Sept. 9, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:39
3406 The War Against Marriage | Stephen Baskerville and Stefan Molyneux
"Taken into Custody' exposes the greatest and most destructive civil rights abuse in America today. Family courts and Soviet-style bureaucracies trample basic civil liberties, entering homes uninvited and taking away people's children at will, then throwing the parents into jail without any form of due process, much less a trial. No parent, no child, no family in America is safe."Dr. Stephen Baskerville is Associate Professor of Government at Patrick Henry College and Research Fellow at the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society, the Independent Institute, and the Inter-American Institute. For more on Dr. Baskerville, please check out: http://www.stephenbaskerville.net Dr. Baskerville is the author of “Taken Into Custody: The War against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family.” Order now at: http://www.fdrurl.com/Taken-Into-CustodyFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
I'm very pleased to have a chat with Dr.
Stephen Baskerville.
He is an Associate Professor of Government at Patrick Henry College and Research Fellow at the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, the Independent Institute.
I don't know why I can't pronounce these words one more time.
Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
We're pleased to have a chat with Dr.
Stephen Barskaville.
He is an Associate Professor of Government at Patrick Henry College and Research Fellow at the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society, as well as the Independent Institute and the Inter-American Institute.
He is the author of a book that will really help you tell your wife how much you love her.
The book is called Taken into Custody, the War Against Fathers, Marriage and the Family, and It's Stephen with a PH. You can find his work at stephenbaskerville.net.
We'll link to that, of course, in the show notes below the video and in the podcast notes.
Dr.
Baskerville, thank you so much for taking the time today.
My pleasure.
So I'm going to fire a quote at you and we'll just start discussing its ramifications.
I, of course, love the big picture stuff and we can sort of drill into more of the details.
So you wrote this.
Some four decades ago, the Western world embarked on the boldest social experiment in its history.
With no public discussion, laws were enacted in virtually every jurisdiction that ended marriage.
As an enforceable contract.
Now this sort of reminds me of, I think it was under Reagan in California in the 60s that he first put in no-fault divorce, which he later said was one of the greatest regrets of his political career.
But since most people, of course, have now grown up with no idea that marriage ever was an enforceable contract, and here in Canada it used to take an act of parliament to dissolve a marriage, I wonder if you can help people understand just what a massive change this has been.
Well, it had actually been going on for some time.
In some ways, the no-fault divorce law simply codified what had been a trend for some decades.
But the effect is the same.
In the law, marriage is not an enforceable contract.
Almost anywhere that I know of in the Western world.
And effectively, therefore, marriage is abolished without some state recognition, without some enforceability to it.
It's basically an empty contract.
Some people call it a fraudulent contract.
It's certainly a violation of the U.S. Constitution, which prevents the states from enacting any law that nullifies or abrogates contracts.
So it's effectively marriage.
Mikey Gallagher, some years ago, called it the abolition of marriage, and that's effectively what he means.
Well, and of course, there used to be, and we're obviously going to have to generalize about a lot of Western legal institutions here.
It may not apply in your jurisdiction.
But generally, marriage was a lifelong contract which could only be abrogated if one person broke the foundational tenets of that contract.
Usually, abuse or infidelity were the two major ones.
Maybe there were some other ones floating around here and there.
But in the absence of abuse or infidelity, you could not wriggle out of or unilaterally abrogate the contract of marriage.
And then that, of course, changed, I guess, coming on five decades ago.
Where marriage became, well, if you just don't feel like being married anymore, you can just choose to dissolve the contract with not only no negative repercussions, but particularly for women some positive reproductions, almost some incentives.
That's right.
Nobody's advocating that people shouldn't be able to divorce.
In fact, people have always been able to divorce.
The point was that under fault divorce, you had to accept responsibility for your actions.
The party that was at fault, in one way or another, was the one that had to accept the consequences for it.
The concept of no-fault justice is a contradiction in terms.
Not only has it undermined marriage, effectively abolished marriage, it's poisoned the entire judicial system in the Western world.
This process, this contradiction, this oxymoron is spreading out from the marriage contract to the rest of the judiciary as well.
So the courts effectively don't dispense justice anymore.
They dispense social science.
They order people's lives.
They serve as a patronage machine for passing around and handling other people's children.
