Reclaiming Lesbian Pride

[Chazz]

Originally Posted by apocalipstic

....Chazz, good for you for being a stand up Mom. It is heartbreaking that anyone would use a child as a pawn in a break up or just refuse to achnowledge that someone who was in a child's life for years should have the right to at least see the child.

I did the best I could, apocalipstic. Thank you for the recognition.

To this day, patriarchy (and it's enforcers) still see children as possessions, chattel. Many men still "their women" this way, too. No amount of neo-age, PC rhetoric has altered that an iota.

Even when a father is little more than a sperm donor, he has total ownership of a child. It doesn't matter that said child was parented, nurtured or financially supported by someone else for years. Biology IS destiny in the concrete world whether post-modernists recognize it or not through the haze of their immanent acts of mind.

Originally Posted by Heart

One of the things the so-called "Father's Rights" groups have done is to stand the concept of more involved and responsible fathering on its head by taking it into the courts. They claim they want to be more involved fathers, but the truth is they are using courts as a way to exert control over their ex-wives [and punish them], with their children as pawns. They have conflated "involvement" with their agenda for ownership, hijacked the Responsible Father's Movement, and shifted it to one of father's RIGHTS (the change in terminology being telling). [Changes in terminology are always telling.]

There are involved and loving fathers who are divorcing and want to maintain strong connections to their children via shared custody.
Usually in these situations, the divorcing parents are able to come to a mediated agreement. Some men are faced with a vindictive ex-wife who is using the courts, but that is the statistical exception. It is more common for men to manipulate custody cases, most unfounded child welfare reports are made by men, and men routinely do better in family court forensics because they control more of the resources in the family.

In short, women don't do well in family court when it comes to contested custody and visitation cases, though the myth is that family courts always favor mothers. That's what Father's Rights groups want you to believe. [Claiming to be the greater victim/the aggrieved party are men's tools of choice these days as they expand their dominion over women.] They were the ones behind the spurious diagnosis of "parental alienation syndrome" used against abused mothers to wrest their children away, and they were also proponents of charging mothers who had been battered in front of their kids with "failing to protect" their children from domestic violence.

There are links, articles, research, etc. There's also the fact that after speaking as an advocate on behalf of battered mothers at a state hearing in Albany a number of years ago, a father's rights nut-job tried to run the car I was in off the road.

The harsh reality is, once you enter a court, it's about power, possession, property, legitimacy, and ownership, not about relationships, and that's where men have it all over women.

And if you're a lesbian parent without a biological or legal connection to the child, facing homophobia and misogyny, (both rooted in patriarchy), your chances are bleak. It remains to be seen what kind of impact legal marriage in some states will have on parenting in gay/lesbian families.

Heart

And gender theory is addressing these issues how?