Dads Against the Divorce Industry

DA*DI is devoted to reinstating the societal valuation of Marriage and the traditional, nuclear American Family, with particular emphasis on the essential role of FATHERS.

DA*DI offers contemporary reports and commentary on culture; its aberrations and its heroes.

The Politics of Idiocracy and Irrationality:
"For the Children"

by Dr. Gerald Rowles

IT STARTED WITH THE NOTION THAT CHILDREN ARE ACTUALLY BETTER-OFF IF A ROCKY MARRIAGE ENDS IN DIVORCE. Then it became fashionable to believe some feminized "experts" who feared that the rough and tumble play of fathers taught children -- and especially sons -- to behave aggressively. This was yet another piece of evidence that fathers and intact two-parent families were superfluous to child-rearing.

But it only started there. Soon we began to celebrate the single-parent birth. During the decade of "the woman" it was the virtual reality of television that gave us the Murphy Brown caricature of the supercareermom and her sperm-donored offspring.

Accompanying this happy arrival was the continued demonization of the rational male. The hapless vice-president Dan Quayle condemned the courageous Murphy's irresponsible imagery. His fate was to become the penultimate Mr. Potatoe, head goober of the tribe of male goobers.

Unfortunately, over the past 30 years it has been the greater numbers of youthful and far more limited young women who were tuned in to the pre- and post-Murphy Brown mythology, and the welfare class of single parent mothers has exploded, bringing a corresponding, exponential expansion in Aid to Families with Dependent Children. But in parallel droves, the middle-class mom has tuned in to the "expert" claims that fathers are superfluous and/or dangerous and have followed suit with their welfare sisters in the contemporary female Declaration of Independence - Divorced Single Parenthood. At the top of the Murphy Brown food chain are the married careermothers who want it all - marriage, children, family, oh, and quality day care so that they need not be inconvenienced beyond an arbitrary three-month get-acquainted post-natal period of psuedo-motherhood. Children make such lovely pets, you know.

In the meantime, at the highest levels of state and federal government, the rational and the traditonal have been relentlessly overturned by the feminist careerists in favor of the politics of "feeling" and the irrational national mantra for the children. Up on the "Anita" hills, otherwise sane male policians, cower in the fearsome shadow of being "Clarence Thomased".

The traditonal male role obligations to support and protect their families, and to assure the education of their offspring, have been turned over to the State - mostly federal. Uncle Sam has become the surrogate father to every Murphy Brown wannabe and her entourage of privileged and vulnerable children.

The Irrational has become the fundamental premise of every statute, and is catalogued in the great Book of Idiocracy, closely guarded by the feminist high-priestesses in the temple of Atlassa. It is no longer Atlas who Shrugged, but Atlassa. And the rational motor of the American culture has been stopped.

In her masterful Opus, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand brought us her philosophy of Objectivism - a paean to rugged individualism, self-sufficiency, and intellectual objectivity. Unlike the theories of "Relativism" and "Subjectivism", Objectivism asserts that Values exist in the external world, independent of our interpretation of them. Because these immutable values can be found and known, they must be used as principles for human judgements and conduct. Good/Bad, Right/Wrong, and Truth/Falsehood are among these values that can be rationally supported as universal and absolute. Because these values can be rationally determined, it is the power of rational, logical thought that can be seen as the motor that sustains the development of a just and substantive society.

In her own words, Ayn Rand declared; "Nothing can corrupt and disintegrate a culture or a man's character as thoroughly as does the precept of moral agnosticism, the idea that one must never pass moral judgment on others, that one must be morally tolerant of anything, that the good consists of never distinguishing good from evil."

"In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. ... When loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it's picked up by scoundrels -- and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteous uncompromising evil."

Unlike the future view that Ayn Rand held, Atlassa, not Atlas, has shrugged and the motor of rational thought has been stopped in every modality of contemporary human existence - politics, entertainment media, news media, the judiciary, colleges and universities, - virtually every American institution.

Cathy Young and Michael Weiss, writing for the Cato Institute, have outlined one irrational outrage that is Feminist Jurisprudence. An example of the implementation of the irrational is the evolution of sexual harrassment laws as explained by Young and Weiss: "A major step in the direction of remaking the law in the neo-feminist image occurred early in 1991. In Ellison v. Brady, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California abandoned the traditional test for offensive conduct - the 'reasonable person' standard and substituted a 'reasonable woman' test, dealing yet another blow to common-law construction." ...

"The court also uncritically embraced the neo-feminist notion that men and women do not and perhaps cannot see the same events similarly, gutting the concept of neutrality under the law." ...

"In Ellison, the Ninth Circuit panel suggested that women's sensitivities were not only 'special,' but might become further refined with the passage of time. ... 'Fortunately, the reasonableness inquiry which we adopt today is not static. As the views of reasonable women change, so too does the Title VII standard of acceptable behavior.' "

And as a final example of the degree to which the sophistry that is Feminism has violated it's own mercurial tenets, we have the infamous and unconstitutional federal Violence Against Women Act which sets females apart as a protected class - while simultaneously implying that males are the violent class against which females must be protected.

As a reasonable person, I would like to suggest that herein the reasonable woman test betrays the glaring irrationality that it is. First, there is a mounting body of evidence that unequivocally substantiates the fact that women are as likely to commit violence against their male partner as is their male counterpart likely to commit violence against them. But what is not as apparent is that while radical Feminists and their male hareem tout their irrational agendas, premised in the "For the Children" mantra, the protected class of females is going about racking up a yearly carnage of child homicide at a rate 10 times greater than that of males that are biologically related to such children. Yet, whenever a mother kills a child; drops a neonate in a dumpster; or snuffs it in a plastic garbage bag we are reminded that she is not responsible for her actions. She was once again the victim, and the dead child becomes a forgotten anecdote. For the children, indeed.

So the great Book of Idiocracy grows, while irrationality dominates our political and social discourse, to the sad abeyance of objectivity.

Ah well, who is John Galt?

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