Wash. Times on anti-dad bias

Stephen Baskerville writes a letter to the editor of the Wash. Times newspaper:

Your Monday editorial "Anti-Dad bias," is the first substantial challenge to the divorce industry by a major newspaper and deserves to be pursued much further. This abuse of power goes far beyond media bias. The child support machinery has been expanded and perverted from a means of providing for abandoned children into a huge federal subsidy of divorce and single-parent homes. It also distorts public policy and criminalizes innocent parents.

Ostensibly created to recover welfare costs, child support enforcement on the federal level has failed and now costs taxpayers more than $3 billion annually. More seriously, it pays mothers to divorce or forgo marriage, thus creating the very problem it is supposed to alleviate.

Another letter says:

Fathers have been demonized on television as well as in society, much to the detriment of society and our nation's children. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 20 million children are now raised without a dad in the home. Also, according to the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 40 percent of all new births are to unwed mothers. This is a huge scar on American society.

The net effect of the demonization of men has been devastating to society.

And another letter says:

However, I question one item in the editorial, namely, that women initiate most divorces after the age of 40. This statistic understates reality. In fact, irrespective of age, wives initiate at least twice as many divorces. One widely quoted 2000 study presented evidence that when both couples have college degrees, the percentage of divorces initiated by wives approaches 90 percent.

It appears that marriage and divorce offer greatly lopsided appeal to men and women. This puzzling situation, I believe, offers a much more fruitful area for study than new ways to persecute fathers.