A FATHERS’ rights campaigner planned a gunpowder plot to gain publicity for his cause, a court heard yesterday.

Matthew Lloyd Starmore, 31, of Berthon Road, Little Mill, was arrested on October 30, 2009, after police found ammunition and gunpowder at the Newport guest house where he was living, Cardiff Crown Court was told.

They also found a notebook in Starmore’s room, which talked about the start of a nation-wide campaign which would see “the most dramatic and climactic and most hard-hitting series of events to hit Wales since World War Two.”

The book also talked about “shutting down some of the city’ most fundamental necessities, pulling emergency services and police tactile units from far and further afield,” and contained references to Newport’s Transporter Bridge, Father’s For Justice and reforms about how fathers get access to their children.

Starmore denies three counts of possessing explosives and ammunition including gunpowder, 24 rounds, and 108 bullet heads. He also denies dishonestly receiving these items knowing or believing they had been stolen.

Richard Griffiths, prosecuting, said police went to the Corporation Road guest house to arrest Starmore’s co-defendant David Hodge for dishonesty offences when they found the explosive material in Hodge’s room.

read full source article

Some very good points made in this article by Dr. Stephen Baskerville:

Considerable nonsense has been written by some opponents of same-sex marriage, while some critical truths are not being heard. Confronting the facts can enable us to win not only this battle but several even more important ones involving family decline and the social anomie it produces.

First: Marriage exists primarily to cement the father to the family. This fact is politically incorrect but undeniable. The breakdown of marriage produces widespread fatherlessness, not motherlessness. As Margaret Mead pointed out long ago—yes, leftist Margaret Mead was correct about this—motherhood is a biological certainty whereas fatherhood is socially constructed. The father is the weakest link in the family bond, and without the institution of marriage he is easily discarded.

The consequences of failing to link men to their offspring are apparent the world over. From our inner cities and Native American reservations to the north of England, the banlieues of Paris, and much of Africa, fatherlessness—not poverty or race—is the leading predictor of virtually every social pathology among the young. Without fathers, adolescents run wild, and society descends into chaos.

The notion that marriage exists for love or “to express and safeguard an emotional union of adults,” as one proponent puts it, is cant. Many loving and emotional human relationships do not involve marriage. Even the conservative argument that marriage exists to rear children is too imprecise: marriage creates fatherhood. No marriage, no fathers.

Once this principle is recognized, same-sex marriage makes no sense. Judge Walker’s “finding of fact” that “gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage” is rendered preposterous. Marriage between two men or two women simply mocks the purpose of the institution. Homosexual parenting only further distances biological fathers (and some mothers too) from their children, since at least some homosexual parents must acquire their children from someone else—usually through heterosexual divorce.

Here is the second unpleasant truth: homosexuals did not destroy marriage, heterosexuals did. The demand for same-sex marriage is a symptom, not a cause, of the deterioration of marriage. By far the most direct threat to the family is heterosexual divorce. “Commentators miss the point when they oppose homosexual marriage on the grounds that it would undermine traditional understandings of marriage,” writes family scholar Bryce Christensen. “It is only because traditional understandings of marriage have already been severely undermined that homosexuals are now laying claim to it.”

Though gay activists cite their desire to marry as evidence that their lifestyle is not inherently promiscuous, they readily admit that marriage is no longer the barrier against promiscuity that it once was. If the standards of marriage have already been lowered, they ask, why shouldn’t homosexuals be admitted to the institution?

“The world of no-strings heterosexual hookups and 50% divorce rates preceded gay marriage,” Andrew Sullivan points out. “All homosexuals are saying C9 is that, under the current definition, there’s no reason to exclude us. If you want to return straight marriage to the 1950s, go ahead. But until you do, the exclusion of gays is simply an anomaly—and a denial of basic civil equality.”

Feminist Stephanie Coontz echoes the point: “Gays and lesbians simply looked at the revolution heterosexuals had wrought and noticed that, with its new norms, marriage could work for them, too.”

Thus the third inconvenient fact: divorce is a political problem. It is not a private matter, and it does not come from impersonal forces of moral and cultural decay. It is driven by complex and lucrative government machinery operating in our names and funded by our taxes. It is imposed upon unwilling people, whose children, homes, and property may be confiscated. It generates the social ills that rationalize almost all domestic government spending. And it is promoted ideologically by the same sexual radicals who now champion same-sex marriage. Homosexuals may be correct that heterosexuals destroyed marriage, but the heterosexuals were their fellow sexual ideologues.

