Local groups on federal "hate list"
Kamloops This Week, Kamloops B.C., June 6, 2003
Mickey MacMillan shakes his head in disbelief.
His name and the organization he founded in Kamloops — Parents of Broken Families — is on what he calls a “hit list” of men's groups, groups which are accused of promoting hatred against women.
MacMillan' s name is not the only one on the list attached to the end of a federally-funded report which claims “masculinists” (or male activists in men' s groups) are organizing a campaign against feminism and blaming women for oppressing and discriminating men.
There are five from B.C., including another Kamloops resident, Todd Eckert, president of the Parents Coalition of B.C.
MP Betty Hinton calls it a “hate watch list” and raised the issue in Parliament Thursday during question period.
“Why did the minister spend $75,000 on a project which is a poorly disguised attack on men and families?”
She argued the report, School Success by Gender: A Catalyst for the Masculinist Discourse, is filled with hate and inflammatory language which does nothing to raise the status of women but everything to denigrate men, families and parent organizations.
Hinton has attended two Parents of Broken Families meetings and insists they're not anti-women.
“These are fathers and mothers and children and grandchildren who are being denied access to their parents, their kids, their grandparents.”
The report recommends the establishment of a Hate Watch group to monitor men' s groups on the Internet, adding the incitement of hatred on the basis of gender as a hate crime, and the organization of women' s groups to counter the masculinists' views.
MacMillan says he hasn' t committed a crime and doesn' t like his name being smeared on a government-funded report.
“They' re doing this to me just because I want a fair shake for fathers and children.”
That fair shake, he says, is in equal access or shared parenting in child custody cases.
MP Hinton, meanwhile, has written a letter to the secretary of state for the Status of Women urging the names of the two Kamloops-based organizations be dropped from the list contained in the federally funded report.
Copyright 2003 Kamloops This Week
