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G. K. Chesterton once observed that the family serves as the principal check on government power, and he suggested that someday the family and the state would confront one another

That day has arrived.

Chesterton was writing about divorce, and despite extensive public attention to almost every other threat to the family, divorce remains the most direct and serious. Michael McManus of Marriage Savers writes that “divorce is a far more grievous blow to marriage than today’s challenge by gays.”

Most Americans would be deeply shocked if they knew what goes on today under the name of divorce. Indeed, many are devastated to discover that they can be forced into divorce by procedures entirely beyond their control. Divorce licenses unprecedented government intrusion into family life, including the power to sunder families, seize children, loot family wealth, and incarcerate parents without trial. Comprised of family courts and vast, federally funded social services bureaucracies that wield what amount to police powers, the divorce machinery has become the most predatory and repressive sector of government ever created in the United States and is today’s greatest threat to constitutional freedom.

… Contrary to common assumptions, divorce today seldom involves two people mutually deciding to part ways. According to Frank Furstenberg and Andrew Cherlin in Divided Families, 80 percent of divorces are unilateral, that is, over the objection of one spouse. Patricia Morgan of London’s Civitas think tank reports that in over half of divorces, there was no recollection of major conflict before the separation.

Under “no-fault,” or what some call “unilateral,” divorce—a legal regime that expunged all considerations of justice from the procedure—divorce becomes a sudden power grab by one spouse, assisted by an army of judicial hangers-on who reward belligerence and profit from the ensuing litigation: judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, counselors, mediators, custody evaluators, social workers, and more.

If marriage is not wholly a private affair, as today’s marriage advocates insist, involuntary divorce by its nature requires constant government supervision over family life. Far more than marriage, divorce mobilizes and expands government power. Marriage creates a private household, which may or may not necessitate signing some legal documents. Divorce dissolves a private household, usually against the wishes of one spouse. It inevitably involves state functionaries—including police and jails—to enforce the divorce and the post-marriage order.

Almost invariably, the involuntarily divorced spouse will want and expect to continue enjoying the protections and prerogatives of private life: the right to live in the common home, to possess the common property, or—most vexing of all—to parent the common children. These claims must be terminated, using the penal system if necessary.

Onerous Implications

Few stopped to consider the implications of laws that shifted the breakup of private households from a voluntary to an involuntary process. Unilateral divorce inescapably involves government agents forcibly removing legally innocent people from their homes, seizing their property, and separating them from their children. It inherently abrogates not only the inviolability of marriage but the very concept of private life.

By far the most serious consequences involve children, who have become the principal weapons of the divorce machinery. Invariably the first action of a divorce court, once a divorce is filed, is to separate the children from one of their parents, usually the father. Until this happens, no one in the machinery acquires any power or earnings. The first principle and first action of divorce court therefore: Remove the father.

Family court judges’ contempt for both fathers and constitutional rights was openly expressed by New Jersey municipal court judge Richard Russell: “Your job is not to become concerned about the constitutional rights of the man that you’re violating,” he told his colleagues at a judges’ training seminar in 1994. “Throw him out on the street. . . . We don’t have to worry about the rights.”

Generated Hysteria

…Why do we hear almost nothing about this? Aside from media that sympathize with the divorce revolution, the multi-billion-dollar divorce industry also commands a huge government-funded propaganda machine that has distorted our view of what is happening.

The growth of the divorce machinery during the 1970s and 1980s did not follow but preceded (in other words, it generated) a series of hysterias against parents—especially fathers—so hideous and inflammatory that no one, left or right, dared question them or defend those accused: child abuse and molestation, wife-beating, and nonpayment of “child support.” Each of these hysterias has been propagated largely by feminists, bar associations, and social work bureaucracies, whose federal funding is generously shared with state and local law-enforcement officials.

The parent on the receiving end of such accusations—even in the absence of any formal charge, evidence, or conviction—not only loses his children summarily and often permanently; he also finds himself abandoned by friends and family members, parishioners and pastors, co-workers and employers (and he may well lose his job)—all terrified to be associated with an accused “pedophile,” “batterer,” or “deadbeat dad.”