But they don't dispense justice, strictly speaking, anymore.
And this completely undermines not only marriage, it undermines the whole common law system and the whole basis of a free society.
So, yeah, let's talk about the degree to which basic principles of common law have been abandoned, particularly in family courts.
If you can help people understand what a deviation that's been.
It's very striking indeed.
I mean, at the most basic level, as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes once pointed out, the common law was based on the principle that you're not supposed to be taken to court at all unless you've done something legally wrong.
You've done something either criminal or civil.
You've transgressed some law.
Otherwise, you have a right to be left alone, to stay in your own home and mind your own business.
The divorce law violates this.
It allows unimpeachable citizens, legally innocent people, Who have not violated any law or any contract to be summoned to court and to be subject to the jurisdiction effectively that dictates the fiat of the court and to be incarcerated without trial if they violate the edicts of the court.
This is an astounding revolution of the common law system.
If you look down the, just to take an obvious example, the American Bill of Rights, virtually every point in the American Bill of Rights is routinely violated in the family courts, as I catalog this in my book in some detail.
So you can, of course, if your wife, usually it's the wife, I think you've pointed out, depending on sort of the statistics that you use, you've got two-thirds, sort of 70%, 80%, some guesses even run as high as 90% of the divorces are initiated by the woman.
And even if we were to accept that the contract could be dissolved unilaterally with no negative repercussions...
That doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of what can happen if a woman decides to initiate divorce against a husband and if she then decides to deploy accusations against her husband, what kind of Kafkaesque pit he could slide into.
Well, that's exactly right.
Especially divorces involving children.
When children are present, some lawyers will tell you informally that it's virtually 100% of divorces are filed by women.
And that's right.
Because of the concept of no-fault justice, the party that abrogates the contract or the party that violates the contract, either through adultery or, as you say, through recognized grounds, that party incurs no consequences for his or her actions.
The court simply takes that as given that the marriage is dissolved and the court then proceeds to formally dissolve it.
And then the court proceeds to carve up the lives of both spouses and the children as the court sees fit.
And it has nothing to do with justice.
The court turns into a kind of social service agency, a kind of social worker with a black robe who can then just dictate, who basically can legislate a personal criminal code around every member of the family.
The judge basically legislates a criminal code around you telling you what you can do, where you can go, who you can see, and you're subject to indefinite incarceration without trial if you violate that.
This is obviously intolerable.
It's inconsistent with the common law principles that have ruled throughout the English-speaking countries.
And it's simply intolerable in a free society to allow functionaries to control people's lives this way.
Well, and of course, if you can't afford a lawyer, if you're subject to a criminal complaint in particular, then a lawyer is assigned to you at no cost.
But in these situations, a lawyer can be assigned to you, and often is, and then you are forced to pay for that lawyer whose services you may not have requested or may even dislike.
And failure to pay, as you point out in your books, is cited as contempt of failing to obey the judge's orders.
And so the judge can assign you a lawyer, that lawyer can run up bills, and if you can't pay them, you could be thrown in jail with no trial.
This is one of the most astounding discoveries that I made in writing the book, and it's quite amazing.
People have trouble understanding that.
It's true.
Yes, citizens who are, again, legally unimpeachable, they're sitting in their own homes minding their own business.
They are ordered into court, and then they are ordered to pay the fees of lawyers or psychologists or custody evaluators, a variety of officials.
They're forced to pay their fees on pain of incarceration.
They're simply told that they have to pay $1,000 or $20,000 or $100,000.
We've documented dollars to an official, a lawyer, or somebody else they haven't hired for services they haven't wanted, and they can be jailed without trial if they don't comply.
This is obviously an extortion racket.
The courts are being commandeered by a gang of criminals to shake down innocent people for money.
And it is one of these things that until you find out about it, you can't really believe that it's true.
This side of what used to be called the Iron Curtain many, many years ago, you know, this idea that there's a totalitarian kangaroo courts or star chambers that can try you in secret with no record of the recordings, no recordings of the decisions and no particular accountability and no usually no chance to overturn unless you want to no recordings of the decisions and no particular accountability and no usually no chance to overturn unless you want to And this situation where and we're going to generalize, of course, it does happen from men to women as well.
