So Much for 'Father's Day' - in a Country Where Fatherhood is Dying Out

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Originally Posted by ardianto

Wa'alaikum salam

I'm sorry if I offend you. But I wrote that because you wrote "I am widow" not "I was widow".

Sister, if a widow has married again, she must call herself as "wife" not "widow" anymore. It's for respecting her new husband.

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;D Sorry I forgot that. I was widow 20 years and wife again just a month.

So i was widow.

English is not my first language. But I think there is difference between become a father and being a father.

Become a father is easy, but being a father?. It's not an easy thing.

Salaam

Another article on how the family is viewed by the political classes in the UK.

Since when was saving your children a 'lifestyle choice'?

There’s something a little jaunty about the expression ‘lifestyle choice’. And maybe in the super-rich world of our Chancellor of the Exchequer, this is how full-time motherhood is regarded.

But actually quite a lot of couples view it as a stern duty.

They see the terrifying world of bad schools, bullying, drugs, internet filth and peer-pressure to do the wrong thing, which now menaces children, and they resolve to make their homes a fortress against this. To do so, they give up many of the pleasures of life. Families with full-time mothers don’t tend to live in big houses, they often go without holidays and the array of shiny consumer goods that two incomes buy. They reckon it is worth the sacrifice. They do not expect to be thanked. Far from it.

But they think it a bit much that their heavy taxes go to pay for nurseries for those who choose to have two incomes rather than one. They learned long ago that the state was suspicious of them and hostile to them.

The New Labour Commissar Patricia Hewitt said back in June 2003 that mothers who stayed at home were a ‘real problem’.

The Tories, who largely supported Labour’s Marxist (see below) ‘Equality’ laws and have their own ‘Equalities’ Minister, have always acted as if they agreed with Ms Hewitt.

They have subsidised every form of childcare except that done by the child’s own mother.

And now the millionaire Chancellor (what is his name? I can never remember) has airily dismissed the embattled minority of traditional families as indulging in a ‘lifestyle choice’, like smoking or owning an allotment. He’s just as much an enemy of the strong family as Commissar Hewitt. The minds of the Tories are so empty that they have been colonised by the ideas of the Left.

For instance, where do you think the following quotations come from?

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‘Complete equal rights for women and men are anchored in the laws .  .  .’

‘Equal work is obviously rewarded with equal pay, regardless of sex. Women hold many leading positions in society .  .  .’

‘The overwhelming majority of women today do not want to be housewives with nothing more to do than wash and cook and run the home .  .  .’

‘Fathers pushing prams and husbands who have learned to operate domestic appliances more or less perfectly are no longer a curiosity.’

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Actually they are in Everyday Life In The GDR, a propaganda booklet published in 1982 by communist East Germany, in praise of itself.

It boasts that the communist state has no need of women’s liberation organisations because their demands have all been met. And it quotes Karl Marx’s 1868 words: ‘Social progress can be measured precisely in terms of the social status accorded the fair sex.’ (The hairy-faced old brute added the words ‘The ugly ones included’, which would have got him into trouble with the Guardian and the BBC today, and perhaps also an invitation to join UKIP.)

Revolutionaries hate the strong family, the fortress of private life, tradition and individuality. They believe in the parental state, all-wise and all-powerful.

The Tories have taken the wrong side, and betrayed their supporters, on this and on all other issues. No wonder they now have fewer than 100,000 members. They should have fewer than 100,000 voters.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/08/since-when-was-saving-your-children-a-lifestyle-choice.html

Salam,

My country is known to have a percentage among the highest of marriages that end in divorce in the Arab world ( If not the highest). The chief reason for this is said to be marital infidelity. Ironically , marriages in my country are typically religious , with Fatiha and all.
As for father's day , I may shock some people here but I don't think people in my country know of a father's day. I know I don't. Mother's day however is well known.
We also have a woman's day. It's a day off too.
Personally , I intend on being a good father if I get to become one someday.

Salaam

Teach married couples about monogamy for sake of the children, says High Court judge

Married couples should be sent to classes promoting monogamy to help spare children lifelong scars from family breakdown, according to the High Court Judge Sir Paul Coleridge


Married couples need to be taught about monogamy to help stem a tide of family breakdown which could blight life in Britain for decades, a leading High Court judge will say today.

Sir Paul Coleridge, the family division judge, will warn of “yawning public ignorance” about the damaging mental effects on children of conflict between parents, even from birth.

It emerged last week that Sir Paul, who is retiring next year, decided to step down because of opposition from within the judiciary to his support for traditional marriage.

He has been placed under investigation and could be officially censured over comments last year criticising the Government for pushing through same-sex marriage legislation rather than tackling a “crisis of family breakdown”.

Speaking in London he will call for a new approach to tackling family breakdown with a greater emphasis on helping prevent relationships running into trouble in the first place.

Sir Paul, who founded the Marriage Foundation think-tank last year, is calling for couples in apparently happy and stable marriages to be actively encouraged to seek professional help to build stable strong long-term relationships.

