Angelo Agathangelou: Originally known by the title I presented above and more recently as 'The Real Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name', it has been too long since our fellow father's rights activist Sir Bob Geldof's attempt to begin to dissect the quagmire that is modern society with regards to the family and the misandric path taken by the now secret kangaroo UK family courts. Too long because after years of campaigning the situation is even worse for fathers today and it seems that all we [the global award winning fathers' rights campaign for several consecutive years 'F4J' and the wider movement that has carried the torch forward] have achieved is the solidification of the gynocentric feminist position. Therefore please find once again a copy of the abridged version below of an historic document, a damning marker of how very far it still remains for us to climb and must read for any in the movement.
BECAUSE OF STATEMENTS I have made on TV and elsewhere, I was
invited by the editors to participate in the
seminars convened by the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group, and to write what can
clearly only be a lay view for this book. If my contribution is of any use, it will
be, I suppose, in the shape of the amateur absolutist and iconoclast. The kicking
up of an impassioned, but informed, fuss is the role Nature seems to have
assigned me. Family law is not my field of expertise but it is certainly my field of
experience and like many, many men in this country, it left me feeling
criminalised, belittled, worthless, powerless and irrelevant. I wrote this chapter very
quickly, allowing those emotions to determine the outcome.
***
A Sometimes Coherent Rant
BOB GELDOF
PROLOGUE
I had no idea, and did not even care,
whether it made sense or had any basis in fact but it was all true, and was what I
and thousands more had experienced and found wanting. I assumed that my eminent
collaborators in this work would be embarrassed by me and unwittingly
patronising. They were not. They were in fact hugely tolerant, sympathetic and often, to
my dismay, in agreement with my inchoate groping towards the dark heart of
this matter. I learned much from them.
They sent me papers which put solid,
researched fact behind my assumptions and observations. They argued amongst
themselves, and with me, over parts of the piece. In the end, however, I have
changed nothing because I believe still that what I wrote is true and just. Its
emotional tone is what is required to change this hugely destructive assault on our
personal lives, which in turn endangers this society through an onerous and
disgraceful Family Law and the system that must implement it.
I have tried incorporating supportive texts
and arguments into the body of the piece to lend a greater credibility or
weight—texts which my colleagues sent me, arguments which were thrashed out in
the seminar—but it seemed presumptuous. I do not want to give the
impression that I am an expert or
pseudo-professional. I am not. But maybe,
unlike them, I am someone lacerated by this law, which contributed massively to
the misery of my family. That is expert enough. Instead, claiming, and being
allowed privileged, non-academic and profoundly unprofessional behaviour by
my weary editors, I have included in an addendum the relevant texts, quotes, arguments
and statistics (referring to them in the main text by number, with the
references I have come across). I hope they serve three functions: firstly, they
give credence to my uninformed thought; secondly, they make me appear a little less
extreme or idiotic; and finally they may help force the sure and soon day that
these baleful diktats will be scornfully shoved aside.
* * *
Family Law as it currently stands does not
work. It is rarely of benefit to the child, and promotes injustice, conflict and
unhappiness on a massive scale.
29,43,45
This law will not work for the reason that
society itself and society’s expec-tations have changed utterly. Law must constantly evolve in order to keep
pace with the dynamics of the society within which it is framed. Social law, specifically that governing
human relationships, will need to evolve ever faster particularly in an age
of unprecedented and confusing change. Deeply cherished nostrums of the ages are
as nothing when confronted with a different moral structure to that in which
those beliefs took root. The endless proposed adjustments with
Family Law will not do. They do not eliminate the injustices or aid the
intended beneficiaries. An unthink- ing tinkering with Family Law becomes unjustified
tampering with peoples lives. Adjustments imply satisfaction with the
core structure, but in the case of Family Law, my view is that this is
inappropriate on the basis that this same law promotes pain, hurt and broken families in
direct and unintended contradiction to its purpose.
33,43,44,45
It serves merely to compound the
self-inflicted damage done to the individuals who come before it. Therefore, just as society appears to be in
a state of fundamental and perhaps revolutionary change, the professionals of
the law must be prepared to think afresh, and act boldly.
38,44
This would mean new basic law. I understand few believe this is necessary,
and that it is too drastic or danger-ously radical or just silly but I will try
to give my, no doubt, poorly conceived notions a rationale. Sometimes my attempt at being dispassionate
will fail and I will be seized by the actual deep rage I feel at what the
system has done to my family, myself and many others I know personally or from the
over 70 plastic bin liners of letters I have received from individuals unknown to
me. This amounts to thousands of letters. Many more than I ever received
during Live Aid or the Boomtown Rats or at any other period of my ‘public life’.
