This blogging thing is really something. I came across a site called the Advice Goddess that I really enjoyed. A balanced point of view from a woman.One article I read was:
Amy:
When does any government ever get anything right? No matter who is in office it’s about the money, the power and the right to fund one’s views of how the world should work at its best, or lining one’s friends pockets at its worst.
Ronald Regan once said “The most fearful words any American can hear are: Hello, I am the Government and I am here to help you…”
Government can't find money to build roads, fund healthcare. ensure clean water and/or air, or properly fund the legal system so you can exercise your most basic constitutional rights without going bankrupt. No where is that more so than Family Court and how fathers are routinely jettisoned out of their daughters (and sons) lives every day on a stereotype that we are all violent brutes who don’t love our wives and kids and are irresponsible and nothing but deadbeats.
Yet it was more often than woman who initiated the relationship, marriage and now divorce - Powerless women…NOT. Confused - maybe, lacking sense – possibly, immoral – can be, selfish – very often, used as a pawn by lawyers – every day; But powerless no, not when they initiate and end relationships end up with the kids, car, house and support that their legal bill will no longer cover, because they trusted that their lawyer was on their side, not lining their own pockets with ill gotten gain. Oh did I mention naive?
And no I am not some bitter man either - I am an adult child of divorce, with a wonderful woman who is also an adult child of divorce. And on this we both agree: The heartbreak of these pregnant teenage girls is because we “ADULTS REALLY SUCK: when it comes to our values and politics as they affect our kids. Those daughters we shoehorn into Family Court during separation and divorceare more likely to not have a father in their life after all is said and done.
That’s because Family Court and all of its bureaucratic systems are more about money than family and children.
The National Organization of Women (N.O.W.) stopped believing in gender equity and liberation theory of women shortly after the first round of burning bras in the 70’s (whose meaning and symbolism struck most young men deeply, helping to shape our ideas of equality. It helped us to be the good men and fathers most of us are today. Yet when we sought that equality to be allowed an equal place in our family, just like women wanted in the workplace we were denied it, after being told we needed to be fully involved in the first place upon marriage).
N.O.W. also gave up on gender equity unless it was fully funded by men, chucking away the “I can do anything a man can do” philosophy that I bought into and taught our daughter. Instead, N.O.W continues to rely upon flawed and the long discredited research by Lenore J. Weitzman, author of The Divorce Revolution which spawned two of the most well intentioned, yet ill considered pieces of legislation The Bradley Amendment – Debtors Prison for Fathers; and VAWA – both which work to make teenage daughters fatherless.
Daughters who have solid relationships with their fathers are less likely to need a condom, because they are less likely to have teenage sex until they are fully ready to accept its consequences, and those that do, have matured enough to have taken dad's advice – “No Glove - no love...”
A father and daughter's relationship is the best first defense to lowering teenage pregnancy, because no one can explain boys better to a girl than Dad. At least that's what my daughter Elyenne has told me :-) And I tend to believe her - she made it to 20 and has not been pregnant yet. However all of her other friends without exception have been, and in every case there is no dad in the home.
Fathers parent differently than Moms. Both are essential to a child's life and doubly so to a teenagers.
So the problem as you define it does not connect all the dots: The reality is that teenage pregnancy is a compounded result of corrupt government in bed with a corrupted women's movement, compounded by those who blindly accept what they are told without questioning its basis or legitimacy.
Most of us believe in equality, humanism and dignity.
The extremists control the women’s movement today. That’s why most women today aren’t card carrying members of N.O.W. – Add the corrupt in power that use them to garner votes from unsuspecting women. Remember those women who handed it all to a divorce lawyer, thinking they were getting their fair share?
Or their sisters - the ill-informed, or who those women with “issues” who can only blame others rather than accept responsibility for going forward with their lives rather than dwelling on a the misfortunes of the past (and as an adult child of divorce I’ve had huge issues and misfortunes but I chose to survive as did my wonderful wife and my daughter from a previous marriage, unlike her mother “the perpetual victim”…)
If that was not so, If N.O.W. is about true equality, then where are all the women's programs for daughters missing their dads, paternal grandmothers who can no longer see their grandchildren, step-mothers who want to make peace with the ex-wife.
That would lower teenage pregnancy quicker than any condom would for the youngest of our daughters, who do not have the necessary guidance, insight or knowledge that fathers impart to daughters about sex, consequences and boys.
Because then if they were available on every corner, these girls might actually insist on boys using them, because their self-esteem would be enormous, because they have a father who loves them, protects them and teaches them about how boys can be.
And the mere continual daily interaction and presence of the fathers provides these daughters the unconscious role model of what the boys they are considering sleeping with should be: Caring, loving and respectful, even during a teenage affair or hook-up.
At least that is what my evolution as a liberated man tells me. ( I am sure I’m about to take a lot of flak for this post, but it needed saying by someone…)
Fire away.
Danny Guspie
Executive Director - Fathers Resources International
www.divorced-dad-daily.com