He is hosting a conference in London today to promote the idea of “relationships education” – sending couples to professional classes to teach them how to avoid potential pitfalls rather than relying on marriage guidance and counselling after the damage has been done.

The Work and pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith is among those expected to attend and speak in support of the idea.

Sir Paul, one of the most outspoken figures on the bench, will single out the very public acrimony between Charles Saatchi and Nigella Lawson, exposed during the trial of two former aides, as an example of the pain of a family split which he said would “chime with many who had been exposed to the rigours of the break-up mill”.

He will argue that for centuries society was held together artificially by “nasty taboos” and stigmas which prevented people getting divorced even in cruel and violent relationships.

But unless modern couples can learn to respect “self imposed boundaries” Britain could be facing “Social anarchy” with children the biggest victims, he will say.

“I encounter it, day in and day out, in arena of the family courts – let it not be forgotten that 50 per cent of all children are not living with both parents by the time they are 15,” he will say.

“There are millions of them and it is they who are the real victims and casualties.

“Their parents are too, of course, but the children are given no choice, are never consulted and only rarely considered before it and its effects are dumped into their young lives, slowly to release their legacy over the whole course of their upbringing and way beyond into their adult lives.”

He will continue: “We live in a time of mass family breakdown. We know of its destructive effects.

“In the old days society was held together by rigid taboos and stigmas which prevented parties from divorcing and stigmatised illegitimate children.

“These taboos were indiscriminate in their application and led to much inhuman behaviour and unhappiness.

“I am genuinely thankful they have evaporated and been consigned to the scrap-heap of history in favour of individual choice.

“However if we are to enjoy freedom to chose we must be helped to understand and make the right choices for ourselves and our children.

“Social anarchy and a society without boundaries is not the only the alternative to nasty taboos.

“If we are not to have restraint by taboo we must have personal restraint and self imposed boundaries.”

But he admitted that many couples would be reluctant to consider marriage classes because they fear they would be like a “Maoist re-education camp” or involve lying on a couch or “embarrassing group discussion”.

“It is instead about equipping people by giving them the tools to cope with and manage the eternally difficult subject of living with your partner in a monogamous long term relationship,” he will say.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/sex...urt-judge.html

A day after my wife passed away, an old friend who did not met me for long time came to my home. After saying condolences he told me that he got divorced in mid of 2012. But then he smile and told me “I married again in early of 2013”. Then I saw his new wife who waited in the car. Beautiful.

I become a widower since June 2013, and a month later I began to get ‘support’ to get married again. Amazingly it started by my wife old friend!. I understand if they support me to get married again although I still surprised when two month ago an older woman who was close enough with my wife told me “I thought you have married again!”.

Frankly I am so familiar with women gaze and can guess what they think on me, based on the way they look or glance at me, and their body languages. So I know what are their view on me in my 46 years old age. Just wonder, I found some of them still glance at me in that way.

But I am a widower with children, not divorced man like my old friend who his children live with his ex-wife. I must still maintain my fatherhood and cannot thinking “Let my ex take care my children” like many divorced men who I know.

This time my children have not ready to accept a new woman as their mother, and I should not selfish. I am a father, and my children happiness is the most important thing for me.

:)

A divorced woman ever told my wife about her problem because her ex-husband refused to pay her children study fee and basic needs. It made me wonder because I knew her ex-husband was rich man while that divorced woman was house wife who didn't have an income. Her ex-husband had married again less than a year after they divorced.

Okay, I know, not every divorced man is bad. But frankly, I feel concerned with behavior of some of divorced men who I know. They neglect their children who abandoned with their ex-wives. Maybe they forget that they are still those children's fathers and still have responsibility on them.

To be honest, there was a time when my wife was angry to me and started thinking about divorce, but then she threw away this thought. One day she told me
"Do you know? I was ever thinking about divorce in that time?"
"I know"
"You knew it? Then what would you do if we were really divorced?"
"I would not neglect my responsibility to our children, I would still give attention, fulfill their needs. And fulfill your needs too because you are their mother".
My wife silent for a moment, then she smile at me.

Yes, there is ex-wife, there is ex-husband. But there is no ex-child, there is no ex-parent.

I love my late wife so much, but I am still an ordinary man who can feel lonely too without someone beside me. But, my children happiness is the most important thing for me. I know it's still hard for them to accept a new woman as their mother.

And thank you very much for my mother who often scolded me when I was kid with "If you don't train yourself to have responsibility since now, how could you bear your responsibility as father in the future??!!"

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Originally Posted by Junon

Salaam

Fathers day has passed. Thought this was sharp comment piece on the state of fatherhood in the UK.

So Much for 'Father's Day' - in a Country Where Fatherhood is Dying Out

By the end of his or her childhood, a British boy or girl is much more likely to have a TV set in the bedroom than a father at home.

Our 45-year national war against traditional family life has been so successful that almost 50% of 15-year-olds no longer live with both their parents. At the same time we have indulged our neglected and abandoned young with electronics, so that 79% of children aged between 5 and 16 have bedroom TVs.