Conservatives have completely misunderstood the significance of the divorce revolution. While they lament mass divorce, they refuse to confront its politics. Maggie Gallagher attributes this silence to “political cowardice”: “Opposing gay marriage or gays in the military is for Republicans an easy, juicy, risk-free issue,” she wrote in 1996. “The message [is] that at all costs we should keep divorce off the political agenda.”

No American politician of national stature has seriously challenged unilateral divorce. “Democrats did not want to anger their large constituency among women who saw easy divorce as a hard-won freedom and prerogative,” writes Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. “Republicans did not want to alienate their upscale constituents or their libertarian wing, both of whom tended to favor easy divorce, nor did they want to call attention to the divorces among their own leadership.”

In his famous denunciation of single parenthood, Vice President Dan Quayle was careful to make clear, “I am not talking about a situation where there is a divorce.” A lengthy article in the current Political Science Quarterly is devoted to the fact—at which the author expresses astonishment—that self-described “pro-family” Christian groups devote almost no effort to reforming divorce laws.

This failure has seriously undermined the moral credibility of the campaign against same-sex marriage. “People who won’t censure divorce carry no special weight as defenders of marriage,” writes columnist Froma Harrop. “Moral authority doesn’t come cheap.”

Just as marriage creates fatherhood, so divorce today should be understood as a system for destroying it. It is no accident that divorce court has become largely a method for plundering and criminalizing fathers. With such a regime arrayed against them, men are powerfully incentivized against marrying and starting a family. No amount of scolding by armchair moralists is going to persuade men into marriages that can mean the loss of their children, expropriation, and incarceration.

The fourth point is perhaps the most difficult to grasp: marriage is not entirely a public institution that government may legitimately define and regulate. It certainly serves important public functions. But marriage also creates a sphere of life beyond official control—what Supreme Court Justice Byron White called a “realm of family life which the state cannot enter.” This does not mean that anything can be declared a marriage. On the contrary, it means that marriage creates a singular zone of privacy for one purpose above all: it is the bond within which parents may raise their children without government interference.

Parenthood, after all, is politically unique. It is the one relationship in which people may exercise coercive authority over others. It is the one exception to state’s monopoly of force, which is why government is constantly trying to undermine and invade it. Without parental and especially paternal authority, legitimized by the bonds of marriage, government’s reach is total. This is already evident in those communities where marriage and fathers have disappeared and government has moved in to replace them with welfare, child-support enforcement, public education, and tax-subsidized healthcare.

Marriage is paradoxical in a way that is critical to our political problems—and that causes considerable confusion among conservatives and libertarians. Marriage must be recognized by the state precisely because it creates a sphere of parental authority from which the state must then withdraw. Government today can no longer be counted upon to exercise this restraint voluntarily. We must all constantly demand that it do so. Marriage—lifelong and protected by a legally enforceable contract—gives us the legal authority and the moral high ground from which to resist encroachments by the state.

Prohibitions on homosexual marriage will not save the institution. As Robert Seidenberg writes in the Washington Times, “Even if Republicans were to succeed in constitutionally defining marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman, some judge somewhere would soon discover a novel meaning for ‘man’ or ‘woman’ or ‘between’ or ‘relationship’ or any of the other dozen words that might appear in the amendment.”

This is already happening. Britain’s Gender Recognition Act allows transsexuals to falsify their birth certificates retroactively to indicate they were born the gender of their choice. “The practical effect C9 will inevitably be same-sex ‘marriage’,” writes Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail. “Marriage as a union between a man and a woman will be destroyed, because ‘man’ and ‘woman’ will no longer mean anything other than whether someone feels like a man or a woman.”

So what is the solution? A measure already before Congress may show the way. Though not intended primarily to save marriage, the proposed Parental Rights Amendment is the first substantial step in the right direction. It protects “the liberty of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children.” How does this strengthen marriage?

