Tom Smith

Three articles are provided below FYI.

The first is a response, by Glenn Sacks, to the following two
attacking and
deceitful articles by feminists, seeking to minimise and shut down
the
growing work men and separated fathers are doing for their children
and
themselves.

Feminist dissembling (attacking and trying to pull apart, with the
intent
of diminishing and dismissing) continues as men and fathers continue
working for the rights their children and themselves.

------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- -----

http://glennsacks. com/blog/
http://glennsacks. com/blog/ ?p=4359

6 November 2009

Slate.com & Salon.com Attack the Fatherhood Movement (Part I)
By Glenn Sacks, MA for Fathers & Families

Two major online publications - Salon.com and Slate.com - recently
did
articles about the men's and fathers movement. The articles discuss
various
aspects and actors in the movement, and also quote and misquote me.
This
series of posts will comment on the articles and also straighten out
certain misrepresentations.

Kathryn Joyce of Slate.com is a feminist writer who has written much
about
what she calls the "Christian patriarchy" movement. She told me she
was
doing a story about George Sodini, who she (accurately) describes as
"the
Pittsburgh man who opened fire on a gym full of exercising women this
August, killing three and leaving behind an online diatribe journaling
his
sense of rejection by millions of desirable women."

I knew from the beginning that Joyce would try to somehow wrap Sodini
around the men's and fathers' movement, and I was very hesitant to be
interviewed. I consented, for two reasons:

1) I still nurture the dream that someday feminists and fatherhood
activists can understand each other and work together.

2) I hoped that maybe I could get her to understand the absurdity of
her
premise, and to understand that our movement is based on legitimate
grievances.

No good deed goes unpunished. Joyce writes:

"Sodini’s diary was republished widely, including on the website of a
popular men’s rights blogger, “Angry Harry,” who added his assessment
of
the case. “MRAs should also take note of the fact that there are
probably
many millions of men across the western world who feel similar in
many
ways, and one can expect to see much more destruction emanating from
them
in the future,” he wrote. “One of the main reasons that I decided to
post
this diary on this website was because the western world must wake up
to
the fact that it cannot continue to treat men so appallingly and get
away
with it.” In a phone interview, Angry Harry said, “Of course there
will be
more Sodinis - there will be many more,” likening him to Marc Lépine,
a
Canadian man who killed or wounded 28, claiming feminists had ruined
his
life ... Perhaps, Angry Harry mused, that as the ranks of online MRAs
grow,
“the threat” of their violence “may be enough” to bring about the
changes
they desire.

"Glenn Sacks dismissed Angry Harry as an “idiot” without real power in
the
movement and yet he cautiously defends him. “I want to be careful in
wording this,” he says, “but the cataclysmic things I'm seeing done to
men,
it’s always my fear that one of these guys is going to do something
terrible. I don't want to say that like I condone it or that it’s OK,
but
it’s just the reality.” "

I specifically, repeatedly, and emphatically told Joyce that any
linkage
between the men's & fathers' movements' grievances and Sodini is not
my
view, but I guess she was determined to jam it in there anyway.

What I did say was that when I do hear of a drastic action - a man on
a
bridge threatening to jump, the guy here in LA who tried to commit
suicide
by parking his car on a train track, etc. - my first thought is that
it
might be a guy dealing with a painful family law issue or injustice.

Judy Berman of Salon.com, writing about Joyce's article, writes:

"It's certainly chilling to hear Sacks empathize (albeit
ambivalently)
with men like George Sodini, the deeply misogynist Pittsburgh gym
shooter..."

Again, this is ludicrous - I never said anything remotely sympathetic
to
Sodini and I made that abundantly clear to Joyce.

This isn't the movement - it's desperate individual fathers who've
been
driven to the brink by a cruel, inhumane family law system. That's
why
since 2002 I've had a policy of not writing about fathers who commit
suicide - I don't want to encourage copycats.

The case she refers to was the Derrick Miller case, about which I
wrote a
column for the San Diego Union-Tribune. The case wasn't exactly "over
late
child-support payments" - the father, a longtime Navy veteran, was
being
assessed 70 or 80% of his income in child support.

Joyce quotes RADAR’s Mark Rosenthal:

“In any movement, there is going to be a reasonable voice and people
who are so hurt, who are so injured by the injustices, that they
can't
afford to step back and try to take their emotions under control. But
no
movement is going to get anywhere without extremists.”