And as we soppily mark ‘Father’s Day’ with cards, socks, sentimentality and meals out, we should remember that in almost all cases the absent parent is the father.

There is no doubt about the facts here. Let me list some of them. The cost of our wild, unprecedented national experiment in fatherlessness is now £49 billion each year, more than the defence budget. This figure, currently costing each taxpayer £1,541 per year, is rising all the time, and has gone up by almost a quarter since 2009.

The money partly goes on handouts and housing which an old-fashioned family with a working father would not have needed. Partly it goes on trying to cope with the crime, disorder, truancy, educational failure, physical and mental illness and general misery which are so much more common among the fatherless than in those from stable homes.

And there is more to come. One in three marriages ends in divorce, while many who would once have married never even bother. Roughly 300,000 families of all kinds separate every year. There are now three million children growing up in fatherless homes. Another 58 fatherless families are launched every day. And be in no doubt that it is the fathers who are, overwhelmingly, absent in these new-style modern households. Only 8% of single-parent homes are headed by a lone father.

Four in ten children being brought up by their mothers – nearly 1.2 million - have no contact with their fathers at all.

Another 67,000 (In England alone) dwell in the organised despair and neglect which are cruelly misnamed ‘care’.

In the last 40 years the proportion of adults who are married has sunk from 70% to fewer than half. The number of single adults has hugely increased (up 50%). A quarter of a million people each year spend Christmas alone. One in six adults now cohabits, compared to one in 50 in the 1960s. Cohabiting households, which have doubled in number since 1996, are the fastest-growing type of family arrangement in the United Kingdom.

By 2015, there will be two million lone parents (up 120,000 since 2010); more than 24% of children will be in lone-parent households.

It matters. Young people from fractured homes are statistically twice as likely to have behaviour problems as those from stable households. They are more likely to be depressed, to abuse drugs or alcohol, to do badly at school, and end up living in relative poverty.

Girls with absent fathers (according to studies in the USA and New Zealand) have teenage pregnancy rates seven or eight times as high as those whose fathers have stayed in meaningful touch with them.

By contrast, the link between marriage and good health is so strong that one study showed the health gain achieved by marrying was as great as that received from giving up smoking.

In all these dismal statistics of marriage decline and failure, the United Kingdom is one of the worst afflicted among advanced nations. And in many of the poorest and most desolate parts of the country, the problem is concentrated into certain areas where fathers in the home are an endangered species.

From Gosport in Hampshire, to Cardiff, Liverpool, Easington in County Durham, Inner London, Bristol, Birmingham and Sheffield, there are whole city wards where at least 60% of the households are headed by a lone parent.

And it is in such circumstances that a procession of serial boyfriends, a type of domestic arrangement closely associated with physical and sexual abuse of children, is most likely to exist.

This great fleet of hard truths is known in general to those who govern the country, and in hard detail to millions who suffer from their consequences.

How, as a country and a people can we manage to be so indifferent to them, when we claim to set fatherhood and fathers at the centre of our culture? The fundamental prayer of the Christian church begins with the words ‘Our Father’. Americans speak of their ‘founding fathers’. The father has since human society began been protector, provider, source of authority, bound by honour and fidelity to defend his hearth.

If he is gone, who takes his place ? Of all people, D.H. Lawrence, author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, wrote of a man and his wife as ‘a king and queen with one or two subjects and a few square yards of territory of their own…true freedom because it is a true fulfilment for man, woman and children.’

But he warned of a great danger if marriage, which makes fatherhood what it is, fell. ‘Break it, and you will have to go back to the overwhelming dominance of the State, which existed before the Christian era’.

And now we see his prophecy fulfilled. The state spends billions, and intervenes incessantly, to try to replace the lost force of fatherhood, and it fails.

I owe most of the facts above to the Centre for Social Justice, which on Friday published its full report into what it calls ‘Fractured Families’.

The CSJ is very close to the Tory party, to the government and to Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary. So it is startling to find that the report is coldly savage in its dismissal of the Cameron government’s efforts to fix this problem.

‘Conservatives say they would have been more radical on family policy had it not been for their Liberal Democrat colleagues, but even those commitments made in the Programme for Government have been ignored so far.

‘So for all of the promises the Conservatives made in Opposition, for all of the gimmick giveaways politicians have unveiled for middle-class families, and for all of the safe ‘families come in all shapes and sizes’ rhetoric ministers have used for decades, hardly anything has been done to resist the tsunami of family breakdown battering the United Kingdom’.

The authors continue: ‘Saying that family form is irrelevant is inaccurate and ultimately counter-productive…’ This is true. Someone ought to speak up for marriage. But is it entirely true to say that ‘Backing commitment and setting a goal of reducing instability does not equate to criticising or stigmatising lone parents.’? Doesn’t approval of the one inevitably stigmatise the other? And if you aren’t prepared to do that, will you get anywhere?

They also assert that ‘marriage is not a right-wing obsession’, though, speaking as a right-winger I rather think it is. It certainly isn’t a left-wing priority. They argue : ‘People throughout society want to marry, but the cultural and financial barriersfaced by those in the poorest communities thwart their aspirations’.