But in the overwhelming cases, you point out with kids virtually 100%.
So we'll just use the traditional template.
One of the things I think that is important about the law, the law exists because people cannot resolve disputes.
In other words, they're in some irrational or heightened emotional state of mind that renders them unable to negotiate a win-win solution.
So the reason you have a law is because people are already in a state of irrationality to some degree.
And to me then, to look at a situation of divorce where emotions are running about as high as can be conceived of.
You know, it's the end of a family structure.
There's a lot of hatred.
There's a lot of anger.
I think it was Norman Mailer who said, you never really know your wife until you meet her in court.
And it seems to me at a time when emotions are running as high as can be conceived of, giving irrational...
Virtually totalitarian power to one party is guaranteed to create the kind of mess that can take generations to clean up.
Well, I think that's true.
I think, in fact, the imbalance in power is also what causes the problem.
I don't think it's just It's just exacerbating or fanning the flames that are already there.
I think it causes the problem in the first place.
If people know that their violation of the marriage contract is going to bring consequences for them and that they will have to shoulder the consequences of their actions rather than foisting them on their spouse, well, then they're going to have an incentive and they're going to behave.
I mean, we have criminal laws.
We have laws to make people behave themselves and to comport themselves with rationality.
And if you make it well known, if you signal it, that a filing for divorce is nothing, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain, emotionally, financially, in terms of political power even, if you make this known, then people are going to, you're going to create this, these horrible, ugly battles, and that's exactly what's going on now.
And you wrote an astonishing statement, which I really wanted to get out to the People who will listen to this or watch this, you wrote, the astonishing but incontrovertible fact is that with the exception of convicted criminals, no group in our society today has fewer rights than fathers.
That is an astonishing, can you help people sort of understand the layers behind that statement?
Well, that's true.
I've never been contradicted in the years since I wrote that.
Even an accused criminal under the common law system has certain rights, certain protections for his or her constitutional rights.
They have a right for presumption of innocence, a right to protection against double jeopardy, the right to face their accusers, these procedural civil liberties that we're accustomed to or we should be in the common law countries.
In fact, fathers in divorce courts and mothers too sometimes.
Don't have none of these protections.
They have no presumption of innocence.
There's no protection against double jeopardy.
The whole procedure is supposed to be, in theory, a civil procedure, not a criminal one.
And yet they can be incarcerated without trial indefinitely.
We have cases of men being incarcerated for 10 years, allegedly for not paying child support.
And actually, I'd have to check that number of years.
The 10-year one is the record, the biggest one we've found so far.
But still, the point is the same.
I mean, incarceration on that scale at that time, without any trial, without any due process, is again, simply something, and it's happening on a huge scale, too.
I hesitate always to use the phrase with these kinds of disastrous outcomes that people say, well, with the best intentions, people who meant well created a system and then things kind of went awry.
I don't extend that to gruesome systems like communism and so on.
But nonetheless, there must have been some...
Justification that was put forward as to why we needed a parallel quasi-legal system of unaccountable, rights-violating, common law shredding courts.
What was put forward as the justification for these kinds of institutions?
That's a good question.
It was very dishonest from the beginning, and a number of people have pointed this out.
What happened, in fact, is that they were advertised as being divorced by mutual consent.
The argument was that people should have the right to divorce by mutual consent without grounds, rather than having to stage supposedly theatrical staged cases of adultery and so forth.
In fact, this is not what was happening at all.
It's unilateral divorce on demand.
The no-fault laws that were passed in California and subsequently in other states and other countries were, in fact, unilateral divorce, where one spouse can unilaterally divorce the other without any grounds and without accepting any consequences.
So it was very dishonest.
I cannot accept that there were good intentions behind this.
In fact, this is driven by a very ideological agenda.
If you look at the website of the National Association of Women Lawyers, you'll find that feminist lawyers were drafting no-fault divorce laws as early as the 1940s.
And they were unable to pass them in those years.
It wasn't until the sexual revolution of the 1960s When we had the Woodstock hippies and the sexual morality that they promoted, that the divorce laws went through without any discussion, without any debate anywhere.
And this was the atmosphere.
Attention was diverted by Vietnam, by the civil rights conflicts.