It is not clear that these nefarious figures are other than bogeymen created by divorce interests, well aware that not only the public generally but conservatives and family advocates in particular are a soft touch when it comes to anything concerning irresponsible behavior or sexual perversion.

…It is also largely credulity and fear that leads Congress by overwhelming majorities to appropriate billions for anti-family programs in response to these hysterias. The massive federal funds devoted to domestic violence, child abuse, and child-support enforcement are little more than what Phyllis Schlafly calls “feminist pork,” taxpayer subsidies on family dissolution that also trample due process protections. Family law may technically be the purview of states, but it is driven by federal policies and funded by a Congress fearful of accusations that it is not doing enough against pedophiles, batterers, and deadbeats.

In fact, each of these figures is largely a hoax, a creation of feminist ideology disseminated at taxpayers’ expense and unchallenged by journalists, academics, civil libertarians, and family advocates who are either unaware of the reality or cowed into silence. Indeed, so diabolical are these hysterias that some family advocates simply accept them as additional evidence of the family crisis.

But while sensational examples can be found of anything, there is simply no evidence that the family and fatherhood crisis is caused primarily or even significantly by fathers abandoning their families, beating their wives, and molesting their children. Irrefutable evidence indicates that it is driven almost entirely by divorce courts forcibly separating parents from their children and using these false accusations as a rationalization.

Divorce Gamesmanship

During the 1980s and 1990s, waves of child abuse hysteria swept America and other countries. Sensational cases in Washington state, California, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Ontario, Saskatchewan, the north of England, and more recently France resulted in torn-apart families, blatantly unjust prison sentences, and ruined lives, while the media and civil libertarians looked the other way.

Today it is not clear that we have learned anything from these miscarriages of justice. If anything, the hysteria has been institutionalized in the divorce courts, where false allegations have become routine.

What is ironic about these witch-hunts is the fact that it is easily demonstrable that the child abuse epidemic—which is very real—is almost entirely the creation of feminism and the welfare bureaucracies themselves. It is well established by scholars that an intact family is the safest place for women and children and that very little abuse takes place in married families. Child abuse overwhelmingly occurs in single-parent homes, homes from which the father has been removed. Domestic violence, too, is far more likely during or after the breakup of a marriage than among married couples.

…government logic is marvelously self-justifying and self-perpetuating, since by eliminating the father, officials can present themselves as the solution to the problem they have created. The more child abuse there is—whether by single mothers, boyfriends, or even (as is often the case) by social workers and bureaucrats themselves—the more the proffered solution is to further expand the child abuse bureaucracy.

Waxing indignant about a string of child deaths at the hands of social workers in the District of Columbia, federal judges and the Washington Post found solace in the D.C. government’s solution: to hire more social workers (and lawyers too, for some unspecified reason). “Olivia Golden, the Child and Family Services’ latest director . . . will use her increased budget to recruit more social workers and double the number of lawyers.” Children die at the hands of social workers, so we must hire more social workers.

…A commonplace of political science is that bureaucracies relentlessly expand, often by creating the very problem they exist to address. Appalling as it sounds, the conclusion is inescapable that we have created a massive army of officials with a vested interest in child abuse.

…The explosion in foster care based on the assumed but unexamined need to find permanent homes for allegedly abused children has provided perhaps the strongest argument in favor of same-sex “marriage” and homosexual parenting. …

Child-Support Racket

The “deadbeat dad” is another figure largely manufactured by the divorce machinery. He is far less likely to have deliberately abandoned offspring he callously sired than to be an involuntarily divorced father who has been, as attorney Jed Abraham writes in From Courtship to Courtroom, “forced to finance the filching of his own children.”

Child support is plagued by the same contradictions as child custody. Like custody, it is awarded ostensibly without reference to “fault,” and yet nonpayment brings swift and severe punishments. Contrary to popular belief, child support today has nothing to do with fathers abandoning their children, reneging on their marital vows, or even agreeing to divorce. It is automatically assessed on all non-custodial parents, even those divorced against their will who lose their children through no legal fault or agreement of their own. It is an entitlement for all single mothers, in other words, regardless of their behavior.