It is certainly true that some benefits actively discourage couples from being or staying married.

But it is the ‘cultural’ barriers I want to talk about here. Anyone who dares to discuss this subject is quickly accused of ‘hating’ or wishing to persecute ‘single mothers’. Any article on the subject is supposed (maybe it is an EU regulation?) to contain a disclaimer saying that many single mothers do a great job.

Well, I neither hate single mothers nor wish to persecute them, and I am perfectly prepared to believe that many of them do a great job. But it isn’t the point. The main problem with single mothers is that they are acting rationally, in a society which actively encourages them with money and approval. Who can blame them?

There is a lot of piety about this. Suggest that anyone deliberately gets pregnant (or rather, in this age of morning-after pills and abortion on demand, deliberately stays pregnant) to get a house and a handout, and you are angrily dismissed as some kind of snobbish hate-figure.

Well, mightn’t it be true? As far as I know, nobody has ever researched the motives of the young women who accept this sparse arrangement. I wish they would. But is it unreasonable to suggest that if you reward certain types of behaviour with money and housing, and with social approval, then that behaviour will increase?

It’s not just me. Adele Adkins once recalled ‘The ambition at my state school was to get pregnant and sponge off the Government’, adding: ‘That ain’t cool.’ Perhaps successful singing stars can get away with saying what others only think.

I don’t myself see that it is a particularly harsh view to hold. A baby is a wonderful thing, and many young women long to be mothers, and good luck to them. Many modern males are a pretty unattractive proposition, so why marry one, if the state will give you a home and an income on your own?

Meanwhile men have learned enough about the divorce courts to know that marriage is a big risk. If it goes wrong, they are the ones who have to move out, and yet they will still have to pay.

Why not take advantage of the fact that the state - which once demanded the father’s name when any baby was registered, so he could be made to pay for his child - now happily allows us to leave this space blank?

My guess is that doing anything really radical about this scares all politicians too much. For the War on Fatherhood is protected by a great taboo.

In every family, every workplace, every school, every pub, every weekend football or cricket team, every political party, every church congregation, there are now large numbers of people who signed up for the Great Cultural and Moral Revolution which was launched in the 1960s and swept through the land like a mighty rushing wind in the 1970s.

The fiery heart of this was the Divorce Law Reform Act of 1969. This change was very popular. It is interesting to note that, just before it began its way through Parliament, Engelbert Humperdinck’s hymn for would-be divorcees, ‘Release Me’, pushed the Beatles off the top of the music charts for weeks on end.

The new law pretty much embodied the song’s plea ‘Please release me, let me go/For I don't love you any more/To waste our lives would be a sin/Release me and let me love again.’

Portrayed at the time as a kindness to those trapped in loveless marriages, the new law made it much easier to end a troubled union than to fight to save it.

And once this had become general, marriage changed with amazing speed from a lifelong commitment into a lifestyle choice. And from a lifestyle choice it changed into a risky and often inconvenient contract. Divorce wasn’t shameful or embarrassing any more. The country was littered with male divorcees complaining about the division of the property and the child support payments.

Men began to calculate that marriage wasn’t worth it. And the Pill and easy abortion (other parts of the 1960s revolution) put an end to shotgun weddings.

Who, in such a society, could condemn the pregnant teenager without hypocrisy? Hardly anyone, especially rackety politicians and flexible churchmen. The middle classes had abandoned lifelong marriage with a sigh of relief. The aristocracy had never cared for it much. Even the Royal Family was riddled with divorce.

The housing-estate poor were simply following the same moral code as those who posed as their betters, and weren’t actually better at all. And the adults of the era have all had a lot of fun as a result. But everyone, throughout this great period of release and revolt, forgot one small thing. What was to become of the children?

Now we are finding out. And a generation which has never known fathers, or family life, or fidelity or constancy, is now busy begetting children of its own. What will become of them? How will boys who have never seen a father learn to be fathers?

I’d have a moral panic at this stage, if I thought it would do any good. But perhaps it will be the victims of this selfish generation, our children and grandchildren, who – having suffered its effects - will re-establish stable family life in our country.

**A Hostile contributor complains about 'a distinct lack of citations' in thjis article. Apart from the fact that newspaper articles are not normally footnoted, the piece clearly states:

"I owe most of the facts above to the Centre for Social Justice, which on Friday published its full report into what it calls ‘Fractured Families’."

This document is fully footnoted and can be found here :

http://www.centreforsocialjustice.or.../CSJ_Fractured

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/

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It is the hard truth. Maybe they'll learn from their mistakes and realize that God's way is the right way. That freedom from the path set by God doesn't have good results.

Salaam

Another update on the state of Marriage in the UK.

A tax break can't rescue marriage: It's been doomed for four decades

Marriage is on its deathbed. A tiny tax allowance won’t save it. Nor will benevolent old judges such as Sir Paul Coleridge urging young couples to wed before starting a family.

