The Case for Father Custody

Here are a few excerpts from the book:

• Today "civilized countries" suffer from a below-replacement level birthrate. Men in them don't view babies as a threat to their survival; their fear is that they can't have families--that women, with the help of the divorce courts, are imposing a matriarchal society upon them.
• The men who get married believing that marriage will give them families are going to rub their sleepy eyes and realize that marriage has become a fraudulent contract which gives men no security of having families and children....They are going to realize that the wife's withdrawal of her primary contribution to the marriage, her sharing of her reproductive life with her husband, removes his reciprocal obligation to support her; and that since the purpose of this support was to benefit his children, the children belong with him, not with her.
• The solution is perfectly obvious: father custody of the children in the case of divorce, as was automatic and mandatory in the mid-nineteenth century. This will permit men to have families and children to have fathers. It will restore male motivation. It will make women understand the value to themselves of the double standard and of their sexual loyalty, the things which formerly gave them their bargaining power in the patriarchal system.

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• Patriarchy tries to make women sexually responsible; sexual responsibility is what they are in rebellion against; rejection of sexual responsibility is what feminism is all about. They will get what they want unless their rejection of sexual responsibility is understood to forfeit their claim to custody.
  "It's never going to happen"--the restoration of meaningful fatherhood and the two-parent family--until men realize that the anti-male bias of divorce court judges is so total that the only solution is to take all discretion out of their hands and to return to the 19th century practice of automatic and mandatory father custody.
• An economically independent woman is privileged to get out of a bad marriage--or a boring one. This is why economically independent women have the highest divorce rate and why sensible men ought to avoid marriage with them--unless custody is given to fathers.
• It is a woman's voluntary renunciation of sexual independence which makes a family possible. This is the reason why a husband is willing to subsidize a wife. When she insists on her right to sexual independence and implements this "right" by adultery or divorce, she loses her right to subsidization and custody of her husband's children.
• If the sexual regulation of women were not what makes civilization possible by permitting men to be fathers and children to have fathers, it would be an absurdity. But the sexual regulation of women is what makes civilization possible by permitting the creation of families and by permitting males to participate in reproduction, by making sex something more than one-night stands, more than recreation--by channeling male energy into being providers, by creating fatherhood. Accordingly, the sexual de-regulation of women, now taking place under the aegis of the sexual revolution attacks patriarchy at its core by its withdrawal of female sexual loyalty to the family and to marriage.
• Maggie Gallagher cites George Rekers, professor of neuropsychiatry and behavioral science at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, as follows on father absence:

  Both developmental and clinical studies have clearly established the general rule that the father's positive presence in the home is, in the vast majority of cases, normally essential for the existence of family strength and child adjustment. Research [says Gallagher] shows that children without fathers have lower academic performance, more cognitive and intellectual deficits, increased adjustment problems, and higher risks for psychosexual development problems. And children from homes in which one or both parents are missing or frequently absent have higher rates of delinquent behavior, suicide, and homicide, along with poor academic performance.

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