Taliban Movement Gains Strength
in the United States
by Clyde Verner
page seven
The American legal system gives a woman the incentive of a free ticket to take the family house and family income, along with the children away from her man whenever she wishes. This is of course anything but egalitarian. And because this approach is so obviously against the best interest of the children, protocol requires that the man must first be accused of some horrible crime.
There are underlying issues of gender war here, though it is not always clear precisely what they are. The present scale of family disintegration brings into question whether an egalitarian society is even achievable. No civilization has ever successfully given men and women equal social and legal status, as Robert Scheaffer documents in Deceptions of a "Gender Equal Society." Mr. Scheaffer exposes the clearly fraudulent claims made by Eleanor Leacock in her contribution to Becoming Visible, a textbook often used in Women's History classes.
A man who does not feel reasonably certain that he can keep his family has little motive to invest in it, emotionally or otherwise. There are those who argue that strong fathers are an essential part of stable families. In The Case for Father Custody, Daniel Amneus makes a compelling argument that the social invention of fatherhood is the basis of stable families. Or put another way, when fathers are weak the family breaks apart, and so does the social structure. If this is the case, then we must find a way to restore fathers to their traditional place of authority in childrearing.
We can no longer expect women to spend their lives bearing twelve children. Nor can we afford to let our culture be further destroyed by a gender war. Whether egalitarian social roles for men and women can be found in a way that balances all of these forces is yet to be seen. If the effort fails, history demonstrates that when law gives way to brute force, it is men who will restore order.
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