Comment
by Fathercare.org :-
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Until recently excluded fathers
sincerely believed they could seek changes by resorting to
letter writing. This approach has proven a vain hope in bringing
about change. Acting as gentlemen gets excluded fathers nowhere.
Over the last 25 years many fathers also wasted large amounts of their
savings and wages (and we are talking 6 figure sums) fervently hoping
to attain justice in courts where the public is banned, where the press
is forbidden to enter, where so-called 'CAFCASS'
child welfare 'experts' remain untrained and ideologically contaminated.
It is official Government policy
that the reality of Family Court proceedings must be excluded
from public scrutiny, by threatening fathers with charges of
imprisonable contempt were they to talk in public about what
passes in these secret courts.
The ongoing wave of protests highlights
that the mood amongst disempowered fathers
has irreversibly turned, and that we are witnessing a new phase
in how fathers fight for the right to be a father to their
children.
The classic Government response
of merely providing a few hundred thousand pounds of extra
funding to tame father groups (to teach fathers how to act
as if fatherhood is about being a mere Sunday McDad) is no
longer working. That window of opportunity has closed. The
Government's favourite poodle organisation, FNF, is haemorrhaging
members to the pro-active Fathers-4-Justice group.
The every other weekend 'turn up
at mummies house to take children to McDonald's' (if she lets
you) form of fatherhood is now on the trash heap of history.
Fathers are demanding adequate time to be real parents to their
children (commensurate with the time mothers are given), and
they are willing to go to prison if that is what it takes to
make Government change its tune.
The intense mood of outrage about father cut-off policies that moderate
fathers' leaders had cautioned about to counterparts in Lord Chancellor's
committees two years ago, has turned into ever more daring acts
of civil disobedience protest against the court system, against lawyers
and against other key father cut-off organisations.
The government and its civil service advisers recently offered some cosmetic
changes and a few new faces (Lord Filkin was seconded from the Northern
Ireland Peace negotiations), but the crisis surrounding father issues
is now too deep.
To recover the situation the price-tag
the Government will now have to pay to buy peace may prove
politically beyond them. Government may even drive despairing
fathers into terrorism. In the meantime
Government demonstrates its whimsical approach by promising
to consult rock-stars about what to do.
It is self-evident that without
wholesale revolution in how excluded fathers gain access to
the media, get treated in courts, and get treated in the field
of the social security and tax systems,
the civil rights spirit that government inaction released will
not disappear.
Institutional
oppression of fathers saw men like Conrad being
sentenced to 84 days for texting his son on his 5th birthday
- (he served 42 days in the Scrubs Prison), while doing nothing
to mothers who break court orders that were meant to let children
keep their fathers. Conrad is not the only man who was imprisoned
for wanting to be a father. Mark Harris was thrown into jail
for 6 months for waving HELLO to his
children from across the road, and he was sentenced to several
more months in jail for giving a birthday
present to his child.
The injustices in the Family Courts
have been occurring for so long that today, children made fatherless
by courts a decade or more ago, have grown up and are joining
in the protests. Grandparents who were denied loving their
grandchildren because of the anti-father policies of Family
courts are also willing to break laws or get arrested in order
to create a future where children are no longer held hostage
to anti-father social policy. Too many got hurt in the past.
There will be no rest for those
who politically ignore politicised fathers, grandparents and
their friends.
Fatherhood today has become political:
it means nothing less than full human and civil rights in law,
in the practice of the law, and in getting access to all forms
of assistance irrespective of a parent's
sex.
Englishmen once gave their lives
so that the Union Flag could fly over mudhuts in villages in
Third World countries. Let's hope that government listens when
the grandchildren of these gallant men now vow:
"We will be fathers
- we will destroy
all obstacles put in our paths!"
fathercare.org
04 Sept 2003
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