…All this marks a new stage in the evolution of the welfare state: from distributing largesse to raising revenue and, from there, to law enforcement. The result is a self-financing machine, generating profits and expanding the size and scope of government—all by generating single-parent homes and fatherless children. Government has created a perpetual growth machine for destroying families, seizing children from legally blameless parents, and incarcerating parents without trial.

Today’s disputes over marriage in fact have their origin in this one. Demands to redefine marriage to include homosexual couples are inconceivable apart from the redefinition of marriage already effected by heterosexuals through divorce. Though gays cite the very desire to marry as evidence that their lifestyle is not inherently promiscuous, activist Andrew Sullivan acknowledges that that desire has arisen only because of the promiscuity permitted in modern marriage. “The world of no-strings heterosexual hookups and 50 percent divorce rates preceded gay marriage,” he points out. “All homosexuals are saying . . . 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 . . . a denial of basic civil equality” (emphasis added). Gays do not want traditional monogamous marriage, only the version debased by divorce.

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Euro-mind Tomas Kavaliauskas writes in Eurozine about the same Euro-fables that caused mass protest and long, widespread wars over the centuries: class-warfare, class-hatred, and that strange hatred of authority that seems to find a place in its’ heart for things that can only be accomplished through totalitarianism. 
 
As usual, they have to get around to limiting human freedom.

The capitalist order implies that the ultimate objective of citizens is to be consumers. Yet consumerism grounded in indebtedness means financial dependence as opposed to democratic freedom

Prattle on about something you don’t understand, pretend social philosophy needs municipal control, pretend that you’re the one to do it, and people call you an intellectual.  Here, our brave gladiator wanting to toy with all our lives manages to describe the only option anti-capitalists can cite as capitalism, and goes through the necessary ‘talking in circles’ to tell us that in fact it was the capitalist societies where social control is at its’ greatest.

According to Foucault, the individual, whose life and activities are restricted by the social order, is constantly examined and classified; this facilitates identification. This process, obviously political, is especially important in contemporary megapolises. The practical and political interest of every state is to control and discipline its citizens in order to secure the successful functioning of its political and economic systems. Moreover, control and discipline help preserve the consumerist order.

I’m sorry, but what history of Europe exactly did you have to exclude from view to arrive at this point?  It’s the poorer, economically dysfunctional societies that permitted tyrannies to calcify permanently. 
 
I’d really like to know where he got the idea that the freedom to make a living in the way you want is the same as programmed consumption or is an all-occupying philosophy of those who live in it.  I’d also really like to know his notion of a viable alternative.  Invariably, the ‘alter-monde’ involves less control over ones’ life and less of a connection between what you do and the conditions you can live in. 
 
I’d also like to know where this nostalgia for Gothic life of communist authoritarian leftism comes from.  Under the only other ‘alter-monde’  to democratic-socialism/socialism Europe has know in living memory has been a system based entirely on consumption – one that not only based itself on the need to ration and construct a destructive level of human conformity, but didn’t even succeed a providing for the population materially.

It would be naïve to assume that prosumers can choose identity. It is ascribed to them by default. Today, one is even born with it. Such is the order of the capitalist system, when individuals are free to choose professions but not the status of the producer and the consumer. Indeed, if Europe or the USA saw the emergence within their boundaries of a state that refused to participate in this global system and instead effected a Rousseauesque return to nature, and if the ideology of this state were based on principles other than production and consumption, contemporary western morality grounded in the maximization of economic growth would simply collapse. This would mean that an "advanced" country chooses "backwardness". What is seen as inevitable in Africa would, in Europe or the USA, be regarded as a choice and thus become a challenge to the ideology, ethics, politics, economics, and culture of utilitarian efficiency.

This can only be true if all people are in fact just like the worst example of constructed negative architypes you see on TV, and that people are not capable of anything else.  How he and his fellow travelers evaded this fate is stunning when you see just how willing they seem to be to parrot ideas no-one with a shred of healthy scepticism would accept.  The poor in Africa cannot passively ‘choose’ to have a European quality of life, and the very idea that these choices can be made sort of undermines the idea that a bogeyman is forcibly ascribing anything to the rest of us. 
 
