Ethics of fatherless babies

SciAm asks:

Is it ethical to use a dead man's sperm to father a child? Experts are calling for a consensus on policies surrounding this question, which currently vary widely across the country.

It has been possible for a few decades to obtain a man’s sperm after his death and use it to fertilize an egg. Today, requests for postmortem sperm retrieval (PMSR) are growing, yet the United States has no guidelines governing the retrieval of sperm from deceased men, said Dr. Larry Lipshultz, a urologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas. ...

But the institutions trying to draft a protocol for these situations face a number of ethical concerns. For example, has the deceased consented to have his sperm used for reproduction after he’s gone? Could just anybody request to obtain his sperm? Is it in the best interest of the child to be brought into the world without having a father? ...

PMSR is currently illegal in France, Germany, Sweden and other countries, even with written consent from the deceased.

Millions of kids are being brought into the world without dads. Millions more are deprived of dads by the family court and other social policies. It is silly to raise a fuss about a handful of these ambiguous sperm donor cases.

Somebody should tell these ethicists to look at what the single moms are doing.

Or look at these fatherless kids:

Nine year-old twins Zea and Luna introduced President Barack Obama at the White House’s LGBT Pride Month celebration last Thursday.

The two girls took turns reading from their prepared notes:

We wrote a letter to the president last summer (they were age eight) and asked him to make some changes. First we asked him to make it harder for bad guys to get guns…(smiles and nods), second for more funding for art and libraries…and PE…(quiet nod from the president) and third, we ask the president for his support of gay marriage.(the crowd goes nuts.They erupt with hoots and screams. The president motions for calm and says “we’re almost done”) because we have two moms and they are just as good as other parents. They love us a lot.

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.

Children purchased at the fertility lab, now being used as political tools — just like their father, who was never a human person — used only for his sperm. If Father’s Day might hurt their feelings, I guess it’s time to quietly retire it as an old fashioned, patriarchal, sexist tradition. No men, no women, no “punishment” for Obama’s daughters’ mistakes, no father for Zea and Luna, only “planned and wanted” children — only endless love.

Obama is the ultimate anti-father, standing in a room of lesbians celebrating cold and calculated fatherlessness.

Obama still celebrates Fathers Day. The next Democrat president may not.

Changing ID if shrinks approve

ABC TV News reports:

Lauren Grey didn't think much about the gender recorded on her Illinois driver's license until she went to test-drive a new car. Although she had been living as a woman for months and easily obtained a license with her new name and a picture reflecting her feminine appearance, Grey's ID still identified her as male, puzzling the salesmen and prompting uncomfortable questions.

"They are like, 'This doesn't match.' Then you have to go into the story: 'I was born male, but now I'm not,'" said Grey, 38, a graphic designer living in suburban Chicago. "And they are like, 'What does that mean?' It was super embarrassing." Similarly awkward conversations ensued when she tried to rent an apartment, went to bars or was taken out of airport security lines for inspection.

Yes, I would be super embarrassed to say, "I used to have testicles, but I had them chopped off."

Advocates recorded their latest victory Friday, when the Social Security Administration announced that it would no longer require proof of surgery to alter the gender identification of individuals in its computers and records.

The move mirrors similar actions by the U.S. State Department, which amended its passport application policies three years ago to do away with the sex reassignment surgery requirement, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which last year did the same for green cards, work permits and other documents it issues. ...

As a result of lawsuits and lobbying, about half of U.S. states — most recently Illinois, Alaska, Virginia and Idaho — now allow residents to revise the gender designations on their driver's licenses without first undergoing surgery or getting a judge's approval. Applicants instead must provide a letter from a health professional stating they have received counseling, hormone therapy or another form of gender-transition treatment. ...

Meanwhile, acquiring a new birth certificate still requires proof of surgery in all but three states: Washington, California and Vermont, according to research by Lisa Mottet, director of the Transgender Rights Project at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

News to me. So if I just go to the California dept. of records and flash a letter from a counselor saying that I had begun thinking of myself as a woman, then the state will re-issue my birth certificate saying that I was born as a woman?

"She had the gumption to ask for a manger. But can you imagine how it adds to your anxiety and depression to be turned away after you worked up the nerve to go into that office and tell your story?" Hudson said. "A lot of transgender people are going to want to just tuck tail and run."

Tuck tail? Do they get tails as part of their re-assignment surgery? I am losing my ability to tell what is for real.

I think the terms father and mother will soon be bigoted terms. We will have parent-1 and parent-2, and maybe parent-3 or parent-4. Or maybe we won't have legal parents at all, and just have guardians who are like foster parents, with any substantive decisions having to be approved by a social worker or shrink. Already we have schools that teach LGBTQIA in grades K-12, and letting boys use the girls rest room.

Science research supports value of fathers

SciAm has posted some research for Fathers Day:

1. For over a decade, research has established that when mothers show their infants new things, they act in ways that will help their babies effectively learn about new behaviors. For example, mothers are more likely to be physically close, interactive, enthusiastic, and repetitive when teaching their babies how to use new toys or try new things than when teaching other adults, much like how people unintentionally slip into those nasal, high-pitched “baby voices” when speaking to infants. Well, a study published last year finally established that fathers tend to engage in just as much of this helpful, “infant-directed action” as mothers do. ...

2. There may be a hidden psychological benefit to being a “Daddy’s Girl.” Women with warm, supportive father-daughter relationships had lower cortisol levels and attenuated cortisol spikes when responding to a stressful life event that had nothing to do with their fathers or their families; those who reported rejecting, chaotic relationships with their fathers had higher cortisol levels and more sensitive cortisol reactions. In other words, women who had good relationships with their fathers had healthier, more adaptive responses to stressful situations in their everyday lives, even when those situations were completely unrelated to their families. If you’re close with your Dad, you may want to call him up and say “thanks” every time you don’t lose your cool during rush hour.

