Christmas in a War Zone
By Wendy McElroy, Tuesday, December 23, 2003
What does Christmas look like in a war zone? Not in Iraq, but in North America -- where a cultural war is being waged between the right and the left over issues ranging from grade-school curricula to the definition of marriage.
I want to be a conscientious objector and allow people to make their own choices about their own lives, even if I disagree. But too often those choices get translated into laws or policies that govern my life and my family. This makes political pacifism impossible.
Christmas should be a demilitarized zone: a cultural cease-fire for people to give thanks for the great good fortune of being born into the freedom and prosperity of North America. But a DMZ is unlikely...at least judging from the ongoing and politically correct attempt to ban even secular expressions of Christmas from the public schools. The Anti-Defamation League calls Christmas "December's Dilemma." The ADL goes far beyond the reasonable separation of church and state by trying to prohibit even the singing of "Jingle Bells" by school children.
Christmas has become a political battle from which you should shield your family. How? Laws take time to change; arguing consumes time. But a powerful weapon can be wielded easily and immediately. It is something that everyone wants from you: your consumer dollar.
The power of the consumer was recently revealed when CBS made the business decision to yank "The Reagans" from its network line-up. So many people vowed to boycott sponsors of the biased docudrama that airing it on primetime TV became financially imprudent.
The left screamed "CENSORSHIP!" but the opposite was true. Censorship is the suppression of words or images through force, usually by law. The threatened "boycott" was nothing more than consumers exercising the freedom of speech to say "no" to a product and to the people peddling it. It was discretionary spending in the free market of ideas.
This Christmas -- and in the year to come -- flex your discretion. Remove your dollars from companies that promote vicious ideas and refuse to support those who sponsor them, e.g. through distribution.
Let me illustrate what I mean by "vicious ideas" through one example: the gender feminist attack on men that causes us to take for granted or even smile at the widespread defamation of males.
Bon-Macy's, a prominent department store in Washington state, has just ceased to sell a T-shirt reading, "Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them," which features the image of a small boy running away as several rocks hurl toward his head. The reason: customers complained about Bon-Macy's sanctioning child abuse.
The company's spokeswoman Kristi Oishi reportedly said: "We believe that the voice of our customers is very important...while these products have been in high demand from many Bon-Macy's customers since they were introduced this fall, we listened to what our customers have recently shared with us and decided to pull the merchandise from the floor."
The recent "sharing" was the direct result of a protest campaign launched by radio talk host Glenn Sacks who -- as the father of an 11-year-old boy -- said the T-shirt made his blood boil. It also made other little boys feel "unsafe."
The shirt in question comes from the clothing manufacturer David & Goliath. D&G's attitude toward boys -- to judge from their website and the messages on various T-shirts -- seems to wink at or even advocate child abuse. That is, as long as the child is male.
The entrance to the D&G site displays a short animation that opens with a small boy in a "Stupid Factory" -- that's where boys are produced. When the factory crumbles around him, he is revealed to be on a toilet, bare-bottomed. A little girl pelts him on the skull with a large rock and he tumbles, landing with his head planted fully in the earth, his wriggling buttocks exposed. A display at the bottom of the page points people toward sources for T-shirts, including a store at the presumably child-friendly Universal Studios.
Clicking through to the imprinted shirts in D&G's "boys are stupid/smelly" line reveals the following messages, complete with images of frightened or injured small boys:
--Boys are Stupid -- Throw Rocks at Them
--Boys Lie -- Poke Them in the Eye
--Boys are Goobers -- Drop Anvils on their Heads
--Boys Lie -- Make Them Cry
--Boys are Smelly -- Throw Garbage Cans at Them
--Boys are Full of It -- Fling Poop at Them.
To those who object, D&G offers the response: their critics have no sense of humor. Besides which, a "spokesman for David and Goliath says the company has sold millions of shirts with this message [Throw Rocks at Boys]. It's their best seller."
Hate mongering is a lucrative business and the best remedy is to yank away the financial incentive. Boycott both the manufacturers and the distributors of any product that endorses the hatred or abuse of children, male or female. Tell vendors how you feel; ask "sponsors" like Universal Studios if they guarantee their safety of your son while on their premises.
Oh...and, when you do so, show a sense of humor. Laugh in the face of anyone who says you shouldn't be concerned.
Wendy McElroy is the editor of ifeminists.com and a research fellow for The Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. She is the author and editor of many books and articles, including the new book, "Liberty for Women: Freedom and Feminism in the 21st Century" (Ivan R. Dee/Independent Institute, 2002). She lives with her husband in Canada.
Fathers demand mandatory paternity testing
A men's rights group has called for mandatory paternity testing of all babies after government figures revealed almost 600 instances of men compelled to financially support children they did not father.
Since changes to child support laws four years ago, there had been 586 cases of men successfully using DNA testing to show they were not biologically related to children they had been financially supporting, the federal government has revealed to The Australian.
DNA test confirms fraud, annulment granted: judge
The Visayan Daily Star, Bacolod City, Philippines, BY CARLA GOMEZ, February 28, 2009
Bacolod Regional Trial Court Judge Ray Alan Drilon has annulled the marriage of a Negrense couple after a DNA test showed that the child borne by the wife was not the biological offspring of the husband who works abroad.