In fact, Sir Paul of all people should understand what the law has done to marriage. After 1969, in most of the Western world, the marriage vow was legally meaningless.

All those moving promises about ‘for richer, for poorer’, or ‘in sickness and in health’ (let alone ‘till death us do part’) were cancelled by Parliament. From then on, one party to the marriage could end it more easily than you can get out of a car lease.

And if the other spouse resisted, and wanted to stick to the vows he or she had made, he or she could, in the end, be dragged from the family home by the forces of the State backed with the threat of prison.

For the most part (but of course not always), it was men who were compulsorily dumped. The law helped this to happen. It didn’t matter how badly either party behaved. Women increasingly got custody of the children, because they were women.

The same went for the family home. The courts didn’t bother to enforce orders allowing ex-husbands to stay in touch with their children.

Hence Willie Nelson’s bitter joke: ‘I’m not going to get married again. I’ll just find a woman I don’t like and buy her a house.’

In the end, the surviving marriages in our society exist entirely because both parties want them to. The State, the law, the tax system, the schools, the benefits system and our culture offer them no support and plenty of penalties.

And if women wonder why they cannot get men to marry them these days, they just need to check the legal position. It is amazing that so many men still do. The day is coming when the only people in Britain who want to get married will be lesbian clergywomen.

I know you think this is just me being extreme and pessimistic. But it isn’t. One of this country’s finest legal minds, Baroness Hale of Richmond, now sits on our alleged Supreme Court as its Deputy President.

But back in 1982, when she was just the barrister Brenda Hoggett, she wrote prophetically that the efforts of English law to make the sexes more equal had, in fact, destroyed most of the legal privileges of marriage. ‘Family law no longer makes any attempt to buttress the stability of marriage or any other union,’ she wrote.

‘Logically, we have reached a point at which, rather than discussing which remedies should now be extended to the unmarried, we should be considering whether the legal institution of marriage continues to serve any useful purposes.’

Well, of course, this is Britain and we never stare the truth in the face like that. We are still pretending. But if anyone really wants to save and revive marriage (and there’s not much time left), it is the law they need to look at, not the tax form.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/

Salaam

Reposting, (since it was lost in the forum transfer)

A personal view by Erin Pizzey. In this shocking, but brilliant documentary originally shown on the BBC, Erin explains how feminism is responsible for destroying the family. (The original copyright is that of the BBC.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdsXG10wln8

Salaam

Dr. Helen Smith joins Steve to discuss her new book, "MEN ON STRIKE WHY MEN ARE BOYCOTTING MARRIAGE, FATHERHOOD, AND THE AMERICAN DREAM - AND WHY IT MATTERS," on how American society has become anti-male and men are sensing the backlash and both consciously and unconsciously going "on strike."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yzUECFwU3U

Salaam

Another update

Abbott: Feminism To Blame For Family Collapse

Feminism has played a part in the breakdown of the family which has led to serious social problems, Labour MP Diane Abbott says.

Feminism is partly to blame for the breakdown of the traditional family, one of Labour's most senior female politicians has claimed.

Labour's public health spokesman Diane Abbott, a divorced mother-of-one, warned that some major social problems "stem from family breakdown".

The feminist MP's declaration is controversial because it appears to reflect the views of Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith.

It could also herald a new political battle as the Tories and Labour vie to show how they will support traditional families.

Ms Abbott said: "As a feminist, perhaps we have been ambivalent about families. In the 1980s, we used to say: 'A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.'

"The more academic version was: 'The family is the site of women's oppression.'

"So those of us who came of age at the height of feminism had very mixed views about the family, since it seemed to be defined as a heterosexual thing with a certificate, children and mum at home."

She called on left-wingers to recognise that "some of the biggest public health issues stem from family breakdown".

"Doctors say to me that so many of the drug and alcohol problems they see stem from family difficulties," she said.

In a nod to the left, she added: "When I talk about stable families, I do not only mean the heterosexual, 2.1-children set-up, but also extended families or same-sex relationships."

But she continued: "I still believe some kind of stable family structure is vital and that is what most people want around them. I do not think we should abandon that terrain to the right."

Ms Abbott, in a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian, also warned about the dangers of fast food and internet pornography.

And she condemned parents who dress their children in designer clothes, warning that youngsters are being "saturated by materialism" in an age of "McParenting".

"There is something wrong when the average child knows 300 or 400 brand names before the age of 11," she told the newspaper.

She revealed she is looking at planning laws to see how banning fast food outlets from setting up near schools could be made easier to help tackle child obesity.

The MP also wants local authorities to have more powers to curb the amount of places selling alcohol in a single area.

On internet pornography, she expressed fears about how its proliferation affects children and particularly young girls.

Ms Abbott is due to give a speech later this month on the sexualisation of children and the rise of "sexting" - a type of cyber-bullying using mobile phones.

http://news.sky.com/story/1033227/abbott-feminism-to-blame-for-family-collapse?fb_action_ids=10152120745931190&fb_action _types=og.recommends

Salaam

Interesting look at the Divorce industry in America.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZTOT6DKfZ8&src_vid=mjJKtyRZVV8&feature=iv &annotation_id=annotation_3587457959

Marriage died in the West when it became socially acceptable to break up your family because you felt bored with your spouse, and when the legal system changed to no-fault-divorce, treating the spouse who decided to blow up the marriage equally with the one who wanted to preserve the marriage.