3. Do you think that the only things you inherited from Dad were his ears and his love for Woody Allen movies? Think again. If you did well in school, you may have to thank Dad for that as well — and not just because he taught you all of those valuable life lessons that helped you along the way. Even when controlling for level of education and IQ, you can predict a kid’s academic performance from how well his or her father did.

The current Atlantic magazine explains The Distinct, Positive Impact of a Good Dad:

What this view overlooks, however, is a growing body of research suggesting that men bring much more to the parenting enterprise than money, especially today, when many fathers are highly involved in the warp and woof of childrearing. As Yale psychiatrist Kyle Pruett put it in Salon: "fathers don't mother."

Pruett's argument is that fathers often engage their children in ways that differ from the ways in which mothers engage their children. Yes, there are exceptions, and, yes, parents also engage their children in ways that are not specifically gendered. But there are at least four ways, spelled out in my new book, Gender and Parenthood: Biological and Social Scientific Perspectives (co-edited with Kathleen Kovner Kline), that today's dads tend to make distinctive contributions to their children's lives: The Power of Play, Encouraging Risk, Protecting His Own, Dad's discipline.

Here is another story, from this morning's newspaper:

From her perch at Randolph-Macon College in rural Ashland, Va., Lambert has spent years designing elaborate experiments to test nurturing in both male and female rodents. She anesthetizes the animals, carefully removes their brains, firms the brains up with formalin, freezes them, then shaves them into slices thinner than a strand of human hair to study under a microscope.

What Lambert's rodent brain slices are revealing is nothing short of revolutionary, challenging the loud pundits and long-held cultural views that only mothers are wired for nurture.

Lambert, one of a small but growing number of scientists who study the biology of father behavior, is finding that not just mothers experience surges of hormones associated with bonding and nurturing. The same hormones increase, though not to the same degree, in fathers.

Rat mothers are not the only ones whose brains become sharper, making them more efficient foragers and more courageous and level-headed than females without offspring. Lambert has found that the same is true of fathers' brains. Fatherhood makes the male California deer mouse smarter, too.

I am tempted to make some wisecracks about rat brains. Humans are different from rats.

Presidential Fathers Day message

Pres. Barack Obama just gave a Fathers Day radio message:

Hi, everybody. This Sunday is Father’s Day, and so I wanted to take a moment to talk about the most important job many of us will ever have – and that’s being a dad.

Today we’re blessed to live in a world where technology allows us to connect instantly with just about anyone on the planet. But no matter how advanced we get, there will never be a substitute for the love and support and, most importantly, the presence of a parent in a child’s life. And in many ways, that’s uniquely true for fathers.

Happy to have our President say that. At least he did not trash black fathers or say we need fathers to step up, as he has in the past.

I never really knew my own father. I was raised by a single mom and two wonderful grandparents who made incredible sacrifices for me. And there are single parents all across the country who do a heroic job raising terrific kids.

He was not raised by a single mom. The single moms are ruining the country.

And I want to do what I can as President to encourage marriage and strong families. We should reform our child support laws to get more men working and engaged with their children. And my Administration will continue to work with the faith and other community organizations, as well as businesses, on a campaign to encourage strong parenting and fatherhood.

Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned along the way, it’s that all our personal successes shine a little less brightly if we fail at family. That’s what matters most.

This is encouraging that he recognizes the need for child support law reform. I have no idea what reform he has in mind. His health care reform increased my rates by $100 a month. But for now, I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt, and hope that he wants to do something positive.

Advice to avoid the delusional ex

Sometime I am going to make a list of disorders that ought to be in the DSM-5. One would be the crazy delusional vindictive ex, as typified by this letter:

Dear Annie: My son's ex-wife has reported him to child protective services six times and to the police for various things she's invented over the past three years. Due to her false accusations, he has been arrested three times. He has been found innocent of all charges, but she persists.

She charged him with violating a restraining order and appeared in court last week flanked by bodyguards supplied by victim services. This charge was thrown out. My son has never touched her, but she has convinced many people that he is dangerous. She is such a good liar that she actually believes her own stories, which makes her even more convincing.

My son has become so paranoid, he barely leaves his house. He is so depressed that he can barely function and is unable to work. She is slowly killing him. Is there anything he can do besides continue to defend himself? The lawyers' costs have become a nightmare for our whole family. There must be something more we can do besides waiting for her next dramatic step. — Worried Family Members

When a woman gets crazy enough to believe her own lies, she becomes more dangerous, because her friends and counselors will be impressed by her apparent sincerity.

Unfortunately, there is no good answer for this poor man. If the woman is crazy enough, maybe she will do something to get herself arrested or committed. But our society has a very high tolerance for these women, and they are likely to continue to make trouble.

Another crazy ex-wife was the one who framed her husband for mailing ricin lettere:

At this time, a providential break in the case occurred: a New Boston woman named Shannon Richardson walked in to the FBI in Shreveport, LA, and fingered her husband, Nathaniel, as the mailer. Nathaniel was dangerous. He had lots of guns. He didn’t like the President. He was a combat wounded veteran, and he was employed in the defense industrial base (these are all things the FBI has been directed to consider warning signs). The FBI swarmed him at work.

His arrest was all over the news. She is going to prison.

