Any more stupid questions you wanna ask?

This morning I saw this question asked in /r/feminism, and reading the comments, I stumbled across a discussion on gender rolls and parenting. Contained therein was the accompanying comment on the balance and even-handedness of the courts.

The commenter's opinion about "what should be" notwithstanding (because honestly, if feminists really believe that, why are they not fighting for it?) I decided to address the denial of the discriminatory way family court and government agencies handle fathers. Fed up with hearing so many variations on the lies, "courts don't favor mothers" and "courts don't discriminate against fathers" I decided to speak up.

I knew there were a couple of possibilities. There could be debate... kind of. I could have come back later to find a cascading procession of angry retorts, rhetoric, and other renditions of the company line. I could have been told off for posting something the commenter didn't like, or even dismissed as irrelevant because (as you'll see from my comment) I'm somewhat bitter about the shit sandwich my family was handed by the system this commenter claims doesn't do what it did to us. However /r/feminism is not known for being able to handle genuine debate. They certainly can't handle the knowledge that advocacy of the ideas and ideals they express in their vacuum of communal validation and emotional appeal is actually damaging to others. The denizens of /r/feminism do not have big girl panties, and I did question the validity of their beliefs. I suspected I would be banned from the sub, but if so, that would simply make my point all the more. Feminists throw women like me under the bus to get and maintain their social power.

In the end, that is what happened, though not as I expected. I was not banned. I was a little surprised to return and find the comment deleted without communication. No message was left in my inbox to explain why. In fact, I would not have known about the delete at all, had I not asked a friend to read it, because when I'm logged into reddit, it still shows. It's interesting to learn that, because it means /r/feminism's mods can censor without the cut commenters knowing unless we visit the thread while logged off, or someone else tells us. I wonder how many voices they've silenced that way.

I decided not to be silenced by some self-important twit who can't handle making the choice to either counter what I said, or accept it and let it stand, so I'm posting it here. In response to the above commenter's glowing praise of our nation's broken legal system, I wrote the following.

If you want evidence of how family courts look at gender roles, I have an example for you: My husband.

His ex-wife wanted a career. She wanted to be unfettered by the role of primary caregiver. She was earning $40,000/year in a full-time management position in 1997. She was rarely at home, and did not spend much time at all with the kids because when she wasn't working during the week, she was partying with friends on the weekend, often 100 miles from home (living in the northern part of Ohio, driving to the southern part.) Her (then) husband was a stay at home Dad, in part because he lost his job from having to call in on weekend days when she was supposed to come home, but he couldn't find her.

When she left - breaking up her family for the other man with whom she was cheating - she was still deemed the primary caregiver, still deemed the victim in the divorce, still treated as having full custody of the kids despite a shared parenting agreement... and still awarded child support based on a fictional income applied to his end of the equation, defined by what a social worker thought he should be making so he could support his poor, helpless, (middle-class) ex-wife. After years of barely even paying attention to the kids, she decided she must keep them with her, because it would look bad for her new man, a lay preacher, if his wife's kids not only were not his, but lived with her ex... and even though the actual, factual primary caregiver was the husband, the state treated the wife as holding that right and responsibility merely because she is a woman.
 
I have been with him since about 8 months after the divorce, which occurred in 1997 while she was middle class and he was not a wage-earner (by her design.) Prior to dating him, I watched with our other friends as he tried everything he could to save a marriage the other partner had stopped wanting, then to salvage at least his relationship with his kids in the face of her selfish efforts to cut him out of their lives (but keep his wallet in hers) to facilitate her new lifestyle. There has never once, in the entirety of the relationship between my husband, the ex, and the legal system... not once been equal treatment under the law. Government agencies and the courts have bent over backward for her at every turn, allowing her to extort additional money from him for every lifestyle decision she's made, from quitting her $40,000 a year job, to having more babies who were not even his, to fleeing across the state to keep his children from him so could she try to hide her past by forcing them to falsely use their stepfather's name.

Excuses given for the discrimination ranged from the simply sexist (the tender years doctrine, the assumption that he had abandoned her, treatment of him as a deadbeat for not making more money than she did, treatment of him as irrelevant to the children's well-being aside from money, because he is a man) to the outright antagonistic ...the child support case worker screamed at him on the phone so loud that when he pulled it away from his ear, I could hear her from across the room... shouting that he had no right to interfere with his ex's "new life" by attempting to stay close enough to her kids (yes, hers, and only hers, because he was the irrelevant father) by daring follow her when she fled with them to an isolated little berg near the southern border of the state. She called him a stalker and an abuser for the heinous act of attempting to avoid losing all contact with his own kids... not because he had actually done anything violent or even inconsiderate to his kids or even his ex, but simply because he had the gall to be there for his family.