Salaam

Well said, its beyond a joke. I think western societies are going to pay a very heavy price in the decades to come. I just hope our faith and culture doesn't get infected with this culture.

Heres another video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFYSOskjIP8

Salaam

Another update. This person is interesting, details how the undermining of marriage is undermining the very fabric of American society.

How the destruction of marriage is strangling the feminist welfare state.

The standard narrative is that feminism removed the artificial restrictions that were holding women back, and what we observe today is a level playing field. The Social Pathologist described this in his recent post Hypergamic Affirmative Action:

The social, sexual and economic liberation of women in the latter half of the 20th Century has meant that for the first time women were able to compete with men in society without restriction. The result has been spectacular if not particularly beneficial to the happiness of women. Whilst not all degrees are created equal (men still overwhelming dominate the “hard” fields of knowledge) the fact that there are now more degree credentialed women than men is simply astonishing. As income is broadly correlated with economic well being, its safe to assume that women have been able to achieve a economic parity with men. The manosphere may not like this result but the fact is that women have been able to effectively compete with men when the shackles of social convention have been removed.

What he is describing is the feminist fantasy coming true, and out of respect for the feminists reading I suggest taking a moment to savor the euphoria before we continue.

The problem with his statement is he is ignoring the incredible amount of social engineering required to achieve and maintain the current state. Feminism has become a central organizing force for western culture. Nearly every decision public and private must consider feminism first, and everything else second. This is true for everything from our last ditch nuclear deterrent to men’s entertainment. Even the Word of God must kneel before the word of feminists. The reason this doesn’t come to mind for most people is it is everywhere. It seems normal, if not natural.

What is too easy to forget is that this is artificial, and therefore requires constant effort to maintain. Feminism didn’t demolish a barrier between two seas and let the water levels adjust; it is a massive pumping operation. Turn off the pumps even for a little bit and reality will come flooding back.

The longer we keep the pumps running, the more the true cost of the operation becomes evident. Most of what feminism gained it did on credit of one sort or another, and these bills are coming due. The reality is human biology makes it impossible for a large percentage of women to focus on casual sex and professional advancement to the degree that feminism insists is only natural. The reason for this is children require more investment than women themselves can provide. Women who want to be mothers need to extract resources from men in order to be truly successful parents. Many have looked at the success of a small number of widows in raising their children without the help of a husband and assumed husbands and fathers aren’t really necessary. However, what is possible as an exception isn’t something we can build a society on. Aside from those who started with great wealth, widows have always struggled to provide for and raise their children. In a healthy society made primarily of husband lead households they also benefit from an in tact social and familial structure.

But a husband-lead permanent family structure is something feminists must destroy. They have no choice if they are to achieve their goals. They need to find a way to compel men to provide resources for children while removing men’s authority and women’s responsibility. In a society with traditional marriage men voluntarily agree to produce more than they personally need in order to lead a family. The problem for feminists with this voluntary model is something which is core to all voluntary cooperation agreements; women must give something up in exchange for men doing the same.

There are of course multiple ways to attack this problem of mutuality. While the methods appear different on the surface, the ultimate end is the same; men must be compelled to offer financial (and sometimes parenting) resources to women who want to have children, and women must be freed from reciprocal obligation and responsibility. The methods to achieve this tend to fall into one of three models:

Socialist State Model: The economy of the state must be reorganized to redistribute production. While the stated aim of socialism is to redistribute wealth from rich to poor, in practice this is a very effective tool to redistribute wealth from men to women. In the socialist state model marriage becomes largely irrelevant because the resource transfer is being achieved at a state or corporate level. These resource transfers can take the form of make work jobs, cash benefits, and free or subsidized child care and education (which tend to become one and the same). Marriage tends to be looked down upon in this type of model because women living with men are forever at risk of being “oppressed” by male leadership. Marriage also works counter to the socialist aim of equality of outcome; if some children grow up with fathers (even weak ones) while others lack fathers altogether the children with fathers have a large advantage. This inequality of maternal outcome poses a danger to feminism as well because women who want to give their children an advantage are at risk of suffering from exposure to male authority.

Sham Marriage Model: This is the model preferred by feminists with a sense of nostalgia. In this model great effort is expended to maintain the illusion of marriage as a fundamental and legitimate social institution. While the edifice is left in place however, the institution itself is entirely debased. Husbands are still expected to support and protect their families, but their authority and rights are all removed. Marriage becomes a vehicle for theft, and something women delay as long as possible and discard as soon as it is no longer needed.

