MENZ Issues: news and discussion about New Zealand men, fathers, family law, divorce, courts, protests, gender politics, and male health.

Dateline: Australia
By: Ozy Dads
From: Dads–On-the-Air
Via: The Honor Network

Priority News Exchange Program News Item (PNEP)

For those of you who are unaware of Mr. Magill story here is brief summation:

Liam Magill, 54, sued his ex-wife Meredith, 38, in the County Court after DNA tests confirmed he was not the father of two of the couple’s three children. His former wife lied in court documents and in court about who the real parent was.

Mr. Liam was breifly awarded $70,000 for pain and suffering and economic loss, but three Appeal Court judges overturned the decision at a higher court level. They also awarded legal costs against Mr Magill, while Mr Magill drove himself into further debt on his own for the state doesn’t fund men so wrongly abused.

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Dateline: Atlanta, USA
By: Pitbull
From: The Honor Network

Priority News Exchange Program News Item (PNEP)

With stats from both the UK and USA governments showing that Deadbeat Mothers are worse than Deadbeat Dads you would think that they could jail at least one such woman, yet what is in fact happening is the state is trampling over itself and other departments (and all traditional laws and rights in many countries) in an effort to put fathers only in jail. In this head long rush innocent men are having their reputations destroyed and are being jailed, bankrupted and I’m sure in some cases much worse, from possible suicide from their unjust situations in jail. Why? Well the establishment wants money from those who have it, and thinks it can get more from bleeding a stone.

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Dateline: BC, Canada
By: Tom Zytaruk at the Now Newspaper
Via: BC Fathers & The Honor Network

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A New Westminster, BC man who dressed up as Robin and perched on the Pattullo Bridge for nearly five hours in 2004 has lost an appeal of his mischief conviction.

Hal Legere - a.k.a. the Boy Wonder - was arrested after climbing onto the girders about 50 feet above the bridge deck and unfurling a large banner supporting Fathers4Justice, a national organization for which he serves as B.C. coordinator.

He was protesting against court bias in child-custody cases.

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Dateline: Canada
By: Jim Hodgins of The National Post (article now removed)
Via: The Honor Network

Priority News Exchange Program News Item (PNEP)

A federally funded report says “masculinists” are orchestrating a backlash against feminism and blaming women for oppressing and discriminating against men.

The report’s authors claim that masculinists portray men as victims and link feminism with boys’ poor performance in schools, male suicide, loss of male identity and discriminatory divorce and child custody laws.

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Below is a collection of quotations by feminists that can now be found on numerous men’s sites.

“I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig.”
Ice And Fire - Andrea Dworkin

“Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometimes gain from the experience.”
Vassar College. Assistant Dean of Students - Catherine Comin

“All men are rapists and that’s all they are.”
Author; (later, advisor to Al Gore’s Presidential Campaign.) - Marilyn French

“I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.”
Ms. Magazine Editor. - Robin Morgan

“I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire.”
Ms. Magazine Editor. - Robin Morgan

“‘To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo.”
Scum Manifesto - Valerie Solanas

“(Rape) is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear”
Against Our Will p.6. - Susan Brownmiller

“We are taught, encouraged, moulded by and lulled into accepting a range of false notions about the family. As a source of some of our most profound experiences, it continues to be such an integral part of our emotional lives that it appears beyond criticism. Yet hiding from the truth of family life leaves women and children vulnerable.”
- Canadian Panel on Violence Against Women

” How will the family unit be destroyed? …[T]he demand alone will throw the whole ideology of the family into question, so that women can begin establishing a community of work with each other and we can fight collectively. Women will feel freer to leave their husbands and become economically independent, either through a job or welfare.”
In “Female Liberation” - Roxanne Dunbarr

“Men are rapists, batterers, plunderers, killers; these same men are religious prophets, poets, heroes, figures of romance, adventure, accomplishment, figures ennobled by tragedy and defeat. Men have claimed the earth, called it “Her”. Men ruin Her. Men have airplanes, guns, bombs, poisonous gases, weapons so perverse and deadly that they defy any authentically human imagination.”
Pornography: Men Possessing Women - Andrea Dworkin

“The traditional flowers of courtship are the traditional flowers of the grave, delivered to the victim before the kill. The cadaver is dressed up and made up and laid down and ritually violated and consecrated to an eternity of being used.”
- Andrea Dworkin

“Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women’s bodies.”
- Andrea Dworkin

“The cultural institutions which embody and enforce those interlocked aberrations - for instance, law, art, religion, nation-states, the family, tribe, or commune based on father-right - these institutions are real and they must be destroyed.”
- Andrea Dworkin

“My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don’t even need to shrug. I simply don’t care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don’t matter.”
The Woman’s Room - Marilyn French

“The nuclear family must be destroyed, and people must find better ways of living together…. Whatever its ultimate meaning, the breakup of families now is an objectively revolutionary process…. No woman should have to deny herself any opportunities because of her special responsibilities to her children….”
“Functions of the Family,” WOMEN: A Journal of Liberation, Fall, 1969 - Linda Gordon

“When a woman reaches orgasm with a man she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression…”
- Sheila Jeffrys

“I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He’s just incapable of it.”
Former Congresswoman - Barbara Jordan

“You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs.”
(Prominent legal feminist scholar; University of Michigan, & Yale.) - Catherine MacKinnon

“All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman.”
- Catherine MacKinnon

“We can’t destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage.”
From Sisterhood Is Powerful, (ed), 1970, p. 537 - Robin Morgan

“All men are good for is fucking, and running over with a truck”
Statement made by A University of Maine Feminist Administrator, quoted by Richard Dinsmore, who brought a successful civil suit against the University in the amount of $600,000.