Reaffirming the rights of parents—married parents particularly—to raise their own children would weaken government interference in the family. Especially if worded so as to protect the bond between children and their married fathers, such a measure could undermine both the divorce regime and same-sex marriage by establishing marriage as a permanent contract conferring parental rights that must be respected by the state. Within the bonds of marriage, it would preserve the rights of fathers, parents of both sexes, and spouses generally, and it would render same-sex marriage largely pointless. Marriages producing children would be effectively indissoluble, and there would be fewer fatherless children for homosexuals to adopt. Men would come to understand that to have full rights as fathers they must marry before conceiving children, and they would thus have an interest in ensuring the institution’s permanence.

This is not a small undertaking. It would mean confronting the radical sexual establishment in its entirety—not only homosexuals but their allies among feminists, bar associations, psychotherapists, social workers, and pubic schools. It would raise the stakes significantly—or rather it would highlight how high the stakes already are. It would also focus public attention on the interconnectedness of these threats to the family and freedom. It would foster a coalition of parents with a vested personal interest in marriage and parental rights.

The alternative is to continue mouthing platitudes, in which case we will be dismissed as a chorus of scolds and moralizers—and yes, bigots. And we will lose.

Stephen Baskerville is associate professor of government at Patrick Henry College and author of Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family.

The American Conservative » Divorced From Reality.

The point of this letter is that society would benefit from a social policy that was centered on preserving traditional family values with the father in the family.  The problem is that our current social policy was specifically designed to explicitly destroy the nuclear family.  It was not “well intentioned”.

Your Wednesday Web article “Census: Solo households continue to expand” reports that there are “fewer households made of a married couple with minor children (21 percent, down from 24 percent in 2000).” What makes this statistic particularly important are the companion statistics released recently showing that the overall U.S. nonmarital birth rate is around 41 percent while most strikingly, it is 72 percent among blacks. Given the worldwide trends to cut public expenditures (including health, education and welfare) and also the recently released preliminary report by President Obama’s deficit-reduction commission, it is undeniably clear that these demographic trends are inherently nonsustainable.

The most commonly offered solution for these nonsustainable demographics is reducing poverty. To the contrary, a stronger case could be made that the optimal solution would be to increase the presence of fathers in families. From the perspective of sound social policy, it is clear that father-headed households are better off economically and the children of these families do better on virtually all indices of social and economic outcomes.

“Progressive” ideology notwithstanding, the empirical data suggest that a national family policy centered on bringing fathers back “in from the cold” and into the warmth of an intact family unit would benefit children not only in terms of positive psychosocial outcomes but also in terms of economic outcomes. The better economic outcomes would, at a minimum, be generated by the economies of scale created by family units rather than solo households. Hard economic times (which appear to be continuing) demand a hard look at failed family policies.

GORDON E. FINLEY

Professor of psychology

Florida International University

Miami, Fla.

via Fathers’ presence can fight poverty – Washington Times.

by Phyllis Schlafly November 5, 2010

When the liberals and the feminists, including Hillary Clinton, began saying the “village” should raise the child, most people recognized village as a metaphor for government. We’re now seeing how intrusive Big Government Nannyism really is.

State agencies operating under various names such as Child Protective Services (CPS) have been assigned the task of protecting kids from abuse or neglect by any adults, especially by their own parents. A new study casts doubt on the value of CPS.

Child Protective Services, which rushes into action based on anonymous tips, investigated more than three million cases of suspected child abuse in 2007. Researchers examined the records of 595 children nationwide alleged to be at similar high risk for abuse, and tracked them from ages 4 to 8.

The researchers concluded that CPS’s intervention did little or nothing to improve the lives of the children, and there was no difference between children in the families CPS investigated or did not investigate. The social scientists looked at all the factors known to increase the risk for abuse or neglect: social support, family functioning, poverty, caregiver education and depressive symptoms, plus child anxiety, depression and aggressive behavior.

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The Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act was passed by Congress in 1974, and about 45 states passed complementary state laws. Taxpayers’ money began to flow big time to the bureaucrats.

The research results were reported in the October issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. The report was accompanied by an editorial entitled “Child Protective Services Has Outlived its Usefulness.”

It argued that CPS should not be engaged in law enforcement. If it’s a crime, call the police; if it’s neglect, call a public health nurse; if it’s an unsuitable living situation, call the appropriate social services.