As Bob Dylan might have said ‘Something’s going on and you don’t know
what it is. Do you Lord Chief Justice Whatever-your-name-is?’ We’d better find out. I will try and break down the factors that
I believe have changed and which, as a result, require a change of law.
Beyond that this is the story of those 70 bin liners—the love of fathers for their
children.
SOCIETY
Given that the birth of children through
the institution of marriage and the desired end result of Family as the basic
block of society is of cardinal import-ance to our stability and social coherence
we must start here.
60,61
All of the assumptions in the above sentence however
are now up for grabs.
50,63
Today, Government tries to deal with
differing views of what is Family, and each view insists upon equal validity. This
is perhaps inevitable in an age of moral relativism, itself an adjunct to our
secular times. This alone is a massive change and something some members of the
judiciary seem to be unable to grasp. The real and significant change that
occurred however, the paradigm shift as an American might say, was of course, the
‘emancipation’ of women.
1,34,36,38
Financial freedom, and the end of
biological determinism, produced an overdue and welcome balance in society. Its
disruptive consequences to the status quo however, could not be predicted but it
has been massive and it has not stopped yet.
Economics determine social arrangements. It
has affected all areas of society but most profoundly and inevitably in the
relationship between the sexes and, as a result, Family. There have been other
exogenous factors contributing to societal shifts but the effect of women
free to enter the workplace has given rise to consumerism, altered production, home
ownership and house building models, and whole areas of law and sentiment
within society itself. Very little has been left unchanged by this huge and
positive social movement and most of those changes have strained the old glues
that bound the family into the breadwinner/nurturer/children model.
38
This model worked well enough for centuries
and where it can still be sustained works well today. The cardinal and
excellent difference between now and the past is that it is not clear until it is
determined by the couples in question who will do the breadwinning and who the nurturing or
whether it will be both simultaneously.
And yet while individuals struggle with
these difficult new conundrums the law governing the, if you will, ‘intimate’
parts of society, the ‘personal’ laws, remain (though some are fairly recently
drafted) resolutely unaltered in their presumptions, save for the pathetic
pretence that they are gender neutral. This is a grotesque lie that all Family Law
professionals have tacitly agreed to be The Real Love that Dare Not Speak its Name
3
party to, as willingly acknowledged by
nearly all the lawyers I have talked to on
this issue.
26,28
And regardless of whether the professionals
acknowledge it to be or not, the vast majority of my
correspondents, friends and others regard it to be so. If this is the commonly held view
then the law will change. It is simply a question of when.
The law appears unwilling or unable to
accept the change in the way we now barter our relationships. The altered state
of women has of course produced the altered state of men. Men cannot be the
same because women are not.
5
The law will not acknowledge this and it must.
4
It appears bewildered, as indeed famously do the men in question. What is
their new role? What is expected of them? How do they now define themselves in
this more fluid brave new world?
And if the world is more fluid, if it now
flexes, bends and warps like morality itself, why is the law so rigid, so
inflexible and fixed that its application to individuals binds them to an overweening and
restrictive State of Orwellian proportions—the common experience of those who
find themselves as victims of the secret world of Family Law.
Divorcees are not criminals, women are not
angels, men are not ogres. Recent rulings have produced two classic examples
of the bewildering and blinkered confusion at the inflexible heart of the
law. One ruling was given against the man who had successfully raised his
children at home for 5 years while his wife went to work. She got the children??? She
got them because she was a woman. The eminent male judge in question said so.
4
Two weeks later, another ruling by the same judge was given against a woman who sought potential lovers on the Internet. The children were given to
the man??? These rulings show no understanding of contemporary society, the appear flagrantly prejudiced and discriminatory in clear breach of any
‘gender neutral’ guidelines or law, and per-fectly illustrate the law’s inability to
come to terms with the modern age. The law must now root itself in reality and not social work theorising or emotive or traditional notions of men and women’s roles. I am not the first to call for this:
a recent report published by the Work
Foundation, which argues for father-friendly workplaces, notes that:
Older fathers—the dinosaur dads—are
currently the ones in the most senior positions and so have a disproportionate influence.
Most continue to see the world through the lens of their own generation’s experience
i.e. a world of bread winning men and child-rearing women. (Reeves, 2002).
Something like 51 per cent of the workforce
are women. The implication of this figure is staggering and yet does not
appear to be considered in relation to family law. In addition men now hold a
completely different view of the par-enting role than before. Again this is a
huge philosophical shift which has enor-mous implications.
11,16,28
There are no studies which suggest that a
child brought up by a man (as I was) display any marked psychological or emotional
characteristics different to one raised by a woman.
3
The contention that women are inherently
better nurturers is wrong.