And the sexual revolution, the sexual freedom that everybody was extolling in those days, this seemed like a sensible thing to do for some reason.
But there were people at the time that warned that this was dangerous, that this undermined the very concept of a free society, of an independent judiciary, and they were simply ignored.
Right.
Well, it seems hard to discuss these issues without talking about some of the leftist ideology.
And sort of as I have ripened and matured hopefully to some degree in my thinking, I have sort of grown to recognize that the two great Barriers to the expansion of state power are traditional religion, Christianity, And the family, the sanctity of the family, the power of the family.
Where the family functions well, not only is state power resisted, but where the family functions well, state power is less necessary because children who come from two-parent stable households are less liable for criminality, for drug use, for alcoholism, for criminality, for a single motherhood.
All of these things which then require more welfare state, more incarceration, more laws, more intrusiveness and so on.
It's hard to sort of not see that there may have been some sort of pattern that the two things, the two pillars of Western society attacked by leftist Christianity and the sanctity of the family have been pushed in many ways by the same people who wish to expand the power of the state and particularly expand the power of the state's control over the family structure.
No, that's very true.
You put your finger right on that.
Those are two institutions that are alternative centers of morality and ethics and power to the state.
And as they become weaker, the power of the state increases.
This is one of my great quarrels with the libertarians.
Or at least some libertarians who argue we want to have minimal government and less state interference in your lives.
Well, that's a very admirable goal, and I share it.
But if you're not going to have the state regulating morality, then you need alternative, non-coercive, non-governmental associations and institutions like the family, like the church, like civil society organizations, the local community, the neighborhood, the extended family.
Morality has to be enforced by somebody.
We can't do it all from what pops You're right.
Parenthood, for example, is an interesting institution.
I didn't really realize myself until I wrote this book.
But a parent is the only person in our society who is allowed to exercise coercive jurisdiction over another person.
That is to say, his or her own children.
In our society, as John Locke pointed out, the government has a monopoly on the use of force.
The only legitimate use of force is the state, and that's why it's so dangerous and why it must be controlled.
The one exception to that is the parent who can spank their child, who can exercise physical punishments or physical control over another person.
So once you abolish that, once you prevent that from happening or abrogate the rights of parents, you really open the state up to direct control over the household, over the private life, over children, and you really have opened yourself to a totalitarian state.
Right, and just not to shock my listeners, I'm no fan of spanking, to put it mildly, but nonetheless, those are the legal rights that most parents in the West enjoy.
The thing is that the marriage was undone to a large degree without people really understanding the purpose of marriage throughout history.
And as you've written, marriage exists primarily to cement the father's To the family.
I remember long ago in an English literature class reading a Strindberg play where he was basically pointing out that women always know that children are theirs but fathers don't.
And the fact that the father can continue to have children into old age that he could trade in if he's got resources or attractiveness, he can trade in his spouse for a younger spouse, although that may be disapproved of or ridiculed, it's certainly possible.
And so the family in many ways was created and the long-term marriage contract, which in many ways benefits the woman even more than the man because the woman loses her reproductive abilities in her mid-40s, whereas the man can continue Anthony Quinn style into his 80s, it seems.
So, the idea that marriage is there to help the woman by cementing the father to the family, which is why, of course, traditionally, all children born within a marriage union are legally considered the father as no matter what, because, you know, before DNA, that was just the way it had to work.
And so, given that fatherhood is so necessary for the mental and moral health of children, indeed, if not the continuation of civilization, to not put it too mildly, Given that fathers are essential to family and marriage was the way that fathers were cemented to the family, when you undo all of that, when you begin to have sort of no-fault divorce and the breakdown of marriage, you don't end up with motherlessness, you end up with fatherlessness.
And that is true.
You've pointed this out in an article about riots in England, just how disastrous.
It is particularly multi-generationally when you have little boys in particular raised without fathers directly, often without male relatives around, often without other fathers around because single moms tend to aggregate in low-rent housing and so on.
Raised by, you know, they may not see a male teacher until they get to junior high or high school.
This kind of maternal domination of early to mid-childhood Is not producing the paradise that was sometimes promised and seems to be producing a dystopia of, dare I say it, nearly biblical proportions.
No, that's right.
Again, you said it precisely.