The family court judge ruled that the marriage of the couple, whose names are being withheld by the DAILY STAR on the request of the court, was null and void.
Due to fraud committed by the wife in getting her overseas worker husband to marry her, properties acquired during their marriage are awarded in favor of the husband, the judge said in his decision, a copy of which was furnished the DAILY STAR yesterday.
The judge also declared that since the overseas worker is not the biological, much less the legitimate father of the child of the woman, the Civil Registrar is ordered to change the surname of the child to the mother's maiden name and remove the name of the plaintiff as father of the child.
The complainant said he was working as an electronics engineer in the United Arab Emirates and on his return to the Philippines in 2001, his girlfriend of 10 years with whom he had sex, showed him a pregnancy test result showing that she was pregnant.
On receiving the news he was overjoyed and offered to marry her. Shortly after he went to Saudi Arabia to work, and his wife gave birth to a baby girl in the same year.
The birth of the child only five months after their marriage puzzled him but his wife told him that the baby was born prematurely, so he believed her, the husband said. Read More ..
Scotland's National Newspaper
96% of women are liars, honest
5,000 women polled
Half the women said that if they became pregnant by another man but wanted to stay with their partner, they would lie about the baby's real father.
Forty-two per cent would lie about contraception in order to get pregnant, no matter the wishes of their partner.
Adulterous woman ordered to pay husband £177,000 in 'moral damages'
The Daily Mail, UK
18th February 2009
An adulterous Spanish woman who conceived three children with her lover has been ordered to pay £177,000 in 'moral damages' to her husband.
The cuckolded man had believed that the three children were his until a DNA test eventually proved they were fathered by another man.
The husband, who along with the other man cannot be named for legal reasons to protect the children's identities, suspected his second wife may have been unfaithful in 2001.
Courier-Mail Newspaper
Australia
Unfaithful mother fined $120,170
From correspondents in Rio de Janeiro
Agence France-Presse
September 18, 2007
A BRAZILIAN woman has been ordered by the country's Supreme Court to pay a hefty fine to her husband for failing to mention that he was not the father of two of their children.
The Rio de Janeiro woman, whose identity was not disclosed, was ordered to pay her husband over $US100,000 ($120,170 Australian Dollars) for having hidden from him for almost two decades that the children in question were fathered by a lover, the court's offices said yesterday.
The husband also had sought damages from his wife's lover, the court said.
Fathering Magazine
A Woman's Right to be Criminal
December 5, 2002
I read a USA Today article on child support by Martin Kasindorf entitled, Men wage battle on 'paternity fraud'. Paternity fraud is when a woman names the wrong man as a father for the purpose of forcing him to pay child support. The words 'paternity fraud' were in quotes as if they referred to someone's questionable characterization rather than a straightforward fact. This might have moved me to let out a long sigh except that I knew it would not have been worth the trouble. I know from experience that 'paternity fraud' would not have been in quotes unless we were being prepared for some unadulterated bullshit.
Who's the Daddy?
Up to three million Britons may be wrong about who their real father is , experts claim. But using DNA paternity tests to discover the truth can cause its own problems.
BBC, U.K., May 16, 2003
Dad's got blue eyes, Baby brown...
When Tessa found out she was pregnant after fertility treatment, she felt a mix of delight and doubt.
This wasn't simply pre-baby nerves - she suspected that her husband might not be the father. For Tessa had started sleeping with a colleague when the stress of the ongoing treatment became too much.
Keen to build a family with her husband, she let him believe the baby was his. But her lover threatened to reveal all if she ended the affair, and Tessa soon fell pregnant again. This time, her lover started to make nuisance calls to her home.
Tessa had no choice but to tell her husband. "I said to him, 'I've had an affair and you may not be the father of my children.' So with that, he went up the stairs, got dressed and left. And that was it," Tessa says in Women Who Live a Lie, a programme for the BBC's Five Live Report.
Biology, not heart, provokes women's infidelity
Sydney Morning Herald, Australia
January 15, 2009
BEAUTIFUL women who have affairs can now blame it on their sex hormones.
Women with higher levels of oestradiol, a form of oestrogen, not only look and feel more attractive, they are also more likely to cheat on their partners, a new study has found.
One-night-stands are not what interest these flirtatious females, who tend to have bigger breasts, relatively small waists and symmetrical faces as a result of their high levels of oestradiol.
Rather, they adopt a strategy of serial monogamy, say the researchers, led by Kristina Durante of the University of Texas.
Would you wear the jacket?
THERE IS A story I used to find hilarious in my high school years about a not too bright man. He was light skinned, his wife was of similar hue, but their first child was born with very dark complexion (darker dan Bello, blacker dan Blakka).
When the man wondered aloud about the baby's complexion his wife assured him that the child was born dark because the child was conceived in darkness (they had sex with the lights off). The man accepted the explanation. Because he loved his wife dearly, he also ignored the fact that the child had other obvious signs of resemblance to the young dark skinned man who did their gardening. To fix the problem, the husband put flood lights, strobe lights, spotlights and forty other lights in the bed room so there would be no more darkness to create dark babies.