The part about the need for extremists is a silly thing to say, but
Rosenthal is usually reasonable and I frankly doubt he's being quoted
correctly. If Mark would like to clarify this on my site, he's welcome
to
do so.

The two articles are Kathryn Joyce's "Men's Rights" Groups Have
Become
Frighteningly Effective (Slate.com, 11/5/09) and Judy Berman's "Men's
rights" groups go mainstream - Once seen as a lunatic fringe,
reactionary
anti-women groups are courting respectability (Salon.com, 11/5/09).
I'll be
posting about them in a few parts, and clearing up more
misrepresentations,
as well as commenting on Joyce's and Berman's views.

Posted in Feminism/NOW, Men and the Media, Men's Movement, Fatherhood
Movement/Fathers' Rights Movement

57 Comments »
http://glennsacks. com/blog/ ?p=4359#comments

------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- -----

http://www.salon. com/life/ broadsheet/ feature/2009/ 11/05/mens_
rights/
http://www.salon. com/life/ broadsheet/ feature/2009/ 11/05/mens_
rights/print. html

Salon - Broadsheet
5 November 2009

"Men's rights" groups go mainstream
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are
courting
respectability
By Judy Berman

When "Quiverfull" author Kathryn Joyce interviewed blogger Bernard
Chapin
<http://bernardchapi n.com/>, he insisted on addressing her as
"Feminist E."
You see, Joyce explains, "he never uses real names for feminists, who
are
wicked and who men 'must verbally oppose ... until our flesh oxidizes
into
dust.'" Now, Chapin's slight isn't particularly unexpected coming from
a
voice in the "men's rights" movement, a loosely organized coalition
of
individuals and organizations that believe feminist-influenced society
is
oppressing men.

But the movement's bizarre fringe is nothing new, as Joyce reminds us
in an
in-depth Double X article
<http://www.doublex. com/section/ news-politics/ mens-rights- groups-
have- become-frighteni ngly-effective? page=0,0>.
What's really frightening is the impact men's rights activists (MRAs)
are
having on mainstream politics. As more reasonable-sounding leaders
and
organizations emerge, groups arguing "that false [domestic abuse]
allegations are rampant, that a feminist-run court system
fraudulently
separates innocent fathers from children, that battered women’s
shelters
are running a racket that funnels federal dollars to feminists, that
domestic-violence laws give cover to cagey mail-order brides seeking
Green
Cards, and finally, that men are victims of an unrecognized epidemic
of
violence at the hands of abusive wives" are facing unprecedented
success.
Joyce reports that a group called RADAR (Respecting Accuracy in
Domestic
Abuse Reporting) <http://www.mediarad ar.org/> claims responsibility
for
blocking four federal domestic violence bills. And with the help of
organizations like Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, MRAs are beginning
to
find a place under conservatism' s big, reactionary tent.

The more moderate men's rights movement also features some high-
profile
"converts." Joyce introduces us to Glenn Sacks
<http://www.glennsac ks.com/blog/>, a popular fathers' rights radio
host and
writer who she describes as "a former feminist and abortion-clinic
defender." Dismissive of the Bernard Chapins of the world, he's
working
toward the comparatively modest goals of increasing shared custody
and
lightening divorced dads' child-support obligations during the
recession.

What's so wrong with those goals, you may well wonder. As Joyce
illustrates, the issues MRAs are pushing are much more complex than
they
seem. For instance, divorcing parents are usually able to work out
custody
agreements on their own. Only 15 percent of cases go to court, and,
of
those, half involve domestic abuse. Tragically, even in those
instances,
mothers don't always have the upper hand. A common family-court
defense of
fathers whose children testify that they are abusive is something
called
"Parental Alienation Syndrome," "a medically unrecognized diagnosis
that
suggests mothers have poisoned their children into making false
accusations
against their fathers." Joyce tells the story of Genia Shockome, a
woman
who spent 30 days in jail and whose husband was awarded full custody
of
their children, despite the fact that his abuse had left her with
post-traumatic stress disorder. Incredibly, Shockome's story doesn't
end
there: After criticizing the judge's decision in print, her attorney
was
slapped with a five-year suspension.