This is my disagreement with many conservative defenders of marriage today who are opposing same-sex marriage, for example.
They argue that the purpose of marriage is procreation.
Well, strictly speaking, it's not quite right because tens of millions of single mothers show that procreation is quite possible.
It's impossible without marriage.
What marriage does, as you say, it creates fatherhood.
Motherhood is a biological fact.
It's not disputable.
Fatherhood is constructed socially by artificial institutions like marriage, for most of which is marriage.
And that's why the breakdown, as you say, you allude to Lord Mansfield's law, the Code Napoleon, which says that a child is the, the father is the wife, sorry, the father is the husband of the mother.
That is to say, fatherhood is not produced by sperm donation.
He is produced by marriage.
And it's an extremely important principle.
And that's why when marriage breaks down, when divorce and cohabitation take over, the first instance you have fatherlessness.
Motherlessness may appear after that, but the first stage in the process is usually fatherlessness.
The children may end up without mothers as well and end up in foster care, which is a huge problem.
But if you look at this in these terms, the inextricable link between marriage and fatherhood, then it shows why, first of all, the welfare state is dangerous, as you've alluded to, why the millions, tens of millions of fatherless children are dangerous.
It also shows, by the way, I think more succinctly than many have said, why same-sex marriage makes no sense.
Because again, the purpose is to have fathers.
Not two fathers, not two mothers, but to have a father.
Well, and of course, given the government's involvement in marriage, a lot of people who have same-sex marriage desires are looking to gain the same kind of marital benefits that are conferred on by the state, when of course marriage originally was a private contract, enforceable perhaps through the state, but made in a church or other area.
Two people committing to be together for their life, and if the state was not that involved in marriage, it seems to me not that likely that other groups would try and get in on marriage.
What has become kind of a marriage racket at the moment.
Another thing I wanted to talk about was the degree to which, and I've hit this point repeatedly on my show, but it's one of these things you can't say often enough, is the degree to which when fathers are separated from families, or when that is a distinct possibility, as everybody who gets into marriage generally knows, that it can be a risky proposition.
Then what happens is the uncertainty that women face, single women or divorced women or women in marriages that may not be that stable, the uncertainty that they face creates a vacuum that the state loves to rush in to fill.
And as you pointed out, you're quoting a polling firm, Greenberg, Quinlan Rosner, who reported, American voters in general may shy away from, quote, radical steps such as importing a Canadian style healthcare system.
Unmarried women, however, embrace such a powerful step.
So can we talk a little bit about the degree to which women who are not secure in the protection of a husband tend to gravitate towards increases in state power and security?
Well, it's very true.
In many ways, much of this problem began, if you go back before the divorce revolution, in many ways, the welfare state, much of the roots of this took place in the welfare state.
The welfare state began the process of fatherlessness by effectively evicting fathers in their homes.
Most of the authoritarian machinery That is now in place originated in the welfare state.
I'm thinking of the child support enforcement machinery, the family courts, the domestic violence programs, which are used as an excuse to remove fathers from their homes.
All of these things began in low-income communities in the welfare state.
They have since spread through divorce to the middle class.
But it's that that really needs to be tackled.
And if you look at how much of the financial crisis that faces the Western world since 2008 is attributable to government spending and welfare spending, the welfare state really is one of the things that needs to be tackled, not just from an economic and fiscal standpoint, but from a social one as well.
These fabulous homes, as you point out, are also the main predictors of unsocial behavior, of crime, of substance abuse.
And these are the things that eat up most of our domestic budget as well.
Budgets for education, budgets for health, Law enforcement, incarceration.
So the welfare state is more expensive than just the cost of the handouts.
It also has a multiplier effect by creating crime and other social problems that the state has to solve.
All of this is very serious.
One could also make an argument, I think, too, that same-sex marriage has arisen because of the welfare benefits that accrue.
There's no reason that A same-sex couple has to be in a sexual relationship.
Any two men or two women can marry now and collect multiple welfare benefits.
So that's really, in some ways, the prize that is being dangled in front of people, what's driving, at large measure, the same-sex marriage.
So we need to rethink the whole concept of how far we want the state and provision to be involved in the private lives of families.
Well, as I pointed out on this show, the welfare state is the single mother state.
