Lenny Schafer
V
isitation" is for prisoners, hospital patients and distant relatives. Not for one's own children. (You can't baby-sit your own kids, either). Parenting is defined by one's control over one's children. The concept of "Non Custodial Parent" is an oxymoron; there is no such thing as a non-custodial parent. If your right to parent has been terminated against your will, then so have the responsibilities that go along with parenting.Reproductive legal rights are solely granted to women. A man who agrees to commit to parent children he has no legal rights to see born, does so voluntarily out of love, not legal obligation. No rights equals no obligations. In exchange for his commitments, he gets to have a family in part, secure in knowing that the kids are of his lineage, not of other men.
If the woman, by force of the state, terminates a man's parenting relationship to the children against his will, he morally has no obligation to support children rendered no longer his. The harm this may bring to the children is not of his making. If kidnappers steal a man's children from him and cause them harm in the holding of them as hostages for payment, the ex-father whether he pays up or not, is not the party who has caused them harm.
That men are held legally responsible for their ex-children is a matter of political expediency, enforced by the threat of violence (imprisonment). If you hold a gun to my head, I will comply with your demands of me. However, I do so as a slave and not out of moral obligation. Kidnap my children and enslave me, if you can continue to pull this off legally. But don't try to sell this to me as being my moral obligation.
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That men are held legally responsible for their ex-children is a matter of political expediency, enforced by the threat of violence (imprisonment). If you hold a gun to my head, I will comply with your demands of me. ... Kidnap my children and enslave me, if you can continue to pull this off legally. But don't try to sell this to me as being my moral obligation. |
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If you want me to happily support my children, return them to my care and control. I'm willing to share the parenting, too. But not be politically sodomized by the state's holding of my children, emotionally beating them in front of me, and then insisting that if I really love my children, I would pay up to stop them from being beaten. Most fathers do love their children so they pay-even if it subsidizes the destruction of their very own relationships to their children.
For what it's worth, I'd rather be raped...and keep my kids, if given the choice. I wonder if most moms wouldn't do the same if in the same situation? The invisible violence hated and feared even more than rape: the loss of children. It is a crime against humanity and no less.
The presumption of shared custody/parenting status is the only moral option for divorcing parents. Starting with anything less is little more than expedient moral butchery and it must be stopped.
Nothing less than shared parenting. Nothing less. Nothing.