To think that we choose our identities rather than develop them as individuals tells one just how little the likes of Tomas Kavaliauskas knows about people to begin with, and how trapped he is in the illusions necessary to maintain the adolescent view of class-warfare into adulthood.  That arbitrariness with which others’ philosophies, even ones that they aren’t familiar with are judged and describes must be the prerequisite to be called a European intellectual these days. 
 
I would pity him if he could admit that his identity was something that developed under a number of influences, (perhaps even things he perceived as traumas) through the course of actually living and wasn’t something he chose one day or was assigned.

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The history of France under German rule during World War II is a depressing tale of collaboration, corruption and subsequent denial that taxes the will of even the most determined Francophile

Perhaps not surprisingly it was not a French scholar but an American one, Robert Paxton, who produced the first serious examination of the period (1940-44)… Now comes Frederic Spotts, a British writer known for his studies of German history. With "The Shameful Peace" he lifts the lid on one of the least known -- and most shameful episodes -- of the period: namely, the role of artists and intellectuals in occupied France.

The first effect of the armistice was to convert the French capital into a kind of vacation paradise for the German occupier. … Representatives of leading Nazi figures, notably Hermann Goering, sacked the homes of wealthy Jews for masterpieces of art -- an expedition in which some of the city's grandest art dealers were pleased to assist. Even low-ranking German functionaries partook of the feast. "I never lived so well anywhere," a secretary-typist later recalled. "We could buy what we wanted. . . . [It was] the most wonderful and unforgettable time of my youth."

One area where the Germans completely understood what they were about, however, was in the co-opting of the French cultural establishment.

What made the French experience of German occupation so different from that of, say, Poland or Czechoslovakia or Greece was that Hitler, far from trying to eradicate French national culture, chose to nourish it as a distraction from his other demands. …

The most obvious minions of Berlin were fascist or protofascist intellectuals who had been at war with French democracy long before the armistice. … Here there could be no surprises. Other writers, however, had not been fascist proponents in the 1930s and simply went with the flow. As novelist Jean Giono put it with great economy of words: "I prefer being a living German to a dead Frenchman."

At a time when both food and fuel were painfully scarce, many cultural figures preferred to live well rather than poorly. The list here is far longer -- a virtual "Who's Who" of the French artistic world [including Picasso, often cited as a principled anti-Fascist, and Céline, often quoted by our detractors as an example of someone with obviously superior francophone sensibilities, artistic prowess, lucidité, and so on]. [Cocteau's] record of the times, Mr. Spotts writes, "gives the impression that the Germans he knew were visiting tourists rather than officers of an invading army."

… The need to nourish the myth of la France combattante -- the cornerstone of Gaullist ideology -- required far fewer collaborators than actually existed. The myth was also necessary to wrest the nimbus of Resistance from the communists, who claimed exclusive rights to it. Then, almost before anyone knew it, anti-Americanism became the ideology of choice for French intellectuals and artists, bringing both left and right happily together.

…the Occupation yielded its secrets only slowly and partially. The story remains complex and confusing, without a satisfying conclusion. Biography is still sanitized; history continues to be rewritten; silence prevails over candour. "The true France was not at Vichy, the true France never collaborated." So spake President Sarkosy as late as May 2008, on the anniversary of the end of the Second World War. But though the myths continue to be officially perpetuated, everyone in France knows they are false. Consequently there remains what de Gaulle once referred to as "a dull pain in the depths of our national consciousness'.

For all that has been written about the subject, for all the continuing [unease] and for all the importance of the issues involved, if you want to know how artists and intellectuals survived, worked and adapted, or if you want to have some idea of what cultural life was like and what policies were followed by German and Vichy authorities, you will have difficulty finding answers.

…Failure to understand the importance of culture in a nation's life was not a mistake Hitler made. For him culture was not peripheral but central to his Occupation policy. In the arts he saw a narcotic to be used to pacify the French and make them amenable to collaboration while he was busy with his war in the Soviet Union. So he not only allowed but actively encouraged a rich artistic life. … At the … time there were … artists who socialized with the Enemy and in some cases toured Germany as Hitler's guests as though unaware that the two countries were still at war.

…After the war the German ambassador in Paris during the Occupation made the astonishing claim that "it would be extremely difficult to name any notable French artist who had not supported collaboration'.