I got some comments in defense of the crazy Stanford professor mom who fled to Hawaii. As usual, she is innocent until proven guilty. But her defender said the dad is child molester and also a Stanford professor, and that she had to flee in order to deny him his supervised visitation.

These allegations only persuade me that the mom is a malicious nut. As far as I know, Stanford professors do not molest their own kids. If there were any hard evidence of it, the dad would be charged with a serious crime. Instead the accusation was used to limit his visits to being supervised. But if the visitation was supervised, then surely the alleged molestation could not have been a concern. If the mom is so far gone as to refuse supervised visitation, then she is quite likely to be crazy or vindictive. If she believes her own lies, then she is dangerous.

Supreme court hears Indian dad

I mentioned in January that the US Supreme Court is hearing a Cherokee child custody case. Now RadioLab has a good podcast on Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl. The oral argument indicated that the case would be closely divided, and probably giving a narrow ruling. The decision is expected in June, along with the same-sex marriage cases.

The case pits a natural dad against adoptive parents making a BIOTCh argument. The dad would have lost and no one cared, but for the fact that he has 2% Cherokee blood and an obscure 1978 federal law (ICWA) was passed to block an epidemic of social workers taking kids from Indian parents and giving them to non-Indian adoptive or foster parents.

I am annoyed that some dad has more rights than I do just because he has 2% Cherokee blood. That got the feds to goto bat for him, got the attention of the federal courts, and got his kid back. Millions of other non-Cherokee dads have much better (non-ICWA) legal arguments, but they do not get any help getting their kids back.

Here are some opinions:

“Cases like this are among the most difficult the justices ever have to decide. If you don’t believe me, ask Justice Antonin Scalia, who last fall cited an ICWA case from 1989 as one of his hardest in 27 years on the Supreme Court bench. They are difficult because there is only one child and two families seeking to raise her and thus no room for Solomon’s compromise.”

“The Indian Child Welfare Act, which grants individuals and tribes statutory rights, does not trump the child’s constitutional rights,” McCarthy said. “The case provides an excellent opportunity for the Supreme Court to finally, hopefully and at long last clarify: Does a child have a constitutional right to a secure and stable home? They’ve never reached that issue yet.”

This case is not difficult at all. The mom put the kid up for adoption. The dad wants the kid, even tho he was tricked into signing some papers while being shipped off to the Iraq War. The adoptive parents did not follow the ICWA law. Even without ICWA, the law should favor the natural parent over strangers.

Yes, this would be a big case of the Supreme Court suddenly decided that all our Indian laws are unconstitutionally racially discriminatory, or that dads have a constitutional right to their kids, or that social workers can adopt out a kid on a belief that adoptive parents have a more secure and stable home. But none of those are likely. The court does not have the guts to directly address parental rights.

I hope this case gets lots of publicity, and forces the public to think about the issues. Some people sympathize with the adoptive parents for having to give up the kid after 2 years of custody. But they are not parents and they never even talked to the real dad. They only had custody for 2 years because they spent 2 years fighting ICWA in court.

This sort of argument is made all the time in family court. A mom will make a phony domestic violence charge, get temporary custody pending an investigation, and when the investigation fails to back her up, she argues that preserving her sole custody would be in the BIOTCh because the kid is accustomed to that.

Octomom the parasite

US mag reports:

Nadya Suleman, a.k.a. "Octomom," is currently under investigation for welfare fraud, on a tip that the mother of 14 has been illegally collecting thousands of dollars in government aid, TMZ reports. According to a search warrant, officials are taking steps to seize Suleman's financial records from her manager's home and office.

Per TMZ, Suleman and her 14 children are eligible for welfare benefits if she earns less than $119,000 in a calendar year. However, officials at the L.A. County Department of Welfare Fraud Prevention and Investigation reportedly received a tip that she grossed more than $200,000 in 2012 -- and still collected public-assistance money from the government.

If the tip turns out to be true, Suleman could face up to three years of prison time.

There are many things wrong here. I am surprised that a single mom can earn up to $119k and still collect welfare?

She has no husband and no real job. I think that she earned the money by cashing in on her celebrity status to make porno videos.

The Octomom is a parasite. Besides collecting tens of thousands in welfare, she someone got free medical treatment for her test-tube babies, some of whom are disabled.

Now if she is put in jail, she will cost us hundreds of thousands more in prison expenses, and in foster care for her 14 kids.

I mentioned her 4 years ago, and there seems to be no end to the drama. At what point are we going to learn to stop subsidizing irresponsible single moms?

Meanwhile, here is the male equivalent:

A man with 22 kids from 14 women is being sued for unpaid child support, reported the Huffington Post on June 7. Orlando Shaw, 33, says he considers himself a good father, but says he can't afford to pay child support.

Shaw says, “You can't knock no man for loving women,” and he says any time any of the women ask for anything, he runs to give it. It seems the 14 women of the 22 kids, however, would argue that is not the case since he is being sued for tens of thousands of dollars over unpaid child support.

Note how it is all about money.

The 33-year-old Shaw admitted to fathering 22 kids by 14 different women. Those mothers -through Child Support Services - took Shaw to court for tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid child support over the years.

It is estimated the state pays more than $7,000 each month in assistance to help support all of Shaw's children.

Adam Corolla says he is "the world's worst father, and possibly human being." Bill O'Reilly says, "I think Orlando should go to jail for 10 years. That is only 6 months for each child. ... He is a menace, a danger. ... Let's put him away for 10 years for child abuse." Both quotes from Fox News TV O'Reilly Factor last night.

Wow, there is some venom. There is no law against having kids that you cannot support. The taxpayers are supporting the single moms with thousands of dollars every month.