As for MRAs' accusations, inspired by deeply flawed studies, that men
and
women are equally likely to commit domestic abuse, well, the numbers
speak
for themselves: "While some men certainly are victims of female
domestic
violence, advocates say the number is closer to 3 percent to 4
percent,
rather than the 45 percent to 50 percent RADAR claims." Toward the end
of
her piece, Joyce makes a particularly fascinating point about MRAs'
domestic violence arguments:

"Critics like Australian sociologist Michael Flood say that men’s
rights movements reflect the tactics of domestic abusers themselves,
minimizing existing violence, calling it mutual, and discrediting
victims.
MRA groups downplay national abuse rates, just as abusers downplay
their
personal battery; they wage campaigns dismissing most allegations as
false,
as abusers claim partners are lying about being hit; and they depict
the
violence as mutual - part of an epidemic of wife-on-husband abuse -
as
individual batterers rationalize their behavior by saying that the
violence
was reciprocal. Additionally, MRA groups’ predictions of future
violence by
fed-up men wronged by the family-law system seem an obvious
additional
correlation, with the threat of violence seemingly intended to
intimidate a
community, like a fearful spouse, into compliance."

So, what do we do about the increasingly mainstream men's rights
movement
and the worrisome gains it has made? Personally, I'm torn. It's
certainly
chilling to hear Sacks empathize (albeit ambivalently) with men like
George
Sodini
<http://www.salon. com/mwt/broadshe et/feature/ 2009/08/06/ hatred/
index. html>,
the deeply misogynist Pittsburgh gym shooter, telling Joyce that "the
cataclysmic things I'm seeing done to men, it’s always my fear that
one of
these guys is going to do something terrible. I don't want to say
that,
like, I condone it or that it’s OK, but it’s just the reality." But I
also
realize that the more marginalized these groups feel, the more extreme
(and
potentially violent) they become. With that in mind, do we go to war,
or do
we try and hear MRAs out? Is there common ground to be found, or is
the new
men's rights movement nothing more than the old men's rights movement
with
a fancy haircut and a flashy suit?

------------ --------- --------- --------- --------- -

<http://www.doublex. com/section/ news-politics/ mens-rights- groups-
have- become-frighteni ngly-effective? page=0,0>

Double X (aka Slate ?)
5 November 2009

"Men's Rights" Groups Have Become Frighteningly Effective
They’re changing custody rights and domestic violence laws.
By Kathryn Joyce

At the end of October, National Domestic Violence Awareness Month,
members
of the men’s movement group RADAR (Respecting Accuracy in Domestic
Abuse
Reporting) <http://www.mediarad ar.org/> gathered on the steps of
Congress
to lobby against what they say are the suppressed truths about
domestic
violence: that false allegations are rampant, that a feminist-run
court
system fraudulently separates innocent fathers from children, that
battered
women’s shelters are running a racket that funnels federal dollars to
feminists, that domestic-violence laws give cover to cagey mail-order
brides seeking Green Cards, and finally, that men are victims of an
unrecognized epidemic of violence at the hands of abusive wives.

“It’s now reached the point,” reads a statement from RADAR, “that
domestic
violence laws represent the largest roll-back in Americans’ civil
rights
since the Jim Crow era!”

RADAR’s rhetoric may seem overblown, but lately the group and its
many
partners have been racking up very real accomplishments. In 2008, the
organization claimed to have blocked passage of four federal
domestic-violence bills, among them an expansion of the Violence
Against
Women Act (VAWA) to international scope and a grant to support lawyers
in
pro bono domestic-violence work. Members of this coalition have
gotten
themselves onto drafting committees for VAWA’s 2011 reauthorization.
Local
groups in West Virginia and California have also had important
successes,
criminalizing false claims of domestic violence in custody cases, and
winning rulings that women-only shelters are discriminatory.

Groups like RADAR fall under the broader umbrella of the men’s rights
movement, a loose coalition of anti-feminist groups. These men’s
rights
activists, or MRAs, have long been written off by domestic-violence
advocates as a bombastic and fringe group of angry white men, and for
good
reason. Bernard Chapin, a popular men’s rights blogger, told me over e-
mail
that he will refer to me as “Feminist E,” since he never uses real
names
for feminists, who are wicked and who men “must verbally oppose ...
until
our flesh oxidizes into dust.” In the United Kingdom, a father’s
rights
group scaled Buckingham Palace in superhero costumes. In Australia,
they
[the Black Shirts www.blackshirts. info] wore paramilitary uniforms
and
demonstrated outside the houses of female divorcees.