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Who knew???!!!! Where is Jove? Wait a minute...........I'm the bad guy?

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…something fairly remarkable is happening

Two weeks ago, the country's biggest left-wing political grouping, the Labor Party, which has responsibility for integration as a member of the coalition government led by the Christian Democrats, issued a position paper calling for the end of the failed model of Dutch "tolerance."

…If judged on the standard scale of caution in dealing with cultural clashes and Muslims' obligations to their new homes in Europe, the language of the Dutch position paper and Lilianne Ploumen, Labor's chairperson, was exceptional.

The paper said: "The mistake we can never repeat is stifling criticism of cultures and religions for reasons of tolerance."

Government and politicians had too long failed to acknowledge the feelings of "loss and estrangement" felt by Dutch society facing parallel communities that disregard its language, laws and customs.

Newcomers, according to Ploumen, must avoid "self-designated victimization." …

Instead of reflexively offering tolerance with the expectation that things would work out in the long run, she said, the government strategy should be "bringing our values into confrontation with people who think otherwise."…

"Without a strategy to deal with these issues, all discussion about creating opportunities and acceptance of diversity will be blocked by suspicion and negative experience."

And that comes from the heart of the traditional, democratic European left, where placing the onus of compatibility on immigrants never found such comfort before.

It's a point of view that makes reference to work and education as essential, but without the emphasis that they are the single path to integration.

Rather, Labor's line seems to stand on its head the old equation of jobs-plus-education equals integration. Conforming to Dutch society's social standards now comes first. Strikingly, it turns its back on cultural relativism and uses the word emancipation in discussing the process of outsiders' becoming Dutch. …

Indeed, Ploumen says, "Integration calls on the greatest effort from the new Dutch. Let go of where you come from; choose the Netherlands unconditionally." Immigrants must "take responsibility for this country" and cherish and protect its Dutch essence.

Not clear enough? Ploumen insists, "The success of the integration process is hindered by the disproportionate number of non-natives involved in criminality and trouble-making, by men who refuse to shake hands with women, by burqas and separate courses for women on citizenship.

"We have to stop the existence of parallel societies within our society."

And the obligations of the native Dutch? Ploumen's answer is, "People who have their roots here have to offer space to traditions, religions and cultures which are new to Dutch society" - but without fear of expressing criticism. "Hurting feelings is allowed, and criticism of religion, too."

…[One uncynical] explanation (that comes, remarkably, from Frits Bolkestein, the former Liberal Party leader, European commissioner, and no friend of the socialists, who began writing in 1991 about the enormous challenge posed to Europe by Muslim immigration):

"The multi-cultis just aren't making the running anymore. It's a brave step towards a new normalcy in this country. "

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NRC Handelsblad International Relations Correspondent Juurd Eijsvoogel reports on a “A Dutch Offer to Obama.”

From feeble minds come strange rationalizations which become the basis necessary to support things that they’ve previously said and done. European critics of anything American became fixated by Gitmo, and as such found in the detainees themselves a form of fairytale hero.

America will soon have a president who has promised to close Guantanamo -- but there are all kinds of practical risks associated with it. For example, there are dozens of prisoners who, as far as Washington is concerned, can go free, but they may be tortured, or worse, in their own country. Where can they go?

To the Netherlands, for example, suggested Lower House member Hans van Baalen (VVD--Dutch People's Party for Freedom and Democracy) last year, and to other NATO member countries. There was no support for the idea. Not from other members of Parliament, not from the Government, and not from the allies.

Correction: the US will have ANOTHER President that has promised to close down the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

Until last week. On the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Portugal offered to accept a number of innocent prisoners who have been locked up without trial. And, at the same time, Lisbon called upon other E.U. countries to do the same. A deep silence then descended upon the European capitals.

The offer to take the detainees has been made for years. The problem now, as then, is that the governments in these “highly enlightened” states don’t want them, often not even wanting their own nationals.

This concerns not only the 50 to 60 innocent prisoners who can not be repatriated. There is also a group of around one hundred Yemenis who probably will soon be returned to their own country, to a rehabilitation program for Jihadists.