The Stanton/Povich Model: Under this model women enjoy their sexual freedom and are free to pursue their goals of education and career without the responsibilities and limitations which come with being a wife. Should such a woman find herself giving birth, she heroically whittles down the list of paternal suspects until she determines the biological father of the child. She then enlists the state to compel the biological father to bankroll her and her children.
What we see in practice tends to be a blending of the three models above. The exact blend of course will vary over time and from country to country, but any country which fits The Social Pathologist’s description has by necessity fully implemented some combination of the three.

The fatal flaws of all three of these models, including their use in blended form, are the same:

• There is insufficient incentive to keep the mass of men producing at the levels needed to transfer enough wealth to women.
• Women who spend their early adulthood focusing on education and career before becoming mothers lead to an enormously expensive mis-allocation of investment in human capital. This exists across all industries but is most easily identified in the case of medical doctors, as The Social Pathologist has witnessed.
• Children don’t just need financial resources, they need a real father. Fathers who aren’t head of the household are a very poor substitute for those who are.
• By prioritizing women’s careers over becoming mothers, the birthrate greatly declines.

While the first two bullets reduce production by existing men below their potential, the last two reduce the number of productive men in future generations. Taken together we end up with reduced numbers of productive men, and less production by those few who exist. These problems aren’t visible at first with feminism however because there is a delay in experiencing the loss of production by men. This gives the initial appearance of a free lunch, where the only result is the increased production associated with women prioritizing paid work. However, this apparent free lunch is simply the inertia of the system; the flaws become progressively more evident from generation to generation.

It is worth reiterating that both the destruction of marriage and the resulting lowered production are ultimately inescapable for any society which makes feminism a priority. There is no way to square this circle, no matter how many people claim it is only natural.

The truth of what I’m describing can be found by opening any economic or business publication. The nations of the west are all facing a time bomb of entitlements caused by demographics moving the wrong way. In the US, Social Security and Medicare present looming demographic threats which get closer every year. Eventually there will be too many people taking out of the system and too few willing or able to produce at the excess levels required to fund them. Discussion of this problem is constant in the financial press, with articles like the one by Forbes titled: America’s Baby Bust: How The Great Recession Has Jeopardized Our Demographic Health

Without these future workers our already tottering pension system will become even more untenable, as is occurring in Europe and Japan.

Of course since feminism is the dominant philosophy of our time the author struggles to understand why birthrates are falling. For some inexplicable reason in the past economic growth has lead to falling birthrates, while economic decline is now also leading to falling birthrates:

Without growth, the long-term decline of most high-income countries, including the United States, is all but assured.

This turns on its head the commonplace assumption that societies reduced their birthrates as they got wealthier.

The problem in the US is worse than it looks on its face. While we remain at near replacement level fertility, the internals of the macro number are cause for concern. Slate explains this in an article subtitled Why America’s widening fertility class divide is a problem. The feminist system comes with perverse incentives regarding family formation. The most capable women are encouraged to delay childbirth as long as possible. At the same time, successful men fear becoming fathers because fatherhood is the bait for the trap feminists and their enablers have set for honest men. Ironically the New York Times can see the disincentive for productive men to become fathers, but only when looking outside of the United States; the headline declares In Europe, Divorce and Separation Become a Burden for Struggling Fathers, and the stories are straight out of the manosphere:

The pain of Europe’s economic crisis is being felt sharply by a new class of people: separated and divorced men who end up impoverished or on the streets as they struggle to maintain themselves while keeping up child support and alimony payments.

The Forbes article cites the NY Times piece, and in an added twist of irony manages to conflate fatherhood and parenthood just in time to miss the point:

Stories about divorced Spanish or Italian young fathers sleeping on the streets or in their cars is not exactly a strong advertising for parenthood.

Making the problem worse is the list of solutions currently on the table. We can go the way suggested by the Slate article, and increase transfers to women with children. Never mind that this brings us back to the core problem. The other solution is to raise taxes, but this exacerbates the productivity problem. In order to tax our way to solvency, we would have to declare a fiscal jihad on the productive. But men are already showing signs of being less willing to create the very excess wealth these taxes are after, for the reasons explained above. If men don’t see the incentive to lead a family, higher taxes will convince ever larger numbers of capable men to decide to get by on just enough to keep themselves comfortable.

https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2012/10/15/how-the-destruction-of-marriage-is-strangling-the-feminist-welfare-state/

Salaam

Another update

4 February 2015: Peter Lloyd on spousal maintenance, BBC Radio 4

An inspired performance by 'Mail Online' journalist Peter Lloyd, debating with a female divorce lawyer who uses the word 'equality' in an utterly laughable sense. The presenter, Eddie Mair, was less toadying towards the female interviewee than is his custom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHS1bWspOY4#t=86

What a comprehensive analysis and thought, brother. It's very ironic, Indeed. It should go back to ourselves what we have done to our father? And certainly we must take part in any role possible to make this fact fixed, make people aware how bad the social system currently in place

Salaam

Another update

Bachelor Nation: 70% of Men Aged 20-34 Are Not Married

Seventy percent of American males between the ages of 20 and 34 are not married, and many live in a state of “perpetual adolescence” with ominous consequences for the nation’s future, says Janice Shaw Crouse, author of “Marriage Matters.”