Study shows false memories in vets

Neuroskeptic writes:

Simply asking people whether they experienced an event can trick them into later believing that it did occur, according to a neat little study just out: Susceptibility to long-term misinformation effect outside of the laboratory

Psychology experiments have shown that it is surprisingly easy to plant false memories in people's minds. They will sincerely swear that they remember something that in fact never happened.

Many people, especially women, tell fantastic stories of abuse or domestic violence from years in the past. There stories seem unlikely, but it also seems unlikely that they are deliberately lying.

Psychologists Miriam Lommen and colleagues studied 249 Dutch soldiers were deployed for a four month tour of duty in Afghanistan. As part of a study into PTSD, they were given an interview at the end of the deployment asking them about their exposure to various stressful events that had occurred. However, one of the things discussed was made up – a missile attack on their base on New Year’s Eve.

At the post-test, participants were provided new information about an event that did not take place during their deployment, that is, a (harmless) missile attack at the base on New Year’s Eve.

We provided a short description of the event including some sensory details (e.g., sound of explosion, sight of gravel after the explosion). After that, participants were asked if they had experienced it…

Eight of the soldiers reported remembering this event right there in the interview. The other 241 correctly said they didn’t recall it, but seven months later, when they did a follow-up questionnaire about their experiences in the field, 26% said they did remember the non-existent New Year’s Eve bombardment (this question had been added to an existing PTSD scale.)

Susceptibility to the misinformation was correlated with having a lower IQ, and with PTSD symptom severity.

False memory effects like this one have been widely studied, but generally only in laboratory conditions. I like this study because it used a clever design to take memory misinformation into the real world, by neatly piggybacking onto another piece of research.

Also, it’s interesting (and worrying) that the false information was presented in the context of a question, not a statement. It seems that merely being asked about something can, in some cases, lead to memories of having experienced that thing.

So if you ask women if they are victims of domestic violence, then maybe 26% of them will conjure up false memories of it.

Not sure about the correlation with PTSD. Maybe these soldiers were asked about PTSD, and also had false memories leading to the PTSD diagnosis.

Indiana hears dad's free speech case

The Indian supreme court has agreed to hear oral arguments on whether to hear the appeal of the case of fellow angry dad Dan Brewington (more info at DanHelpsKids). I have written about his case several times. He lost his kids and was sent to prison for criticizing the judge and psychologist. Oral argument is scheduled for Sept. 12.

This is an important case for the right of citizens to expose incompetence and corruption in public official. What Breington exposed was similar to what I exposed here about Irwin H. Joseph and Ken B. Perlmutter. Those are people who would be rotting in prison if there were any justice.

Illinois passes right of first refusal

Illinois Fathers reports:

In an historic move, Illinois unanimously passed the ‘Right of First Refusal’ on May 22 (HB2992, 98th Session).

Illinois becomes the first state to explicitly call for consideration of the ‘Right of First Refusal’ in a parenting plan or court order.

It will be added as Section 602.3 to the Illinois Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act. The bill is currently on the governor’s desk for his expected signature.

‘Right of First Refusal’ is a guarantee that anytime a parent needs someone to watch the children, they must ask the other parent first. This gives a parent the opportunity to watch the children when the other parent has them.

Sounds great, right?

The court is given the maximum discretion in determining if ‘Right of First Refusal’ is in the child’s best interest.

I guess this is progress, but it is not much of a right if some stupid judge has the discretion to take it away based on his own prejudices.

Arguments that fathers are unnecessary

The NY Times has a debate on fathers:

In almost half the American households with children, mothers are the sole or primary breadwinners. This victory for working women shows evolving family economics — or maybe, two very different types of families.

So what is the purpose of men in modern families? We’re approaching the holiday that celebrates dads, but do fathers bring anything unique to the table?

Michele Weldon, an assistant professor of journalism:

The 24 million American sons and daughters growing up without fathers are not all doomed. Nor are the children of lesbian parents. Nor the children whose fathers were killed in the line of duty as policemen, firemen, soldiers. Nor the children who have lost fathers to disease, accidents or suicide. Our society must be careful not to assume these sons and daughters are damned.

In the cases where the father is far from heroic – even abusive – his absence is also the absence of the chaos, anger, pain and disruption he would bring to his family. Americans encourage women to leave abusive partners, but mothers who do this end up in a class we shame and pity. The government itself sends the message that children are better off with a father. The reality is, many children are better off without their fathers.

Jane Mattes, a psychotherapist:

As more women are graduating from college and are able to provide a sufficient income to support a family, it is no longer necessary for them to marry in order to support a child. After looking for a partner for many years – or not, in a few cases – some have decided that they would prefer to have a child on their own rather than settle for a man who isn’t likely to be a good and loving husband or parent. We are called single mothers by choice. ...

The organization I founded, Single Mothers by Choice, is more than 30 years old now. We have seen a generation of our children grow up – and turn out just fine.

Hanna Rosin:

I’m not sure whether a child needs a father. Sophisticated studies on single motherhood show that the circumstances surrounding such families – poverty, instability – can be rough on children, but not that single motherhood itself is an issue.

Dad gets 3 years for taking kids on yacht

Here is a follow-up to a story I posted last year. I post the whole thing, because last time I was accused to cherry-picking facts to support the dad.

A father was sentenced to three years in jail Friday for abducting his two young children in South San Francisco and then motoring away with them aboard a stolen yacht that ran out of gas, attorneys said.

But as long as Christopher Maffei, 43, behaves he'll only spend about another nine months behind bars due to the jail time credit he already has. San Mateo County Superior Court Judge Jonathan Karesh also ordered him to do 16 months of supervision, which is like probation, after gets out of jail, District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said.