But lately they’ve become far more polished and savvy about advancing
their
views. In their early days of lobbying, “these guys would show up and
have
this looming body language that was very off-putting,” says Ben
Atherton-Zeman, author of Voices of Men, a one-man play about
domestic
violence and sexual assault. “But that’s all changed. A lot of the
leaders
are still convicted batterers, but they’re well-organized, they speak
in
complete sentences, they sound much more reasonable: All we want is
equal
custody, for fathers not to be ignored.”

One of the respectable new faces of the movement is Glenn Sacks, a
fathers'
rights columnist and radio host with 50,000 e-mail followers, and a
pragmatist in a world of angry dreamers. Sacks is a former feminist
and
abortion-clinic defender who disavows what he calls “the not-
insubstantial
lunatic fringe of the fathers’ rights movement.” He recently merged
his
successful media group with the shared-parenting organization Fathers
and
Families in a bid to build a mainstream fathers' rights organ on par
with
the National Organization of Women. Many of Sacks’ arguments - for a
court
assumption of shared parenting in the case of divorce, or against
child-support rigidity in the midst of recession - can sound
reasonable.

But do any of their arguments hold up? Many of the men for whom Sacks
advocates are involved in extreme cases, says Joanie Dawson, a writer
and
domestic-violence advocate who has covered the fathers’ rights
movement.
The great majority of custody cases, in which shared parenting is a
legitimate option, are settled or resolved privately. But of the 15
percent
that go to family court - the cases that fathers’ rights groups target
- at
least half include alleged domestic abuse.

Unsurprisingly, this argument is missing from MRA discussions of
custody
inequality and recruitment ads, which cast all men as potentially
innocent
victims “just one 911 call away” from losing everything they have
earned
and loved. These rallying calls, and the divorce attorneys hawking
men’s
rights expertise on MRA sites, promising to “teach her a lesson,”
serve as
what Dawson sees as a powerful draw for men in the midst of painful
divorces.

While MRA groups continue to expand their base of embittered fathers
and
ex-husbands, they’ve cleaned up their image to court more powerful
allies.
RADAR board member Ron Grignal, the former president of Fathers for
Virginia and a former state delegate candidate, organizes the group’s
Washington lobbying activities. In 2008, RADAR partnered with Eagle
Forum
for a conference at the Heritage Foundation about the threat that
VAWA
poses to the family. Grignal argues that state interpretations of VAWA
are
so broad they could cast couples’ money disputes as domestic
violence,
enabling unwarranted restraining orders that then win women’s divorce
cases
for them. Politicians, Grignal says, are increasingly on board with
men’s
rights movement concerns.

“On domestic violence, I’ve had both state and federal legislators
tell me
they know that this process is out of control,” says Grignal.
“They’re
afraid if they support [reforms] they’ll be tagged as ‘for domestic
violence.’ But I've had Democrats on Capitol Hill tell me they agree
with
everything I say. A member of the Congressional Black Caucus told me
that
his brother can’t see his kids, and his wife threatened to throw
herself
down the stairs to ruin his political career.”

Some domestic-violence protections do seem to have unintended effects,
such
as mandatory-arrest policies that compel police to take someone into
custody in response to any domestic-violence call - a policy that has
been
criticized by RADAR as well as by some domestic-violence advocates,
who say
it imposes an absurd equivalence between largely nonviolent family
spats or
insubstantial female violence and serious abuse. But groups like RADAR
are
criticizing the law for the wrong reasons. In fact, the effect of
mandatory
arrest in conflating women’s low-level violence with battery, seems
very
close to RADAR’s campaign for viewing women as equal domestic abusers.