The two are virtually synonymous.
And of course, whatever you subsidize, you get more of, and whatever you tax, you get less of.
And when people have stable, happy, productive marriages, they get taxed to pay for people who have made, let's just say, not optimal, suboptimal choices in who they've had sex with to be the father of their children.
And so naturally, you know, given the sort of public choice theory that government programs really influence and affect behavior in ways that's somewhat easy to predict when you're taxing stability, And you are subsidizing licentiousness or irresponsibility.
Well, of course, you're going to get less responsibility and more irresponsibility, which means that the problem that you're trying to solve at the beginning, which is relatively small, you're feeding to the point where it can devour the body politic.
Yeah, as you indicated earlier, I think one succinct way of saying this is that, respectively, single mother homes are the state becomes the provider and the protector.
The state usurps the role of the father and becomes kind of the big patriarch.
And then when the father then becomes a rival, a rival to the state who effectively has to be incarcerated to stay out of the way.
So the two functions that the father performs, providing and protecting, are then taken to the state, and they also serve as the excuses to incarcerate the father.
Most fathers are incarcerated for non-payment of child support.
Or for domestic violence.
So again, the protective and providing role of the father becomes to be inverted.
He comes to be the threat to the protection and the provision of women and children.
And he's taken off in handcuffs.
Well, and this is something that is, again, astonishing.
I mean, you have to go back to Charles Dickens in the sort of early to mid part of the 19th century to find examples of debtor's prison.
They generally have been abolished.
The non-payment of debts may get you some negative consequences, but it won't get you a jail cell, with the one exception of state-mandated custody payments, which, you know, and they're not forgivable should you become ill.
Should you lose your job through no fault of your own?
Should your job be shipped overseas?
Should something happen?
The local plant closes down even though you were a good worker, it does not affect or adjust your payment requirements and of course then you go to jail where you can't earn money and then you come out and the interest is accumulated and it really can be a revolving door of near permanent incarceration for some men under some circumstances and that is horribly unjust and recognized as the wrong way to go morally.
Many, many decades ago, but it still remains in this area.
But because men are the victims, it doesn't really seem to.
Because, you know, now it's all deadbeat dads.
And without realizing that, of course, the government stands often with a truncheon between a father and his children to call him a deadbeat dad is, I don't know, like calling a prison cell inmate agoraphobic because he doesn't seem to want to go outside too often.
It's ignoring the coercion around the entire situation.
Now, the one thing I also wanted to mention, which is...
It's a very, very big topic, and this is something which contributes to it, I do believe, is this question of what's called the demographic winter and so on, which is the idea that this is going more so even in Japan than in Europe, to some degree in Canada, to a slightly lesser degree in America.
It's driving lots of debates about multiculturalism and immigration and so on, which is the fact, of course, that Most of the English-speaking native residents of Europe and North America, and Canada in particular, just not having that many kids.
And there are lots of theories that are floating around.
But this idea that the men are going alt or refraining from getting involved in marriage, partly because they probably, a lot of them have seen their own fathers be detonated by the family court system and want to have nothing to do with it.
The long-term effects of the hollowing out of the young, you know, in Japan, they're selling more adult diapers than child diapers these days.
Population dropped by a million just over a few years.
To what degree is this really affecting foundational familial decisions going forward?
That's very interesting, Eric, a question.
I'm not a demographer, but it is fairly clear a number of people put forth this view that men are on strike.
Excuse me.
Helen Smith has written a book called Men on Strike, where she documents this very clearly, that men are effectively boycotting marriage because they can see what is happening, what can happen to them.
They have no, once they marry, they have no control over their livelihood, their home, their persons, and above all, perhaps their children.
All these things can be taken away from them.
And so the men are effectively refusing to marry them.
There are other reasons, too, for the low birth rates as well.
But I think this one is unmistakable.
And it is very strange that people are out there promoting conservative groups and so forth.
They're out there promoting marriage and government programs to promote marriage.
But these programs are very ineffectual and, I think, largely pointless.
If you look at the incentives, the disincentives that are built into the divorce system, in some ways, no man in his right mind will marry and have a family.
A few years ago, there was a group in Britain that was touring university campuses and they were warning young men not to marry because of what could happen to them in the divorce courts.
