mother's custody when he tries a divorce case, and justifies what he 
does by saying, "I ain't never seen a calf following a bull.  They always 
follow the cow.  So I always give custody to the mamas."  The reason 
Judge Noland never saw a calf following a bull is that cattle don't live 
in two-parent households. If we want to live like cattle, Judge Noland 
has the right idea.  
							
      --Daniel Amneus, Ph.D.
        Men's Defense Association  	  
        Contributing Editor, The Liberator


From fathers@soho.ios.com Thu Jun  8 16:48:56 1995
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