One potent idea advanced by MRAs is the claim that men are equal
victims of
domestic violence. Mark Rosenthal, president and co-founder of RADAR,
makes
a very personal argument for the phenomenon. Rosenthal, who doesn’t
call
himself an MRA, grew up with a mother who he says terrorized the
entire
family and hit her husband frequently. The true impact of the
violence, he
says, was more than physical and eclipsed his petite mother’s ability
to
inflict serious injuries. Rosenthal wants to see an appreciation for
women’s nonphysical abuse incorporated into domestic-violence policy.
“It’s
not about size,” he told an audience at a law enforcement domestic-
violence
training. “It’s not exclusively about physical attacks. However, it
is
about a pathological need to control others, and women are as prone to
this
as men.”

RADAR and other MRA groups base their battered men arguments largely
on the
research of a small group of social scientists who claim that
domestic
violence between couples is equally divided, just unequally reported.
Most
notable are the studies conducted by sociologist Murray Straus of the
University of New Hampshire, who has written extensively on female
violence
(and who Dawson saw distributing RADAR flyers at an APA conference).
Straus’ research is starting to move public opinion. A Los Angeles
conference this July dedicated to discussing male victims of domestic
violence, “From Ideology to Inclusion 2009: New Directions in
Domestic
Violence Research and Intervention,” received positive mainstream
press for
its “inclusive” efforts.

While some men certainly are victims of female domestic violence,
advocates
say the number is closer to 3 percent to 4 percent, rather than the
45
percent to 50 percent RADAR claims. Jack Straton, a Portland State
University professor and member of Oregon’s Attorney General's Sexual
Assault Task Force, argues that Straus critically fails to
distinguish
between the intent and effect of violence, equating “a woman pushing a
man
in self-defense to a man pushing a woman down the stairs,” or a single
act
of female violence with years of male abuse; that Straus only
interviewed
one partner, when couples’ accounts of violence commonly diverge; and
that
he excludes from his study post-separation violence, which accounts
for
more than 75 percent of spouse-on-spouse violence, 93 percent of which
is
committed by men.

All in all, advocates say that cherry-picked studies from researchers
like
Straus, touted by the MRAs, amount to what Edward Gondolf, director
of
research for the Mid-Atlantic Addiction Research and Training
Institute,
calls“bad science.” Statistics suggesting gender parity in abuse are
taken
out of necessary context, they say, ignoring distinctions between the
equally divided “common couple violence” and the sort of escalated,
continuing violence known as battery - which is 85 percent male-
perpetrated
- as well as the disparate injuries inflicted by men and women.

“The biggest concern, though, is not the wasted effort on a false
issue,”
writes Straton, but the encouragement given to batterers to consider
themselves the victimized party. “Arming these men with warped
statistics
to fuel their already warped worldview is unethical, irresponsible,
and
quite simply lethal.”

In this, critics like Australian sociologist Michael Flood say that
men’s
rights movements reflect the tactics of domestic abusers themselves,
minimizing existing violence, calling it mutual, and discrediting
victims.
MRA groups downplay national abuse rates, just as abusers downplay
their
personal battery; they wage campaigns dismissing most allegations as
false,
as abusers claim partners are lying about being hit; and they depict
the
violence as mutual - part of an epidemic of wife-on-husband abuse -
as
individual batterers rationalize their behavior by saying that the
violence
was reciprocal. Additionally, MRA groups’ predictions of future
violence by
fed-up men wronged by the family-law system seem an obvious
additional
correlation, with the threat of violence seemingly intended to
intimidate a
community, like a fearful spouse, into compliance.

MRA critics say the organizational recapitulation of abusive tactics
should
be no surprise, considering the wealth of movement leaders with
records or
accusations of violence, abuse, harassment, or failure to pay child
support. Some advocates call MRA groups “the abuser’s lobby,” because
of
members like Jason Hutch, the Buckingham Palace fathers’ rights
“Batman,”
who has been estranged from three mothers of his children and was
taken to
court for threatening one of his ex-wives.

Contrary to RADAR’s claims, domestic-violence advocates say that not
only
do abuse accusations not automatically win custody cases for women;
there
are a rising number of custody decisions awarded to abusive fathers,
as
judges see wives eager to protect their children as less cooperative
regarding custody. More than half the time, studies have found,
wives’
accusations of domestic violence are met with counter-accusations
from
husbands of “Parental Alienation Syndrome” - a medically unrecognized
diagnosis that suggests mothers have poisoned their children into
making
false accusations against their fathers.

