H/T Red Pill Latecomer.
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How things work.
One of Cane Caldo’s readers suggested that feminists are likely to complain that he hasn’t made his case regarding the term bastard with sufficient detail. Cane responded:
I can live with that and refuse to explain things to Feminists anyways. Explaining the realities of civilization to Feminists is like explaining the internal combustion engine to Feminists: You will talk about the need for a proper mixture of fuel, air, and spark and they will come back with a demand for a bigger pink key because everyone knows its keys that make cars go.
They don’t lack explanations. That’s not their problem.
Posted in Cane Caldo, Feminists, Illegitimacy, Men's Sphere Humor
80 Comments
Turning the hearts of children from their fathers.
5“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. 6And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.”
–Malachi 4:5-6 ESV
Cane Caldo makes the case for bringing the concept of bastard back:
Mothers of bastards are incentivized to make peace with the fathers. Currently, bastard mothers are incentivized to be at war with the father, and to threaten him with no access to his child. She is incentivized to recruit the power of the courts against him because it is her best bet financially; even though it is the worst bet for the bastard’s spiritual, mental, and emotional good. “Blessed are the peacemakers.”
This is the old conservative view, and is contrary to the new conservative view which has great zeal for the new family model based on single mothers collecting child support. Interestingly, while modern conservatives almost universally love the new destructive family model, some on the left are concerned about the way this new model alienates fathers from their children (emphasis mine):
…child support is generally perceived as a pure good: a benefit to children, families, and society, as well as a moral and legal obligation of absent parents. But for the millions of children whose child support has been assigned to the government,5 the reality of child support is anything but pure or good. Poor mothers are forced to name absent fathers, and then sue them—and sue them again and again. Because the fathers are often also poor, the vast amount of assigned child support goes unpaid and insurmountable arrearages quickly result.6 The fathers who try almost always fail as the automated enforcement mechanisms throttle endlessly: a trucker’s license is suspended, so he cannot work; a laborer’s wages are garnished at sixty-five percent, so he cannot afford to pay his own rent; a father obtains a new job and then loses it after being incarcerated for contempt because of his child support arrearages.7 The relationships between the mothers and fathers, fragile at their beginnings, can be obliterated through the process. The hopes of children to have fathers who are supportive and involved in their lives are often dissolved.8
The quote above is from the paper Child Support Harming Children: Subordinating the Best Interests of Children to the Fiscal Interests of the State, by Daniel L. Hatcher. Hatcher is arguing against the Republican welfare reform of the 1990s. This reform all but obliterated the line between welfare and child support and thereby exposed a new class of broken families to the corrosive power of the child support system.
While Hatcher is on the left and would prefer to remove all stigma from single motherhood (just like modern conservatives), he unintentionally makes Cane’s point that the concept of bastard promoted reconciliation and marriage due to the stigma attached to the term. Hatcher quotes an 1832 decision of the Court of Appeals of Kentucky regarding the bastardy act in Burgen v. Straughan (emphasis mine):
[N]or can we perceive how it can be unlawful or immoral, or inconsistent with the policy of the law, for the mother of a bastard to agree with the father that, if he will co-operate in the maintainance [sic] of their child, she will not proceed under the bastardy act . . . . It should not be deemed injurious to the community or county. It is not the public duty of the mother of an illegitimate child to assert her statutory right. Her voluntary forbearance is no breach of any moral or civil obligation. Her child may become a burthen to her county; but this might happen, and would, perhaps, be more likely to occur, if such contracts as that we are now considering should be declared illegal and void. Many, in her condition, might prefer all the wretchedness of destitution and poverty, to a voluntary promulgation, in a county court, of all the circumstances necessary to coerce contributions under the bastardy act.
Related:
Won’t someone think of the children who want to become single mothers?
Commenter Evan Turner asks how Christian fathers are supposed to facilitate their daughters becoming single mothers without child support:
Wow i used to like reading the blog and comments on here but this is a true “jump the shark” moment for me. Child support is evil? Really? …
Everyman who has sex knows the risk, if they don’t want to pay for 18 years don’t have sex. We all know that there are consequences for every action. For Christians here to give cover to irresponsible men is disturbing. If there were no child support laws here and your underage daughter got pregnant what would you do?
Like nearly all proponents of the system designed to replace marriage, Turner wants to create a false dichotomy where everyone is either on team single mother (with him), or on team cad. But I am on neither team, and neither should Turner be. I am on team marriage. Instead of worrying about the aspirations of children to grow up to become single mothers (keeping the dream alive!), Turner should be worrying about the millions of fatherless children born due to the family model he so passionately defends*:
Turner also roughly equates the child support model (which replaces marriage) with God’s law in the Old Testament (which forced marriage).
Do you think an irresponsible man in ancient Israel would have sex with a virgin without marrying her again after having to pay the virgin dowry or having to work off the debt for several years? Likewise a man who is paying child support for 18 years will think twice about being irresponsible again. I know some of these men who learned the hard way.
This is the other massive problem with the child support model. It isn’t just that it offers women a cash incentive to become single mothers. Defenders of the child support model, as both Turner and Brother Jed have demonstrated, provide a passionate moral argument that women deserve to have the option to become single mothers, going so far as to imply that the child support family model has God’s blessing.
*Figure 1 from the 2014 NCHS data brief Recent Declines in Nonmarital Childbearing in the United States.
Posted in Child Support, New Morality, Turning a blind eye
117 Comments
He’s seen this movie before.
Picking up where I left off yesterday, the headline at the Sun reads:
Yet despite the sensational claim in the headline, the quotes in the article don’t back up the assertion. From the quotes provided, the lawyer (Rodriguez) didn’t claim that the father was the leader of a cult. What he said was that in some cases this is what has happened:
It’s not clear what motivated the Turpins to live a secluded life with their large brood or what went on in the house.
But parents convicted in similar cases exerted control over their children though intimidation, psychological and physical coercion, and frequently possessed their own belief system, claims Attorney Ambrosio Rodriguez.
He said: “They develop a kind of cultish doomsday type of religion where the father becomes this mythical leader and the mother and children’s duty is to serve the father.”
Like I did in my post yesterday, Rodriguez is speculating. While I pointed out the evidence so far that strongly suggests the wife was in charge*, Rodriguez is basing his speculation on past experience:
“I’ve seen this movie before,” Rodriguez said.
“It’s going to get more creepy and make our skin crawl. And at the end of it, we’re all going to be asking the same question: ‘How did this happen in front of us and no one noticed?'”
The article references a case Rodriguez worked in the past, where a Christian pastor abused five children. However, the case they offer to bolster the claim that it must have been the father abusing the wife and children doesn’t fit the pattern. In the movie Rodriguez saw before, the perpetrator was a woman, and there was evidently not a man around to blame her actions on:
Rodriguez was a longtime Riverside County prosecutor who sent Jessica Banks, a pastor and mother, to prison for life for beating, starving and drugging her five adopted daughters, who were kept locked in her garage.
H/T HoseB
*Which would not lessen the father’s guilt.
Posted in Turning a blind eye
14 Comments
