Cover Your Stump Before You Hump!
A computer programmer from Michigan is set to file a lawsuit today in the U.S. District Court there. With assistance from the amusingly titled National Center for Men, Matt Dubay is contending that his constitutional rights are being violated by a court order obligating him to pay $500 a month in child support. You see, Mr. Dubay didn’t want to be a father. But apparently, whenever he protested his now ex-girlfriend’s distaste for the latex, she assured him that she was sterile due to a medical condition. Was she lying? Maybe. Is he lying? Maybe. But the important thing here is not the details of the case being made. Judges are sworn to uphold and interpret our laws, but a major perk of the job description is the reinforcement of societal values at the expense of strictly rational logic. In this case, society says “tough shit Casanova, pay the bitch”, and so will the judges.
We Americans are good people. We’re not smart, we aren’t nuanced, and we want to be told how to think as long as the mechanisms that manipulate us are sufficiently indistinguishable from entertainment. Those of us that are aware that there are Non-America parts of the world, even tend to feel good about the global cultural Americanization that we’ve been exporting for so many decades. Now, I’m no historian, but near as I can tell we started down this slippery slope way back in 1960 when oral contraceptives (aka “The Pill”) was made available. The knucklehead supreme court justices who made this possible were also good people. They were also very smart, if not very forward-thinking. They believed that the Constitution implies the existence of the so-called “right to privacy”. If such a right had actually been written in by the forefathers, our lives today would be unrecognizably different. Better late than never, right? Well, no… because these justices were only activist enough to apply their belief of this right to the matter of marital sexual privacy; paving the way for Roe vs. Wade in 1973. But before we get too far ahead, marital sexual privacy?
Simply put, they believed that government shouldn’t get to tell women whether or not they have to bear a child. Souls, sperm, and embryonic zygotes aside, this is a good-hearted notion. Back off big brother! Except, the decision effectively empowered women to cheat on their husbands as easily as men cheat on their wives. Like men, women could now sleep around without having to choose between breaking the law in order to keep from being found out or seeking an illegal abortion after the fact. In 1972 our cultural slide advanced when the decision was extended in another high-profile case. Building from the first decision, this time the “right of privacy” was extended to all procreative decisions by anyone, married or unmarried. Now, by the powers of science and law, every woman was assured her right to be just as unfaithful as any man.
The next year we got Roe v. Wade, the decision that Matt Dubay and the National Center for Men are claiming to emulate in his quest to deprive the unwanted fruit of his loins from $500 a month. Was Roe v. Wade a bad decision? My own answer to this is that so far it is. It stands for something good, the importance of certain individual rights over the rights of society; specifically with regard to the fate of our bodies. But the cultural revolution set forth with that little pink pill is far from over. By all accounts, Matt Dubay is an asshat. But the indecency of his arguments is just a reflection of the cultural decline that results when social playing fields become artificially levelled by scientists and judicial activists. Whether these advances are bad ultimately depends on where we draw the line in the balances between the social good and personal freedom. So far, things keep getting worse all the time.
Still, men should not have the right to opt-out of paying child support. Please! It might seem like a fair compensation for some of those who look poorly on a woman’s right to choose, but child-support is part of the glue that holds society together. In this sense, it isn’t unlike the little devil who used to sit on the shoulders of women telling them not to screw around on their men. Unburdened by the possibility of financial obligation, man’s subconscious biological imperative would likely lead to the kind of empowerment that made women dare to burn their bras. Instead of “Girls Gone Wild” and parents who mistakenly want badly to befriend their kids we might someday have powerful lesbian polygamist rights groups and a dire need for laws to protect masculine heterosexual men from rampant discrimination.
Now that I’m dangerously close to ending this post without straying off-topic, I should add that there is a potentially worthy cause that this National Center for Men could take on. With recent SCOTUS appointments looming over the future of Roe v. Wade, it may be time for a reasonable compromise. If a woman chooses to terminate her pregnancy but the father insists she bear the child in the interest of protecting his child’s right to life, perhaps he should have the right to that protection. If you give the mother a list of conditional provisions to balance this right, I don’t see why it would be unjust. For instance, suppose he agrees to her compatible selections among marriage, prenuptial voided divorce, his taking full custody, his forfeiting his adoption rights, his paying child support, and his acceptance of reversible vasectomy. I doubt that many men, regardless of their self-proclaimed love for Jesus, would save their tadpolean babies if it meant having to prove their decency with more than words anyway. Still, it would be nice to have a true National Center for Men. They should have just named theirs Planned Fatherhood.
