A Special Father’s Day Message to the Fathers’ Rights Movement

 

Each year as I sit down to compose a Father’s Day message I try to come up with some witty, even sarcastic message to send to all.  I have always found joy in being a father in taking a humorous approach to what is the very serious business of forming a young person into a useful member of society.

 

That humor is gone from me this year as I watch the current crop of so-called “father’s rights activists” take a long-proven path of self-destruction, not only of themselves but of the family law reform movement as a whole. This new “batch” has stepped backward to a 20-year-old failed message and attitude of pure laziness.  They are acting as though they are entitled to changes in family law without any work of their own. The T-shirts and signs have reappeared along with the constant whining that has long hampered changes to one of society’s largest and most expensive problems. They have the attitude that it is someone else’s job to change the law instead of their own.

 

The reality is they have bitten the poison apple that has been dangled in front of them for years by organizations that claim they have been working on the problem for 20 years yet have not solved it.  These so-called top-flight organizations like ACFC and National Parents Organization aka Fathers and Families have preached that we need to go after small changes and rarely produce any legislation that makes any changes to the current problems. I pose a question for all, if they are top-flight and so good as they claim, then why have they not changed the problem that has been recognized for nearly 20 years? Or is it they have chosen to continue rather than solve the problem, leading to the loss of future generations of children? We all need to ask them why when comprehensive legislation was introduced by someone other than them, why did NPO openly block the bill that they could not state a flaw to and why did ACFC remain silent. I have gotten behind good bills that their associates have done or it is because I have no problem pointing out their flawed bill.

 

Why is it that NPO has now decided to contact non-affiliated groups demanding that their lawyers vet any bills they plan to introduce? This comes from an organization that continually presses for presumptions of shared parenting in a state that already has a statute on the books.

 

I do want to take the time to praise all the good fathers and mothers who have spent time and supported their children throughout the year. I especially want to take the time to say thank those of you who have not had the opportunity to spend time with your children for the hard work that you have put in to change the laws across this Nation and Canada. These projects always have been and always will be time-consuming and require dedication and perseverance.

 

While it is never easy for any parent to not see their child, or to be limited because of faulty state policy, in the mistaken belief that this is all done in the “Best Interest of the Child”, we need to focus on how to change a much-failed system of law that has failed society.   As we gather more and more research and gather numbers that show the extreme cost of this bad state policy of making these decisions based on “Best Interests” rather than on the “Fitness of the Parents”, we are gaining the attention of legislators across the country. I have yet to have a legislator disagree with me when I talk of the extreme monetary cost of the problem and what the effect would intimately be when policy and the law are changed.

 

We need to move forward with this approach and as more people and organizations join on to taking this approach we will see light at the end of the tunnel.  While some scoff at what I call the “New Approach”, those that have taken it are gaining the attention needed for the introduction of comprehensive legislation instead of the long-preached band-aid approach that had produced nothing more than a continuation of the problem, rather than a solution to the problem. 

 

It is well past the time to redirect our efforts from the failed messages of the past and rethink how we go about reforming the entire approach to family law nationwide. We need to start asking a simple question of every legislator across the land as to why we continue to remove fit parents from the lives of children.  Until we do that nothing will change and we will remain in perfect lockstep with the failures of the past or do you want to take a different path toward success?

 

For these changes to come, it will take hard work, not talk. Talking and telling the news media and legislators about the problem do little if you have not produced and presented a solution. The question should not be why your legislators and the courts have failed you but why you have failed yourself.

 

Yet the approach I am finding today that some are taking is flat-out attacks against me and the organization.  Some have gone so far as to call legislators complaining that I have offended them. Maybe instead of attacking me, you should start listening to a common-sense approach and not repeating the failures of the past. The t-shirt and tissue thing failed before and continues to fail. The whining that it is an unfair approach has failed before and fails not because you refuse to take the time to learn what causes that problem.

 

If you want to change, you are going to have to change yourself and your way of approaching the problem.  You need to take personal responsibility for your actions and act like an adult not the whining brat in the grocery store whose parents will not buy them a candy bar.  Is that harsh on you? Far from this, it is how responsible adults are created by responsible parents.