Until the sentence is complete Maffei must stay away from his son Devin and daughter Brooklynn, who were 2 and 3 years old respectively when he snatched them from their South San Francisco home Sept. 4. He packed the kids onto a yacht stolen from an Alameda marina and then set out on a strange odyssey that ended three days later when, police said, a relieved Maffei surrendered in the waters near Santa Cruz.

"He realizes it was inappropriate, illegal and not supported by any kind of rational thinking," said defense attorney Jeff Boyarsky. "He wants the rest of the family and the public to know he's sorry for the anguish he caused."
Maffei believed the toddlers were in danger in part because they were around an aunt with alleged substance abuse problems, Boyarsky said. But prosecutors and police never found any evidence of abuse and noted Maffei should have asked authorities to check into his concerns.

Boyarsky said his client had no definite plan on what to do after taking the kids. They ended up out of gas in the Pacific Ocean and authorities guided them to land in Santa Cruz, where the children were reunited, unharmed, with their mother Jennifer Hipon.

Maffei pleaded no contest to child stealing and possession of the 41-foot yacht Unleashed in April. He's remained in San Mateo County Jail in lieu of $500,000 bail since the days after the abduction.

Okay the dad's behavior was inappropriate, but this story did not justify the huge news coverage and the 3-year sentence. Isn't it odd that he was charged with stealing the kids and possessing the yacht? No, he was possessing his kids and stealing the yacht.

This is, of course, just a child custody dispute gone bad. The mom was taking steps to cut off the dad from the kids. Moms refuse visitation all the time, and they aren't sentenced to jail for it.

Catholic school cannot fire lesbian

At one time, Catholic schools only hired Catholic teachers. Now that is considered illegal discrimination, but the private schools can still refuse to hire teachers who are openly mocking Church doctrine. That means that they could fire a lesbian artifically-inseminated teacher.

Not any more. An Ohio newspaper reports:

A Catholic-school teacher who was fired after she became pregnant through artificial insemination won her anti-discrimination lawsuit against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Cincinnati yesterday and was awarded more than $170,000.

A federal jury found that the archdiocese discriminated against Christa Dias, who taught computer classes, by firing her in October 2010. ...

The jury said the archdiocese should pay $51,000 in back pay, $20,000 in compensatory damages and $100,000 in punitive damages. Dias had sued the archdiocese and two of its schools; the jury didn’t find the schools liable for damages. ...

I am guessing that most of my readers have no moral objections to lesbians getting artificially inseminated, and teaching in the schools. That sort of thing is celebrated in this California beach town where I live. But shouldn't parents have the right to teach their own moral values to their kids, and to send them to a private school where their morals will not be openly mocked?

I hate to keep writing about these LGBTQIA issues, but even the Catholic Church cannot escape them. The American nuclear family has been dismantled, and your kids will be taught that it is normal for a woman to become a lesbian and be artificially inseminated. You will not be able to escape the intolerance of the gay lobby, even if you send your kids to private Catholic schools.

If I do not fully appreciate lesbianism, the movies will force it:

The Cannes prize was given to Mr. Kechiche just hours after masses of French demonstrators poured into the streets of Paris to protest France’s new law allowing same-sex marriage and adoption. ...

And Mr. Kechiche told Reuters, “Everyone who is against same-sex marriage or love between two people of the same sex must see the film.” ...

On the Riviera in May, the critics gushed. The graphic sexual encounters were so magnificent, The Guardian wrote, that “they make the sex in famous movies like, say, ‘Last Tango in Paris,’ look supercilious and dated.”
The Hollywood Reporter said the film would surely “raise eyebrows with its showstopping scenes of nonsimulated [sic] female copulation.”

Is this a joke? Did Last Tango in Paris persuade you of the merits of the behavior in that movie? Follow the link if you want spoilers; I'd rather not summarize them here.

I got the Catholic story from the Spearhead, which also comments on some anti-man NY Times propaganda:

Not long ago, there was a trend of women using estrogen during and following menopause, and while this was later found to contribute to some health risks, not once were women accused of “abusing” the female hormone. In fact, use of estrogen was widely praised and recommended in all sorts of media outlets.

But now that we have older men doing the equivalent, it constitutes a problem. This is because masculine characteristics, in our culture, are seen as inherently problematic, whether they be men’s sexual preferences, personality characteristics or work habits. Testosterone is seen as a culprit in many of these masculine behaviors and proclivities, so it’s bad, right? ...

And finally, it’s amazing that the Times has the chutzpah to cast aspersions on ordinary men’s use of T when it so happily endorses “gender reassignment” procedures for men, which require enormous doses of hormones in addition to risky surgery.

He is right. To the NY emo leftoid mentality, being manly is a disease.

Leno repeats police story

Jay Leno just showed this on the police blotter segment of his TV show:

Violation of injunction, ... While having sex with her ex-husband, a woman remembered that she had a restraining order against him. She then reported him to police for the violation.

This was a repeat from Feb. 2011. You read it here first.

I am sure Leno would be embarrassed to learn that he had repeated material. Or maybe it is worth repeating.

Nazi dad lost his kids

I mentioned this case in 2010, and suggested that you do not name your kid Adolf. This man is testing the limits of free speech. UPI reports:

The founder of New Jersey pro-Nazi organization "Hitler’s Order" appeared in family court wearing a Nazi uniform to petition for the right to visit his youngest son.

The family made headlines in 2008 when a supermarket refused to write Adolf Hitler Campbell's name on a cake for his third birthday. The Campbells complained that it was discrimination and another store provided a cake, but the news led New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services (NJ DYFS) to investigate.