3,4,7,22,23,28
Rulings appear to be based on the ‘sugar
and spice and all things nice’ school of Biological
Determinism rather than on anything more significant. The law to its eternal
discredit stands in the way of great and important cultural and social progression
and as such will be swept aside despite the legal Luddites who opine secretly from
their benches. Kimmell (2002) is entirely correct in asserting that if
the later twentieth century saw the transformation of women’s lives then the
transformation of the twenty-first century involves the transformation of
men’s lives, and by definition the lives of their children.
My complaints are not the moans of the
unsuccessful litigant. I, in fact, was ‘successful’. This was someone dismayed by
the inappropriateness of the law to the everyday.
Nor is this the complaint of the
proto-misogynist, indeed the law is so inept it produces misandrists in equal measure,
but rather the irritation and anger of someone who sees exact parallels with
women’s struggle against assumptions, bias and prejudice.
2
LANGUAGE
We have indeed been here before. Female
emancipationists of the 60s and 70s found, as they set out their agenda for
change, that the very language militated against them. The issue of language becomes
incredibly potent as attitudes change. Words once used frequently become
freshly freighted with meaning, emotion and unintended insult and need to
be changed. This of course can escalate to the realms of madness and the
thought police (rather like the consequences of Family Law) but in the
everyday use and their meaning, and therefore import, they carry whole ideas
that when heard afresh from a different perspective need to be adjusted.
This is never more true than in the language used in Family Law.
In this new era of ‘Family Liberation’ as
it were, where the law itself and its officers, attendants and practitioners are
the instruments of reaction and discrimination, the language used to discuss
the personal appears to have been deliberately chosen to be as cold,
deadening and hopeless as possible in the hope of appearing neutral. In fact it becomes
heartbreaking, hurtful, rage inducing and an instrument of absolute harm in the
entire process.
I cannot even say the words. A huge
emptiness would well in my stomach, a deep loathing for those who would deign to
tell me they would ALLOW me ACCESS to my children—those I loved above
all, those I created, those who gave meaning to everything I did, those
that were the very best of us two and the absolute physical manifestation of our once
blinding love. Who the fuck are they that they should ALLOW anything?
REASONABLE CONTACT!!!
Is the law mad? Am I a criminal? An ABSENT
parent. A RESIDENT NON-RESIDENT parent. This Lawspeak which
you all speak so fluently, so unthinkingly, so hurtfully, must go.
Indeed, like the law returning to a
wholesale root and branch re-drafting as I believe it must, we should look while we’re
here at the two most basic words that permeate this issue: Mother and
Father.
If a woman ‘mothers’ a child an entire warm
universe of nurturing is conjured. If a man ‘fathers’ a child it
implies nothing more than the swift biological function involved in the procreative act.
The importance of language is critical.
It expresses whole ideas for us and, in the
case of the above loaded examples come with assumptions upon which laws are
based and judgments made that can destroy people and their lives.
So society, ideas, language itself has
changed but the law has not. This law framed by people, albeit ‘experts’, of
other generations and classes have imbued the drafting with their own prejudices,
theories and philosophies. Of course it was done with benign intent but so were all
laws of previous times which have subsequently been abandoned.
43,44
Laws which no longer apply to society,
notoriously become widely ignored and therefore impossible to implement.
Punishment is redundant in something not recognised as a breach viz the current
debate on drug legalisation upsetting generations of hitherto accepted nostrums.
Some professionals within the law accept
this or at least feel an as yet inchoate discontent and anxiety towards the law on
the part of huge numbers of people who fall under its intolerable weight. They
seek to tinker, modify, add or subtract and adjust but it is pointless.
These legalistic tweakings are utterly impotent against this growing tide of
ill-feeling and anger against the law itself.
We have all moved on from its assumptions
and the law must now be re-appraised and torn open to its heart, for it
has no soul.
It is the movement of society that
determines law, not its draftees and implementers. Society will always move forward
re-inventing the moral parameters in which it needs to operate in order to
facilitate its new thinking and consequently different modes of behaviour. The
law runs after society—a legal pooper-scooper—sweeping up its unasked for
droppings and disposing of them.
The law seeks to put a legal frame around
where society has already gone in order to protect it from the often unanticipated
consequences of its moral behaviour.
44,46,48,50
MARRIAGE
Marriage has become meaningless. It may
retain its romantic ideal connotations but has it any import beyond the dress, the
cake, the speech and the drunk uncle?
60
The law gives it no value whatsoever save
the occasional and typical denial of a man’s parental rights when he is an
unmarried father.
59
Some financial considerations are taken on board but these
can be augmented by the courts, generally in favour of the woman, should it
be required. And . . . that’s it.