How dare he.

I listened to this same woman castigate my husband for "making" me pay the overflow of his child support while she simultaneously threatened that if I didn't do it, he'd go to jail.

Then she made me sign a paper saying I wasn't coerced... also under threat that if I didn't, the man I love would go to jail.

Because, you know. That isn't coercion at all.

And the excuse? She needs the money, because she's a mom.

Meaning that I am not a mom.

Because, you know, my son does not count as a child.

I'm the second wife.

I am married to the father of my child.

As such, my son and I don't count for anything to these people, so that case worker was willing to break my back to prevent the ex having to even use hers.

Even if my husband's case were isolated, even if I'd never seen the same treatment handed to other men in my life... friends, relatives, coworkers... I'd still say this is a symptom of the larger issue caused by feminist advocacy. Laws governing family court and policies followed by health and human services agencies are based on the idea that women in divorce, and unwed mothers, are the victims of the fathers of their children. For 25 years, I have watched laws and policies treat efforts of fathers to remain active in their children's lives as an intrusion on the mother's life, while simultaneously facilitating mothers in using the child support system to fund their own life choices. Stories I could tell you range from being just like my husband's experience to many times worse.

Women who don't take advantage of that system and don't marry divorcees with kids don't see it happening.

Women who do take advantage, don't admit it.

Women like me, who see it, are often afraid to speak up because when we do we are beaten down by other women for our trouble.

That doesn't mean it isn't happening.

It means most women aren't invested in trying to fix it.

If someone among the readers and commenters here wants to tell me how the system as it works now constitutes equal treatment, how if he were a woman, the case would have gone exactly the same way, I would be interested to hear your
reasoning excuses.

You might even be able to offer me some case or another, an exception to the 25 years of discrimination I've witnessed, and treat that as the counterbalance for the many, many cases which go the opposite way.

If someone wants to tell me how justified and reasonable it was to take away the focus of my husband's life because his female ex wanted to look respectable to church people after cheating and breaking up her family to run off with another man, I would be interested in that 
argument  propaganda, too.

If you want to tell me how women are victimized by the consideration given them by this system, by all means, go ahead and tell me all about it. How terrible it must be to have an entire network of judges and government workers think you're so incapable of backing up your own decisions that you have to be supported by someone else. What a burden it must be to have to constantly play victim in order to make part of your living.

Maybe someone who supports the system could explain to me how child support workers who take sides are unbiased, who accuse men without knowledge are reasonable, who presume guilt without evidence are benevolent.

Why, after 25 years of watching the family law and family government systems and the people who run them show searing hatred and angry disdain for men, should I have any sympathy for women who walk out on their husbands and then cannot support that decision on their own?

Why should a second wife, who has seen the damage that so-called "pro-woman" advocacy does to everyone but the selfish and the heartless, give a rat's ruddy ass about defending the innocence of your ideology?

Modern feminist advocates of victimology and sex-politics may be able to bullshit younger women and many men, but what do you think you can present that is going to bullshit someone like me, who has had the wool ripped from her eyes by experience? Do you have anything besides rhetoric? Anything I haven't already heard? Anything besides opinion, ancient history, cheesy catch-phrases and twisted terminology? Anything real, solid, and current?

I got my answer to those questions with the deletion of the comment: no. No, they can't present anything to justify the presented position. They cannot demonstrate balance in the courts. They cannot back up the commenter's denial, and they cannot even defend their general ideology.

As for the original question, "Is there a reason why Men's rights and Women's rights can't coexist and produce equal rights?" the answer is feminists. Feminists cannot accept the reasons behind the MRM, because many, if not most of those reasons trace right back to their own house. You cannot work together with another group for a cause you've been fighting against throughout your entire history. You can claim to be interested in cooperating on gender issues, but in reality, you are more interested in pushing your own agenda than in working with anyone else, particularly if working with others means having to question the validity of the agenda you've been pushing. Why? Because you'd rather be confident than right.
And confident you are. You go, girl!
Go right on spouting feminism's company line, while more and more women see through your bullshit and either leave, or like me, never join your ranks in the first place.