Unfortunately, the researchers did not look at the harm caused by CPS bureaucrats who arrive unannounced with the police, interfere with a functioning family, and often take the children away from their parents and turn them over to foster care. When taxpayer appropriations are voted next year by Congress and state legislatures, CPS bureaucrats should be required to demonstrate whether any good outweighs the harm.

Two cases involving Child Protective Services are now before the U.S. Supreme Court. The High Court has just agreed to take a case involving the interrogation of an elementary schoolchild at school by a CPS caseworker and a deputy sheriff about possible sexual abuse at home.

This is a Fourth Amendment case: Camreta and Alford v. Greene. Oregon investigators are appealing a lower court ruling that they violated a nine-year-old girl’s constitutional right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure when they interviewed her for two hours at school without a warrant, court order, parental consent, or exigent circumstances.

This case could have a significant impact nationwide. Unfortunately, some government agencies are more solicitous in guaranteeing constitutional due process to vicious criminals than to parents.

The other CPS case now before the Supreme Court, Los Angeles County v. Humphries, has already been briefed and argued. This case involves the constitutionality of the child abuse index, or list, maintained by Child Protective Services in California.

More than 800,000 people are now listed on California’s child abuse index. These listings are very hurtful to individuals since employers consult the list before hiring employees to work with children.

CPS puts people on this list from agency reports that are based on anonymous tips and suspicion, not proof. It’s mighty easy for a malicious wife or ex-wife to allege child abuse as part of her game plan to get child custody or increased child support.

The issue in this case is the fact that there are no procedures, no standards, and no criteria for a wrongly accused person to get his name off the child abusers index. The Supreme Court is reviewing the Ninth Circuit ruling that Craig Humphries (whom a court pronounced innocent of all charges) had a “nightmarish encounter” with the California system, and “There is no effective procedure for Humphries to challenge this listing.”

In 2006, Congress toyed with a plan to create a national child abuse registry. The plan was abandoned because of the unreliability of state lists and lack of due process. (blog.eagleforum.org)

The child abuse registry should not be confused with the sex offender registry, which lists only those who have been convicted of sex crimes. The child abuse registry puts men on the list who have never been proven guilty of anything or even charged with a crime, a punishment that is entirely contrary to our legal assumption of being innocent until proven guilty.

Humphries has been trying to clear his name for nine years. Congress should defund these abusive registries and we hope the Supreme Court declares them unconstitutional.

via Government Trampling on Constitutional Rights of Parents.

Family court judges are divided, he said, with some thinking it recognises the increasingly important role of fathers, while others believe it is too disruptive for children.

“Shared residence orders are not a panacea,” he said, adding that court-imposed solutions “rarely satisfy anybody”.

“I remain of the view that the separated parent’s role in the lives of his or her children retains the same degree of importance as when the parents were living together, even if the opportunities to manifest the qualities which an absent parent can bring to his children may be limited.”

Craig Pickering, of Families Need Fathers, welcomed the speech, saying: “Generally speaking, children do better in every way if they have two parents in their lives, and the children of separated families are no exception.”

via Divorcing parents ‘damage children in legal war’ – Home News, UK – The Independent.

The ideological war against fathers is really obvious here. This is from a recent article by Stephen Baskerville:

…it is sad to see the group squander their credibility. Amnesty has been so captured by political ideology that, far from defending human rights, they have become advocates for violating them.

The latest example comes from Sweden, where Amnesty is no longer fighting for political prisoners but instead advocates for authoritarian ideology. Amnesty sponsored a film competition, but when some finalists produced a film that angered feminists, the film was pulled from Amnesty’s YouTube site. Amnesty denies that pressure from an Uppsala women’s shelter was responsible for suppressing the film, but the shelter itself is gloating about its political clout.

The film, created by four high school students and titled, The Right To Be a Father, is a powerful depiction of how children are taken from their fathers by Sweden’s feminist family courts. Separating children from their fathers is not only a bedrock principle of the war against “patriarchy,” but also the bread-and-butter of the lucrative child custody industry, so it is not surprising that the sisterhood would come down hard on the heresy that feminists violate human rights.The film was nominated for the final stage of the competition. Amnesty posted it on YouTube, and the creators were invited to the film gala in Gothenburg. “But our film was never shown at the festival, and the day after it also disappeared from Amnesty's YouTube channel,” says Sara Sivesson, one of the creators. Further, the students claim they obtained an email from the Uppsala feminists bragging, “Thanks to the protests Amnesty did not show the film at the festival and they also dropped it from their website.”

via Human Rights or Wrongs? by Stephen Baskerville.