NJ DYFS officials placed Adolf Hitler Campbell, 7, JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell, 6, and 5-year-old Honzlynn Jeannie Campbell in foster care due to alleged violence in the home. Hons Campbell was born later, in 2011, and NJ DYFS took the boy from Heath Campbell and his now estranged wife Deborah Campbell when he was just 16 hours old.

The couple argues that they have never abused their children, and that they are being discriminated against for giving their children Nazi-inspired names.

Heath Campbell, 40, hasn't seen his children in two years, and the three oldest have been adopted by another family. The children's mother has already given up her parental rights.

Prior to the closed-door custody hearing on Monday, Campbell told WCAU-TV that the Nazi uniform shouldn't affect the court's decision. "I'm going to tell the judge, I love my children; I wanna be a father, let me be it. Let me prove to the world that I am a good father."

This is wacky, but I don't see how it is any worse than the dad being a Commie or a Mohammedan. He is entitled to his beliefs. He should not have lost his kids for his beliefs.

I attacked JC Penney for its Apple anti-consumer attitude and its gay Fathers Day marketing, but now it just got caught promoting a Hitler tea kettle on a billboard. Penney had to pull the product and the billboard. Perhaps someone at Penney thought that it was a joke. You cannot joke about one of the great evil men of the 20th century, I guess.

New study on working moms

Here is the latest parenting flap:

On his show Thursday, anchor Lou Dobbs highlighted a new study showing that four in 10 households now have female, rather than male, breadwinners. One of Dobbs' guests, Erick Erickson, called it "anti-science" and said women should not be competing for a "dominant role" in a family. "Having moms as the primary breadwinner is bad for kids and bad for marriage," Erickson continued.

Shockingly (not), those comments didn't sit well with Van Susteren, who has made a career out of speaking her mind on TV. "Have these men lost their minds? (and these are my colleagues??!! oh brother... maybe I need to have a little chat with them)," she wrote on her blog. "(Next thing they will have a segment to discuss eliminating women's right to vote?)"

Kelly went one step further and invited Erickson on her show to scold him on-air for his comments on the show and in a recent blog post. "I don't think I'm an emo-liberal and I don't describe myself as a feminist but I will tell you I was offended by your piece nonetheless. I didn't like what you wrote one bit and I do think you are judging people," she said.

I previously found emos on a list of people to repent. I am still not sure what they are.

Here are some retro opinions:

It appears to me that Megyn Kelly perfectly illustrates Erick Erickson’s point. Her behaviour is dominant, her looks are immodest, and her opinions are overly ‘emoliberal.’ According to Wikipedia, she is a ‘re-married’ Roman Catholic; so if there is no legal annulment of her church marriage, then her second marriage is not a real marriage, and her children are, sadly, extramarital children (or as would have been said two generations ago: bastards).

Given Kelly’s dominant behaviour, it is likely that her new boyfriend will have or develop traits of an absentee father; and given her immodest looks, it is likely that her children will be nurtured with a wrong conception of womanhood. In effect, their children will grow up with an unbalanced father and mother relationship. ...

The square-jawed, strangely robotic Erickson is pathetic against this harridan. His argument that sex differences are good because animals display them is very weak. He should have pointed not to the animal kingdom but to the rise of human beings out of it. Motherhood is not just a private affair, but a social institution that preserves a certain kind of human culture. By promoting the large-scale abandonment of it, mothers such as Kelly expose children who will never have private nannies and intelligent parents who can manage every crisis and cover over neglect with material luxury to immense harm.

That's right, the animal evidence because different species have different sex roles. The two species most closely related to humans, chimps and bonobos, are very different. There is a human nature argument, and it is informed by animal evidence, but it is trickier. Here is another report:

Kelly also compared his "natural male dominance" theories to the pseudo-science used in the 1950s and '60s to oppose interracial marriage. "They said it was science and fact if you were the child of a black father and white mother or vice versa you were inferior and not set up for success. Tell that to Barack Obama."

People keep making this interracial marriage analogy, but it is bogus. Scientists never said that such kids were inferior. I think that the concern was that the kids would not fit into either the white or black communities. Now multi-racial kids are used to sell Cheerios. A white mom makes breakfast for the kid while the black dad lies on the couch.

Kelly apparently has a nanny to raise her two small kids, and she is sensitive about her decision. She is offended that anyone would judge her for it.

I have no idea what the research says about the kids of rich parents who hire nannies. But the research does say that single moms make lousy parents and feminists make lousy wives. I post this to show that even the supposedly conservative Fox News has been infiltrated by women who resist maternal roles, and who go nuts about the suggestion that kids need their moms at home.

Law criminalizes parents of outspoken kids

The Wisconsin State Journal reports:

Monona parents whose children repeatedly bully others can now be ticketed by police and fined in municipal court.

The approach, part of a broader anti-bullying ordinance passed May 20 by the Monona City Council, appears to break new ground in the national effort to reduce harassment and emotional abuse among young people. ...

“I think it’s fantastic,” said Jason Burns, executive director of Equality Wisconsin, a Milwaukee nonprofit organization that works on bullying prevention in schools. “It forces parents to be more involved in their child’s life, if they’re not already.”

Equality Wisconsin is an LGBT advocacy organization. When they say "works on bullying prevention", they mean working on promoting LGBT lifestyles and forcing everyone to approve of their morals, with criminal penalties.

Anti-bullying is a big fad in the schools and elsewhere. The main purpose is to stifle hetero-normative language, and to tell small kids that it is okay to grow up to be LGBTQIA.