It all sounds magnanimous until you realize what it is that they are and aren’t willing to do: they’ll take the ones that they can parade as innocent, but still demand the release of the guilty ones, and insist that they are the United States’ responsibility, that their actions are the United States’ responsibility, and not the responsibility of the guilty themselves.

It will not be easy to return people to a society -- people who have been held prisoners for years, while innocent, under such appalling conditions. But if they are given the opportunity to request refugee status here, they will finally have the prospect for a new future, in a country that - more than, for example, Albania - has experience in the reception, counseling and treatment of refugees who have suffered serious psychological trauma.

Isn’t it brave of the Europeans to have spared these detainees the possibility of trauma by not taking detainees? Taken in the light “Watching America” is placing it in, isn’t that just another cruel follow-up to the years of lecturing being turned into a festival of self-congratulation?

Once the Obama administration is in place, it is likely that Washington will quickly come to the European allies with a request for help with receiving Guantanamo prisoners. Then refusing this will be difficult. By letting it be known in advance that the innocent prisoners, as well as Washington, can count on us, we not only help the detainees and Obama, but also ourselves.

Which is to say that in order to avoid making good on their demands, complaints, and on their word, they’ll take them, as long as they (first) can all be declared harmless, and (further) only take the few among them that really are harmless. That way, the US can continue to bear criticism for protecting the populations of crowded European cities from harm, and giving the populations of crowded European vindication from their parasitism at least cost, demonstrated to themselves a fake degree of involvement in the security of populations (the genuinely innocent) by inverting the concept to guilt and innocence, and getting that “activist feeling” by pushing for the release of killers and abetters of jihadi violence, as though they themselves aren’t “little Eichmanns” for giving aid and comfort to those that DO pull the trigger. It gives them maximum domestic PR at least cost.

The bold emphasis was mine. The word “innocent” appears in the article 5 times. “Danger” appears once (and in the context of the Chinese suppression of the Uigers at that, not in reference to the danger to civilians anywhere in the world).

The word “guilt” does not appear at all. It has the same evasiveness that the early stage of fixation of Iran had with Israel, and it starts with the revision of terms, and the construction of a far-away figure to blame in a desperate effort to distract a population into some organized purpose benefiting a social elite of some sort.

What if these critics were offered clearer choices in this matter (that they have no stake in anyway): 1) shooting irregular combatants on sight in the field as the Geneva Convention virtually proscribes, 2) not detaining combatants at all, 3) hiring non-state entities, not in uniform as the terrorists are, to do our fighting for us as a proxy, disposing the coalition of all responsibility for anyone’s fate, or 4) (their inferred solution) bringing those who want to kill your population INTO your country and freeing them.

Jihadists do not wear uniforms, but are a force organized under an ideology. The critics (“Watchers”) of America in any form that provides a vehicle for their hatefulness, insist on forcing the defenders against terrorism to operate on a different standard based on rules and not the implication of those rules.

The Jihadists are, in fact, being used by the critics’ as proxy army to embolden the image they have of themselves in an imaginary opera where they cast themselves as the moderators between the civilization and its’ enemies, while carefully casting America as an moral equivalent to the enemy. It’s only about casting themselves, somehow as relevant figures which they aren’t. They are empowering evil, and still can’t tell the difference between proponents of peaceful pluralism possible with enlightenment philosophy and a violent movement exploiting religious doctrine to impose an autocratic theocracy on the rest of humanity.

Juurd Eijsvoogel writing in the NRC Handesblad isn’t really “watching America”. He is watching the tendencies and temperament his own society through a haze of confusion which requires the demonization of the fake image of antithesis of themselves that Europeans have constructed. This entire bit of theater is about them, not us, and the effort put to manipulating America. By clearly airing statements (that they’re loath to back up anyway) as open support for Obama, and not America or even their own security, they make this quite plain.

Let’s review this again for those can’t get the years of wailing and complaint out of their melons: critics declaring some kind victory in this are not liberating anyone, nor are they facing the matter of dealing with the guilty or even their own wild demands - they are reciting the same dilemma facing the United States that has been present since 2002 as if they’ve solved it, one which the US alone has to tend to for the sake of these writers, not doers or entitled to protection from terrorism.

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