Often in these times, a big impediment to ongoing relationships of fathers and their children is the state’s intervention.

A Fragile Families study showed a majority of unmarried fathers were very involved with their infants and planned to stay that way. About 80 percent provided financial support to their child’s mother during pregnancy and planned to support the child. About half were romantically involved and living with the child’s mother at the time of birth; another 30 percent were dating but did not live together. Only 10 percent had little or no contact with their babies.

via Study: Majority of unwed dads involved with infants » Knoxville News Sentinel.

Very interesting interview.  The Japanese mother in this case who took the kids away to Japan, also ripped off the father, but he’s in jail.

Video – Breaking News Videos from CNN.com.

Received this notice from Stephen Baskerville:

My article, “Married to the State,” is published today in The American Conservative, online edition: http://www.amconmag.com/blog/married-to-the-state/.

A longer, scholarly version of this argument will be published in the January 2010 issue of The Family in America: A Journal of Public Policy.

TAC has published 3 previous articles of mine in their print edition:
“Fathers Into Felons”: http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/may/23/00020/
“The Fathers’ War”: http://www.amconmag.com/article/2005/oct/24/00017/
“Violence Against Families”: http://stephenbaskerville.net/Violence_Against_Families.pdf

Stephen

******************************

Married to the State

How government colonizes the family

By Stephen Baskerville

In 1947, with the baby boom in its infancy and few disposed to hearing of family crisis, Harvard sociologist Carle Zimmerman saw the long-term reality: the family had been deteriorating since the Renaissance and was nearing the point of no return. Whenever the family shows signs of dysfunction, Zimmerman observed, “the state helps to break it up.” During the 19th century, “law piled on law, and government agency upon government agency” until by 1900 “the state had become master of the family.” The result, he wrote in Family and Civilization, was that “the family is now truly the agent, the slave, the handmaiden of the state.”

To read the rest, go to: http://www.amconmag.com/blog/married-to-the-state/.

************************************************

Stephen Baskerville, PhD
Associate Professor of Government
Patrick Henry College
1 Patrick Henry Circle
Purcellville, Virginia 20132

From Turner Publishing:

Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fatherhood, Marriage, and the Family

Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family
STEPHEN BASKERVILLE, PhD

“This book is a tremendous and much-needed report on how family courts and government policies are harming children.” — Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum

Order today at Amazon’s special price of $16.47 (regular price $24.95).

For more than 80 articles and studies in mainstream publications on the abuses of the divorce industry, see www.stephenbaskerville.net.

Baskerville has been writing and speaking on the subject of family law, and it’s discrimination against fathers for many years. It is always interesting to see how many prescient researchers and writers over the years have foreseen the destruction of the family, yet the destruction continues apace.
One of the biggest issues that I’ve ever noticed is that most fathers, when ending up in a divorce hearing, simply don’t understand that they are no longer the head of a family, if they ever were. Now,all the talk about children’s rights takes it further. When you talk children’s rights outside the context of parental or family rights, then you are talking about the state supplanting the parent, period.

A recent United Nations report advocates giving mandatory instruction in masturbation to children as young as 5. “Sexuality education is part of the duty of care of education and health authorities and institutions,” according to the U.N.

Entitled “International Guidelines on Sexuality Education,” the document is published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO. The entire document is a manifesto for governments to assume control over the “sexual education” of children, to inculcate in them politically correct ideas about sex and sexual politics, and to undermine and marginalize their parents.

This is from an article by Stephen Baskerville, which discusses the UN’s continued push for a separation to be made between parental rights and children’s rights.  He correctly observes that this is eroding the traditional family, with the idea of enhancing the power of the state to dictate how children are to be educated.

This is a serious development, which began, of course, before there was a UN.  It started with the idea of public education.  It just seems as if there is a certain percentage of people who can’t get it out of their heads that they need to control how you think and behave.

via Molested by the state.