Volokh trashes this law, and drew comments like these:

It also sounds like it was written by someone who doesn't have kids. A parent telling their kid to not do something guarantees that the kid will never take that action, correct? And when the kid (inevitably) ignores his parents, they get charged?

I can see it now... 'raise my allowance or I'll go yell at the minority kid next door'... or something like that.

[reply]
Doesn't even have to be "the minority kid"; sounds like there's liability if Junior goes next door and simply calls any kid next door a "block-head", or says "Aw, my ol' man could beat up your ol' man, with a hand tied behind his back..." (This would be the "Spanky McFarlin Rule" of offensive speech....)

This law is a terrible idea. There is no objective definition of emotional abuse, or any consensus that it is harmful, or any practical way to stop it.

In case someone accuses me of gay-bashing again, I have no objection to what consenting adults do in private. I do object to school policies that promote LGBTQIA lifestyles to kids, to laws against free speech, to micro-managing parents, and to authorities having broad discretion to punish people they don't like.

Wisconsin is the same state with a transgender school day:

Students celebrating spirit week at Tippecanoe School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, caused controversy with Friday's Gender Bender Day theme.

Members of the Student Council decided on the costume theme calling for boys to dress like girls and girls to dress like boys.

Milwaukee Public Schools said participation was 100 percent voluntary, but changed the theme to Switch It Up Day after parental complaints. Fox affiliate WITI reports a chilling effect on students, who didn't dress up, with mostly teachers and staff members showing the Switch It Up spirit.

“I think it’s just teaching them the wrong lesson about gender," said one boy's father, who didn't want to be identified. "If you’re a boy, stay a boy. You shouldn’t have something like that at school," he said.

A parent should not be afraid to identify himself just for expressing the opinion that a boy can stay a boy. He is probably worried that someday he will be prosecuted for emotional abuse against LGBTQIA kids, and CPS will threaten to take his kids away or send him to re-education camp.

The Divorce Generation

The WSJ has a new book excerpt about divorce:

Having survived their own family splits, Generation X parents are determined to keep their marriages together. It doesn't always work. ...

Many of us do. The phrase "friendly divorce" may strike some as an oxymoron, but it is increasingly a trend and a real possibility. Relatively inexpensive and nonadversarial divorce mediation—rather than pricey, contentious litigation—is now more common than ever. Many of us are all too familiar with the brutal court fights of our parents, and we have no intention of putting our kids through it, too. According to a recent University of Virginia study, couples who decide to mediate their divorce are more likely than those who go to court to talk regularly about the children's needs and problems, to participate in school and special events, daily activities, holidays and vacations.

We may not make it in marriage, but we still want to make it as parents. In the '70s, only nine states permitted joint custody. Today, every state has adopted it. It was once typical for dads to recede from family life, or to drop out altogether, in the wake of a divorce. But dads are critical in helping kids to develop self-esteem and constructive habits of behavior. A 2009 study published in the journal Child Development found, for example, that teenagers with involved fathers are less likely to engage in risky sexual activities.

Joint custody also reduces family strife. According to a 2001 study, couples with such arrangements report less conflict with their former spouses than sole-custody parents—an important finding, since judges have worried, historically, that joint custody exposes children to ongoing parental fighting. Some divorced couples have even decided to continue living together in different parts of the home—or to "swap out" each week—in order to maintain some measure of stability for their kids.

I have yet to meet the divorced mother or father who feels like a good parent, who professes to being happier with how their children are now being raised. Many of us have ended up inflicting pain on our children, which we did everything to avoid.

But we have not had our parents' divorces either. We can only hope that in this, we have done it differently in the right way.

—Adapted from "In Spite of Everything: A Memoir" by Susan Gregory Thomas, to be published by Random House next week. Copyright © by Susan Gregory Thomas.

The studies do show that joint custody works better and reduces conflict. Unfortunately many judges and child custody evaluators insist that joint custody must be avoided if there is conflict.

No free speech in England

The UK Daily Mail reports:

A father has been jailed at a secret court hearing for sending a Facebook message to his grown-up son on his 21st birthday.

Garry Johnson, 46, breached a draconian gagging order which stops him publicly naming his son, Sam, whom he has brought up and who still lives with him.

In a case which is certain to fuel concerns about Britain’s shadowy network of secret courts, a judge sent the former music executive to prison for contempt at a closed-doors family court hearing in Essex at the beginning of last month.

This is crazy stuff. Usually I have to explain why it is bad to have social workers and judges micromanaging parents' lives. But no need here. Just read on.

After their parents’ divorce, the two boys chose to live with their father, following a series of rows with their mother over her new boyfriend.

But within a year of the divorce, Mr Johnson’s ex-wife made allegations to Essex social workers that he was neglecting the children and not feeding them properly at his smart family home.

An investigation by social workers cleared him of any wrongdoing and said the boys were fine.

A year later, in 2006, she made further allegations to social workers that he was mentally unfit to care for the boys.

Medical documents shown to the Mail by Sam and Adam reveal that Mr Johnson was examined three times by a local psychiatrist hired by social workers. The doctor wrote to social workers saying:

‘There is no evidence of mental illness. I cannot understand why there are concerns about Mr Johnson’s mental health.’

Social services refused, as a result, to get involved.

In 2007, the ex-wife started private care proceedings to remove the boys from their father. A judge put the boys under a ‘living at home with parent’ care order.

It meant they would continue to live with their father, but under supervision by social services.

This care order was accompanied by the gagging order to stop an increasingly anguished Mr Johnson talking about the case publicly.