In one recent case, Genia Shockome, a Russian immigrant, was fighting
for
custody of her two children with her ex-husband, whom she charged had
beaten her so severely that she suffered post-traumatic stress
disorder and
who had told her she “had no right to leave” since he'd brought her to
the
United States. The judge in the case sided with her husband’s
counter-claims of Parental Alienation Syndrome and awarded him full
custody
(and later sentenced Shockome to 30 days in jail while she was seven
months
pregnant). When her attorney, Barry Goldstein, co-author of the
forthcoming
book Domestic Violence, Abuse and Custody, criticized the judge in an
online article, the judge retaliated with a complaint, and Goldstein
was
given a five-year suspension. Goldstein says the sanction represents
a
chilling pressure on attorneys, who may now fear penalties for
criticizing
a court’s gender bias that will interfere with their duties to their
clients and that could result in women deciding not to leave abusers
out of
fear they won't get a fair trial.

If cases such as Genia Shockome’s are the fodder of mainstream
fathers’
rights advocates like Glenn Sacks - who ridiculed her claims and loss
of
custody as an uncredible “cause célèbre” for feminist family-law
reformers
- what Sacks calls the movement’s “lunatic fringe” is more vitriolic
yet.

Within the ranks of the men’s rights movement, vigilante “resisters”
are
regularly nominated and lionized for acts of violence perceived to be
in
opposition to a feminist status quo
<http://www.foreignp olicy.com/ articles/ 2009/06/18/ the_death_
of_macho>. In a
few quarters of the movement, this even included George Sodini, the
Pittsburgh man who opened fire on a gym full of exercising women this
August, killing three and leaving behind an online diatribe journaling
his
sense of rejection by millions of desirable women.

Sodini’s diary was republished widely, including on the website of a
popular men’s rights blogger, “Angry Harry,” who added his assessment
of
the case <http://www.angryhar ry.com/esGeorgeS odini.htm>. “MRAs
should also
take note of the fact that there are probably many millions of men
across
the western world who feel similar in many ways, and one can expect to
see
much more destruction emanating from them in the future,” he wrote.
“One of
the main reasons that I decided to post this diary on this website
was
because the western world must wake up to the fact that it cannot
continue
to treat men so appallingly and get away with it.” In a phone
interview,
Angry Harry said, “Of course there will be more Sodinis - there will
be
many more,” likening him to Marc Lépine, a Canadian man who killed or
wounded 28, claiming feminists had ruined his life, or Nevada father
Darren
Mack, who murdered his estranged wife and attempted to kill the judge
in
their custody battle. (Also among this number is John Muhammad, the
“D.C.
Beltway Sniper,” whose involvement in a Washington father’s rights
group
and history of abuse is described in his ex-wife Mildred’s newly-
released
memoir, Scared Silent
<http://www.amazon. com/gp/product/ 1593092415? ie=UTF8&tag=
dblx-20&linkCode =as2&camp= 1789&creative= 390957&creativeA
SIN=1593092415>.)
Perhaps, Angry Harry mused, that as the ranks of online MRAs grow,
“the
threat” of their violence “may be enough” to bring about the changes
they
desire.

Glenn Sacks dismissed Angry Harry as an "idiot" without real power in
the
movement, and yet he cautiously agrees that what Sacks calls "family
court
injustices" could lead to future violence.* “I want to be careful in
wording this,” he says, “but the cataclysmic things I'm seeing done to
men,
it’s always my fear that one of these guys is going to do something
terrible. I don't want to say that like I condone it or that it’s OK,
but
it’s just the reality.” The movement seems eager to supply more
martyrs.
After Sacks wrote about a San Diego father who shot himself on the
city’s
courthouse steps over late child-support payments, numerous men wrote
Sacks, telling him, “They’re taking everything from me, and I want to
go
out in a big way, and if I do, will you write about me?”

I asked RADAR’s Mark Rosenthal about the ties between groups like
RADAR -
claiming, however cynically, to have egalitarian motives - and the
blunt
anti-feminist positions of men’s movement allies like Chapin or Angry
Harry. “I'd like to suggest that what you've just done is interview
Martin
Luther King and Malcolm X,” he told me. “In any movement, there is
going to
be a reasonable voice and people who are so hurt, who are so injured
by the
injustices, that they can't afford to step back and try to take their
emotions under control. But no movement is going to get anywhere
without
extremists.”