“Far too many young men have failed to make a normal progression into adult roles of responsibility and self-sufficiency, roles generally associated with marriage and fatherhood,” Crouse, the former executive director of the Beverly LaHaye Institute, wrote in a recent Washington Times oped.

The high percentage of bachelors means bleak prospects for millions of young women who dream about a wedding day that may never come. “It’s very, very depressing,” Crouse told CNSNews.com. “They’re not understanding how important it is for the culture, for society, for the strength of the nation to have strong families.”

She pointed out that there’s “no data” to back up the common assertion that a lack of jobs during and after the Great Recession is the primary reason so many young men have been reluctant to tie the knot. “The problem with marriage was long before that,” she pointed out.

After decades of feminism, Crouse noted that young men are now the ones who set the parameters for intimate relationships, and those increasingly do not include a wedding ring.

“And I know the feminists just yell and scream if you say anything like this, but time was, girls set the cultural morays, the standards, the parameters for intimate activity. The girls were the ones that set those boundaries. And now it’s the guys who do,” Crouse told CNSNews.com.

“And it’s doubly terrible because the colleges now are predominantly female. So you have some – up to 60 percent of the student bodies are female. And almost all of them are more than 50 percent female. And so the ratio [of] male/female is out of sync.

“And that means the girls have to live by the guys’ demands. And that means less romance. They don’t date. The girls, I have talked to numerous young women, lament the fact that they don’t have the opportunity to dress up and go out for an event.”

Young women who adhere to a moral code and refuse to participate in the “hook up” culture are now considered social misfits, Crouse pointed out. And they face even more daunting odds of finding a husband than their promiscuous sisters.

“It’s really interesting, because Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker wrote their book, “Premarital Sex in America,” what, three, four years ago. And even then, they were very concerned about the fact that young women today are not as likely to get married. And their prospects, if they are not sexually promiscuous, are really low because the guys, if they can sleep around, they’re not interested in going with the girls who don’t put out.

“The ones who are very serious get married early. And that leaves the majority of the girls, then, by the time they’re 25 and into their first jobs, the pickings are very, very slim for them. And Mark Regnerus was very, very clear that the quote ‘good girls’ are the ones who are at risk now in terms of not being able to get married.”

According to 2014 data from the U.S. Census Bureau, 7.9 million opposite sex couples in the U.S. live together but are not married. A 2014 study by Johns Hopkins University also found that 57 percent of children born to women aged 26 to 31 are out of wedlock.

Crouse says the decline in marriage and a corresponding rise in cohabitation is happening despite at least a decade of research demonstrating the societal benefits of two-parent families.

“Even researchers from the left are coming out very strongly for the family and for marriage, and saying the two-parent family is necessary for children to do their best," she told CNSNews.com. "It’s not just good for them, it’s the very best. It’s the gold standard. It’s essential for children to reach their potential. And that has to be communicated in the popular culture."

According to “projections based on census data, when today’s young adults reach their mid-40s to mid-50s, a record high share (25%) is likely to have never been married,” Pew Research noted in a 2014 study documenting the decline of marriage in the U.S.

But men are not entirely to blame for the steep decline in marriage, Crouse pointed out. “A lot of women fear marriage. While feminism is a spent force, the ultimate consequences of that philosophy is a whole generation of women who don’t want any man to tell them what to do, and don’t really understand the give and take that is necessary for a marriage relationship.”

However, the box office success of movies like American Sniper, which features a very masculine Navy SEAL, is an indication that women still respond to strong men, she said.

CNSNews.com asked Crouse if that means the cultural pendulum has finally swung back in the male direction after decades of feminism.

“That’s not certain yet,” she replied. “There’ still a lot of anti-male stuff out there.”

Feminism has largely achieved its goal of equality in the workplace, so the movement has “lost relevance” for young women who are now earning more college and professional degrees than men, she pointed out. However, feminism’s effects on the culture – including the historically low marriage rate - will linger for some time to come, she noted.

“Feminism was supposed to bring women happiness,” Crouse said. “But the research shows that women today are much more unhappy then they have been in the past. They’ve ended up with far more opportunities, but their personal happiness is way down.”

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/bachelor-nation-70-men-aged-20-34-are-not-married

Kryten
What you're seeing is a rational response to the fact that marriage has far more risks than benefits for men associated with it. Its a simple cost / benefit calculation that many men are making, some conciously, some not.

Its the culmination of a feminist centred society that refuses to treat men as human beings - and until that changes the situation will only continue.

"Girls with absent fathers (according to studies in the USA and New Zealand) have teenage pregnancy rates seven or eight times as high as those whose fathers have stayed in meaningful touch with them."
Nothing in the Quran against teenage pregnancy. Also only women can get pregnant, a "girl" is a prepubescent female human. The best time for females to get pregnant is in the second decade of life, two years after first menses, by scientific standards. 12 years old is the best time for an average European woman to get pregnant, by scientific research.

For the breakdown of the family you can thank feminism for that.

BTW there is no "Father's Day" in Islam.