41,46,60
But if the law has devalued its view of
marriage to be as nothing, what does it mean outside of that view. When during a
long-term relationship your girlfriend annoyingly and inevitably raises the issue
of ‘commitment’ she means it. She means the commitment that couple will make
to bring children into the world and raise them as useful members of
society. It is this that gives the man pause for thought. If he decides to ‘commit’ it
must be that, inherent in this compact, is the real, desired expectation that he,
like the mother, will have the privilege of raising that child to adulthood. She in
turn desires the ‘commitment’. Simply having a child isn’t a problem; but the commitment
gives the sure and probably innate knowledge that the child will have
better chances of survival with the two parents and their respective roles than the
one. This is the real weight behind marriage which the law seems to have opted
out from. How odd that we should have to repeat the obvious and the
commonplace. Except that this too can no longer be assumed. Single parent families
become a more frequent option.
61
With economic freedom some women feel they
can now raise the child singlehandedly. But so can men.
3,8
What’s sauce for the goose as they say is
sauce for the gander (except of course in the eyes of
Family Law). However if these assumptions are correct, then this removes
the absolute rationale behind marriage.
Nonetheless society accepts that the ideal
of the two parents is more beneficial and we therefore try to encourage the
continuation of the institution of marriage while doing nothing legally or economically
to support it.
41
An act of grotesque moral hypocrisy.
44,48–50,54,61
While we appear to encourage our young to
get married we rarely explain to them what its consequences will be. This
has disastrous results. Bombarded as we are with all sorts of cultural messages,
we have learned, through TV, the main cultural arbiter, and its populist
programmes, a childlike and naive view of marriage with extremely high and
unsustainable levels of expectation.
The happiness of the wedding day will be
assumed to continue unaltered through life, as we fondly imagine it once
did. And still today most of us long for and strive for a lifelong relationship
with the one partner. We view this with moral approval and we’re probably right.
Unfortunately today with a near 50 per cent divorce rate, it is
increasingly unlikely to be the case.
We should support this institution and
educate people again to the true meaning and nature of marriage. That which our
parents had explained to them, those examples of a ‘normal’ marriage which
were all around and clearly visible to the participants in another age, has
dissolved in our more fractured society.
46,60
Equally the law must stop pretending and
insisting that the dissolution of a relationship is fault-free—it never
is.
17,42,58
This again is convenient but it is another disastrous moral failure on the
part of the law. One understands what the law is trying to do, but in pretending
it is non-judgemental (ie morally neutral) it lessens the importance of the
institution and allows its dissolution to be that much easier, which is not, as I’ve
argued, in society’s interest and by extension, not in the interest of the child.
44,50,54
This failure becomes full-blown when divorce is embarked upon, which I will
discuss shortly. The nullity of marriage becomes a Potemkin
Village of the heart upon signature of the marriage contract and the
utterance of the oath.
This is the great act of State betrayal.
The moment the great pantomime or charade begins. At this point the man
ceases to be an equal partner in anything but name. And he’d better hang in there or
risk losing everything he’s had and be forced under pain of pursuit,
prosecution and imprisonment, using the full panoply of the State, to be sometimes in
effect nothing better than a wage slave for life.
For both the oath and the contract are void
and meaningless. What are they for? In life when one signs a contract one
reasonably expects the other person to uphold their end of the deal. That is the
contract’s purpose. A legal thrashing-out of obligations between the parties,
failure of which to uphold results in sanctions. Certainly in business, should one
fail in one’s contractual obligation, one would face dire consequences.
49,54,58,59,62
And there’s the cardinal mistake—marriage
has obligations and responsibilities. It’s a grown-up’s game. But if the
consequences of marriage become tiresome why not escape them? Divorce for a
large number of women, but not for the man and children, is consequence free.
42,62
So what of obligation and responsibility? What of the oath, the contract?
What of sanction? The law is silent.
59
At this point the initial moral failure of
the law is compounded into a freefall of hypocrisy, gender- biased assumptions,
discrimination, suspension of rights and all the other baleful results of a
morally neutral law.
58
How can such a thing exist? It is impossible to have judgement
with neutral consequence. Family Law is a sophist’s delight. No law is morally
neutral and when it pretends to be, and behaves as though it were, it has, by
definition, become a travesty of justice.
43
What may be done? The contract must have weight and meaning
and it should spell out what is expected of the parties in the case of
children and also the terms under which a marriage may be dissolved.
53
At the point of misgivings in a
relationship there should be mandatory discussions with an authority who cannot
recommend the dissolution of the contract.
48,51,52,57
It should spell out the consequences, which
are null should it simply be two individuals who are involved, but if there
are young children involved, the matter should be thoroughly dwelt upon, all
help given to the participants and the consequences of divorce spelt out and
they must be equally onerous to both parties. It would be helpful were this to
be spelt out in pre-marriage meetings also.
49,52,53
It makes clear that this marriage is a
serious thing, society takes it seriously. It is not to be entered into and dissolved
on whim, making light of it is a profound mistake, this contract says so and
this contract will be upheld.
49,58,59
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