Even naming his sons in the most innocuous circumstances – such as on Facebook – became a contempt of court.

The care order on Sam expired on his 18th birthday three years ago. The one on Adam in October last year when he reached 18. Normally, a gagging order imposed by a family court judge on a parent expires at the same time as a care order on the child. This one did not.

Here is another story showing the lack of free speech in the UK:

A NEWPORT shopkeeper has been forced by police to remove a T-shirt from his shop window because they felt it “could be seen to be inciting racial hatred.”

Matthew Taylor, 35, the owner of Taylor’s clothes store on Emlyn Walk in the city, printed up and displayed the T-shirt with the slogan: “Obey our laws, respect our beliefs or get out of our country” after Drummer Lee Rigby, 25, was killed in near Woolwich barracks in London last week.

But following a complaint from a member of the public, police came to his store and threatened to arrest him unless he removed the T-shirt from sight....

The shirt is not racist, unless maybe you believe that only certain races violate the law. Immigrants should obey our laws and respect our beliefs. The UK is being destroyed.

Parade promotes queer youth

The local beach town is having a parade on Sunday at 11am:

Never has so much been at stake for the gay and lesbian community as it prepares to mark Sunday's 39th annual Santa Cruz Pride Parade and Festival. ...

"We are inviting everyone to stand with us as we await the decision of the Supreme Court and we are calling on our allies on the Supreme Court to uphold equality," she said. "It is certainly a seminal moment for our community and feels like a great time to gather and be together." ...

The organization reached new heights in recent years, bringing the awards program to Scotts Valley and San Lorenzo Valley schools and working on a new program designed to support transgender youth.

Rosenstein said he draws inspiration from the families who love their LGBT children unconditionally.

"It's humbling to work with parents who stand proud to support their children," he said. ...

Kathy Goldenkranz, president of Boys and Girls Club and founder of Out in Our Faith

Stuart Rosenstein, chair of the Queer Youth Task Force

Other Pride Festival honorees:

Jim Brown, former executive director of the Diversity Center

Mark Hajduk, member of Bay Area Municipal Elections Committee (BAYMEC)

Santa Cruz Parents Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG)

Santa Cruz City Schools

I am surprised at how much emphasis is on how much of this event is based on gay and lesbian outreach to children. They have the schools, boys and girls club, queer youth, transgender youth, LGBT children, etc. all lined up for this parade.

The court doesn't let me see my kids because I once reset an alarm clock and took them to a math contest, but when a bunch of local weirdos want to promote LGBTQIA behavior in children, the city has a parade.

They are excited that the US Supreme Court in going to rule on California's Prop. 8, but that will not have any direct practical on the rights and obligations of California couples. What they desperately want, of course, is for the justices to declare that LGBTQIA relationships have "equality" with all others.

For a long time, gay rights was about the private behavior of consenting adults. No more. Now it is all about recruiting kids for the next generation of activists.

Already we are being told that LGBTQIA couples are not just equal, but are better and raising kids:

In a recent cover story in The Atlantic, “The Gay Guide to Wedded Bliss,” Liza Mundy discusses how same-sex unions are happier than heterosexual marriages. Her studies show that gay and lesbian couples, whether intentional or not, are more in sync than straight couples across many areas. For example, chores. 

“Study after study has shown that these unions tend to be more egalitarian,” Mundy said on Take Two Thursday. “There's still a fair amount of traditional division of labor in straight households, whereas gay couples start with a blank slate, and have to negotiate every duty.”

Mundy mentions how in male-female couples’ household duties, the wife tends to clean the bathroom while the husband traditionally takes out the trash. In same-sex unions, however, each couple divvies up chores more based on their strengths rather than gender roles. 

This same logic applies to an issue oft-debated in marriages: parenting. While the woman is generally assumed to play the major role in child care in many couples (though men are taking the role more and more), Mundy says that taking gender out of the equation can lead to a better parenting dynamic.

“When it comes to parenting, for example, in gay couples, both parents tend to be present more at the same time,” Mundy said on raising children. “They’re co-parenting… together.” 

Mundy’s study showed that in contrast, straight couples being around children together were more likely to have the mother interacting by herself with the kids, with the father “off on his Blackberry or playing with Tinker Toys by himself.”

No, this is crazy stuff.

A new autobiography on Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul says:

In a matter-of-fact way, I began to understand that I was a monster.

A word I think of in this connection is an old bit of psychiatric jargon that went out of polite use a few decades ago. Today the word “invert” is scarcely ever heard at all. Not so long ago, however, it was was not only reputable but clinically descriptive. In those days homosexuality was often regarded not merely as a sexual disorder or perversion, like impotence or exhibitionism, but as a comprehensive personality disorder. That is, homosexuality was not just a thing unto itself: it was a marker of a disturbed and possibly antisocial or even dangerous character.

The invert’s sexuality was an expression of a deep tangle of neuroses. He was thus quite a sick person, unfit for military service or positions of social responsibility. Socially, the invert was likely to be backward and poorly adjusted; psychologically he was not only unhappy but the very antithesis of normalcy. Thus was his personality almost literally upside-down. Now, the dusty museum-case is a good resting place for “invert,” and I would hate to see it creep back into general use. But I cannot deny that in some respects it is a good word to describe what I was for 25 years.

This guy also writes about being an introvert. Not sure if he was born that way. Invert or not, he would be normal in Santa Cruz.

Now I see that a children's TV network is launching a transsexual superhero show:

When Guy says the magic words – “You go girl!” – he becomes SheZow, wearing a purple skirt and cape, as well as pink gloves and white boots.

I don't think that this story is a joke.