Well, of course, it's not like having sexual relations with a woman these days at any college campus is not without its risks as well.
That can be quite exciting and a great challenge for some men should there be regret and mind changed after the fact.
Now, when it comes to reform, It's a tale as old as the legal system that some people say that the primary business of law is to invent business for itself.
How can such a system that is so financially invested and so accepted as a necessary and positive part of the legal system by the majority of people who haven't got this kind of information, what kind of reforms do you think are possible and how could they be achieved?
Well, the actual reforms needed are really very simple.
It really means a matter of enforcing the constitutions of most of the free societies.
If you simply make marriage a legal contract, so it doesn't mean that you can't divorce, that couples can't separate.
It means that you have to accept the consequences of what you do.
If you commit adultery, if you cheat on your spouse, or if you want out of the marriage without any legal grounds, well, then you have to accept the consequences.
You may have to leave the marriage By yourself, you may not be able to take all of the goods with you.
You may not be able to take the children with you if the spouse has done nothing wrong.
So simply by enforcing the standard common law protections that we all thought we enjoyed, the right to sit in your own home, to mind your own business, to be left in peace, to be left in peace with your children if you have committed no offense, no transaction that's legally recognized, If these things were simply recognized, the US Bill of Rights, the English Bill of Rights, the traditional protections of the common law, this would take care of it.
But it's not that we lack the mechanisms to do this.
They're all in place.
What we lack is the political will.
What we lack is the courage to take on this huge lobby Of not only feminists, but family court lawyers, social workers, family court judges, a huge entourage, a huge mafia, really, of both public officials and private industry now, which has a vested interest, frankly, to put it to the bottom line, in separating as many children from their fathers as possible.
And that's what has to be fought.
Yes, I mean, it is something that the battle would be long and hard.
And of course, you know, a lot of politicians have had their own divorces and that could be whatever party took it on could be accused of hypocrisy for those kinds of things.
But of course, you know, you probably have learned a lot about the court system by being divorced.
So I mean, a divorced person might be the perfect person to bring this kind of stuff up.
But as you point out, it would be a very long and difficult battle.
And the rewards would not accrue to the politician in power.
This is one of the general problems of course with democracy, that the things which affect society for the best generally take up to a generation to manifest, which is longer than the career of most politicians.
And so it seems there's a lot of incentives against it.
Few four accept this sort of passionate desire to do what the family courts say that they claim to do, to act in the best interests of the children and the best interests, of course, of women.
You know, women are statistically the safest when they're in a marriage and children are the happiest when they're in marriage.
So if we are interested in protecting women and acting for the best interests of children, we should be doing everything possible to promote marriage, not weaken the foundations of its stability.
Right.
And as to the question about the coalition, the political likeliness of doing this, I think it's important to realize that what's going on against fathers in divorce courts doesn't exist in isolation.
There are other people that go through similar kinds of violations of the process of law.
Many of them are promoted by the same lobby of feminists and government lawyers as the divorce courts.
And if all of these people, I'm thinking of people, for example, of families, parents, even intact parents, two parents, who were accused of spurious child abuse accusations and whose children were taken away from them.
Sometimes they're homeschoolers, sometimes they're Christians who have traditional views of But they can very easily lose their children on the flimsiest charges of child abuse.
You alluded earlier to universities where young men in North America and now in Britain and elsewhere are accused of rape and sexual assault.
Again, very flimsy evidence.
Most people are pretty clear it didn't happen.
These are fabrications of rape accusations.
We have a whole series of these kinds of things.
Fathers, deadbeat dads, false rape accusations, false sexual assault accusations, false child abuse accusations, accusations of nebulous crimes like bullying.
If all of the people that were the targets of these abrogations of justice got together and spoke with the United Voice and then looked at the parallels between these different facets of the problem, I think you'd have quite a large number of people that could speak out and do something about this.
This, in fact, is what my next book is about.
It's showing how the fatherhood crisis is part of a much larger crisis of the judiciary and the government generally invading people's private lives and abrogating their civil liberties.
Well, this is one of the very frustrating things that people who have a good case and a good argument to make usually don't need to create parallel institutions to mirror I mean, there is, of course, if a woman is genuinely raped on campus, then, of course, there is an existing legal system to deal with that and punish, as has been the case in Western law for thousands of years, punish the rapist severely, and that is entirely right and just.