Dateline: World
By: Carey Roberts
Via: The Honor Network

Priority News Exchange Program News Item (PNEP)

As early as 1980, UNICEF director Jim Grant championed simple yet effective programs to promote child welfare. These strategies included immunizations, promotion of breastfeeding, and training birth attendants. Grant’s initiative has been credited with saving the lives of over 25 million children.
But in 1995, Grant tragically died, and radical feminist Carol Bellamy took over. UNICEF was due for an ideological overhaul.

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Dateline: UK
By: Daddy Ian
From: The Honor Network

Priority News Exchange Program News Item (PNEP)
(All Comments on Laws Relate to the UK Only)

This news story is exceptional for a number of reasons and highlights the problems men face in the UK.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/southern_counties/6037701.stm

1) After sex, a man is accused of rape. Under the current law in the UK, the accused man is named, the female ‘victim’ remains anonymous. This applies to accusations of sexual and other abuse against children as well. The inevitable result of that publicity is a ‘witch-hunt’ and the accused man is persecuted, threatened and otherwise bullied and in many cases either lynched or commit suicide. This is even before he has been to trial. Many, perhaps most cases collapse before trial. In rape cases barely 6% reach a conclusion with the accused man found guilty, around 300 per year. There has been a massive jump in rape accusations in the last few years, but the actual level of convictions has stayed at around 300 per year.

The feminists argue that the Police and courts are failing women. I argue that women are swamping the system with false accusations knowing they can destroy a man without actually having to stand trial or be named - the damage is done immediately.

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editor@kapiti-observer.co.nz

I am looking at a recent copy of the Kapiti Observor highlighting letters to the Editor on domestic violence. Three of the four authors of these letters are well known amongst men’s groups, of which I am sure you are aware. It is a small orchestrated effort to make a point and obviously one in which you have participated. While some will view this as a small victory to have their position recognised, and while many readers may welcome the acknowledgement of a male perspective, what you have done is illustrate the reality of how we deal with this issue in New Zealand. In a society that now seldom recognises male men’s fathers’ perspective, amongst published letters, (courtesy of a sympathetic editor), is about the only place you might find such perspectives, because it is seldom sought as an opposing or contributing view in either television or print media articles, which are generally obsessed with feminist perspective.

As Christmas nears what we will do throughout this country via the media is undertake our annual condemnation of what hasn’t yet happened, but is anticipated and expected, and media will give unlimited airplay to a particular theme from a small group of women.

When things fall apart at home, come to us, and we will make sure it never happens again.

What they don’t say is regardless of the circumstances we will rip your family apart, regardless of circumstances we will blame the man, and the women and her children, will live in the re modelled state sponsored family – just mum and the kids – that’s the kiwi way now.

Get help before it happens, and those with the courage to venture forth will find something even more insidious. It is a regime of excuses and condemnations, remarkably for the same behaviour, but your gender will determine whether such behaviour is excusable or condemnable. Every ounce of belief you once had in institutions of justice and help, will slowly drain away as you become aware that this is required behaviour from state employees. (Once called public servants)

What will many children get for Christmas this year – a fatherless home! This is the pathetic attitude that we as a society allow to pervade services that we will give money to, in order to create the perception that we are dealing with “the problem”
The same social personality that makes young New Zealand women unattractive enough to make young New Zealand men consider celibacy or relocation. The particularly venomous bite of these creatures elicits an increasing disrespect and disdain of women in general, and for the concepts of relationship and reproduction.

Underpinning these perceptions attitudes and many organisations is a government who’s most politicised issue and policy vehicle is domestic violence. Not for the purpose of helping families, but to underpin its policy position on the unqualified definition of family, the increasing funding of single parenting and the evolution of child tax.

This is the manner in which we socialise help and protect thousands of children, and yet there appears to be some inconceivable mystery behind the increasingly brutal, bizarre and more frequent headlines that dominate the daily news line up. Perhaps it may occur to some people one day that their reaction is much more understandable than our own contributing behaviour.

Bevan Berg
Project Re-Union.

Dateline: USA
By: Fielder
From: The Honor Network
Priority News Exchange Program News Item (PNEP)

Under a bill recently passed by the Michigan House of Representatives, fathers & men are reaching all time lows in any kind of legal rights, and this is sure to increase the marriage strike by men along with their fleeing from western nations as fast as they can.The House Bill 5882 creates the Coercive Abortion Prevention Act. The purpose of the bill is to prohibit the putative father of a pregnant woman’s child from coercing or intimidating the woman into terminating her pregnancy.

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Stuff: Men marginalised as parents

A Nelson research project on fathering has revealed natal support services focus on women, marginalising men and their role as parents in their own right.

Men interviewed said they lacked preparation and information, and the process stressed their relationship.

While this is not exactly earth-shattering news, it’s great to see the Nelson-Marlborough District Health Board funding this kind of study. Men in other parts of New Zealand might find it interesting to check what kind of similar initiatives their health boards are involved with.

Co-author and NMIT lecturer and researcher David Mitchell said the project highlighted the continuing difficulties midwives and support agencies, such as Plunket, had in engaging with and understanding the roles of fathers as a parent in their own right.

I know a lot of young men feel dis-empowered around childcare issues when confronted by assertive women, especially en mass which is the likely experience in female dominated organisations.

Co-author Philip Chapman, a Public Health Service fathering promoter, said the research showed men wanted to be better informed about fatherhood.

If there ever is any genuine commitment on the part of the government to encouraging males to be more involved with fathering, I think programmes targeting young men are likely to be extremely effective - provided they are delivered by experienced fathers!