So you shouldn't need some sort of parallel system of these committees, you know, where the accused is not allowed to confront the accuser, sometimes not even allowed to have legal representation and so on.
You should not need to create parallel institutions.
You should be able to achieve what you want working within the existing legal system.
And I always have this great suspicion, Stephen, when I see people who say, well, we can't get what we want this way, so we're going to create some parallel institution with lower standards in order to get what we want.
Because my question is, well, maybe what you want isn't the right thing.
No, that's very true.
I mean, nobody is, contrary to what we're accused of, nobody is arguing against laws against rape or assault or battery or child molestation or any of the other things.
These are crimes, and they've been statutes on the books to deal with them for generations.
What we're dealing with here is the reinvention, new crimes that, as you say, circumvent the standards of justice.
Government officials openly talk about redefining rape, a new definition of rape, or creating domestic violence measures when there's already laws in the books against violent assault, or child abuse measures when there's already laws That prevent people from sexually or physically abusing another person, whether it's your own child or not.
So these newfangled laws, these newfangled hysterias is what they amount to in many ways, are often ways to bypass the criminal statutes like rape or physical assault and to bypass the protections that the common law systems give to the accused.
Right.
It's hard also to imagine...
I'm a big one, of course, the traditional Western approach to ethics is universality, right?
And if you can't universalize a particular system or approach, then it's almost invalid by definition.
It's a self-detonating statement to say something is moral, therefore universal, but cannot be applied universally.
And it's hard for me to imagine any other system of human conflict, human disagreement, whether it's civil or criminal, wherein...
You could have these kinds of standards.
If you have a disagreement with your neighbor, as you point out, over a fence, well, you can't just rip down the fence and force your neighbor to pay for something.
You have to go through.
And if you've unjustly accused someone, there should be negative repercussions for those things.
If you lie in court, there should be negative repercussions and so on.
And all of this is something that you could not take the principles that are currently at play in divorce and in family court and apply them to any other sphere that I can think of without completely undermining any legitimacy or justice in those spheres.
And this should give people some cause for concern.
Well, that's very true.
But unfortunately, that is what's happening.
The principles that are being put in place in divorce courts and these sexual crimes, these gender crimes, are spreading out into other areas, and they are poisoning the judiciary.
Again, my next book will outline this in many ways.
You can see this even in international organizations like the United Nations and the European Union.
They are applying internationally now.
They are using the principles of Anglo-American divorce law.
And putting them into areas of international social work and international child protection.
So this stuff can't remain isolated.
There's no firebreak between divorce courts and the rest of the courts.
As Dr.
Martin Luther King said, an injustice anywhere is a collective justice everywhere.
Once bad justice drives out good justice, once you put these bogus principles into place and allow men to be treated unjustly in divorce courts, for example, this sets a precedent, which can be used in other courts.
For example, if you look at the rape accusations in university campuses, these are justified because the young men who are accused on university campuses are not jailed.
They're simply expelled from the university.
And so, therefore, they don't need due process of law, it is argued.
But there's no way that these Principals are going to remain isolated to the universities.
They're going to spread out to the criminal judiciary, and they're going to be used in real rape cases or real criminal accusations where people do live in jeopardy of incarceration.
So, you know, this is poisoning our legal system in a very serious way.
Well, and of course, the first thing to do with these kinds of things is to expose them.
When would your new book be coming out, do you think?
I hope it will be out later this year.
Oh, okay, good.
Well, obviously, keep us posted.
We'll do what we can to help promote it.
I really, really do appreciate your time today, Dr.
Baskerville.
Really wanted to remind people, go to stephenbaskerville.net and check out his book.
We'll put an Amazon link to it below.
Taken into custody, the war against fathers, marriage and the family.
I really appreciate the work that you're doing to help people See this.
It's the kind of thing that until you're in it, you don't really see it.
And once you're in it, it's highly hazardous to speak out against it for fear of negative repercussions from the system itself.
So thanks so much for all the work that you're doing to promote this.
And I hope that we can get you some books out there and get some people reading your stuff.
It's essential and important stuff for people to understand.
