ACFC Launches Shared Parenting Petition Drive
March 17th, 2008 by Glenn Sacks, MA for Fathers & Families
"Children thrive with the active involvement of both parents. Children and parents should be encouraged to spend substantial time with each other regardless of the parents’ present marital status. The undersigned recognize that absent issues of abuse, neglect or abandonment, social and government policy must be structured in such a way as to promote and maximize the opportunity of all parents to contribute to the social, emotional, intellectual, physical, moral and spiritual development of their children."--ACFC's new Shared Parenting Petition.
An announcement from Mike McCormick, President of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children regarding their new Shared Parenting Petition. I have signed the petition and urge others to do so.
Please participate in this new campaign and sign the SHARED PARENTING PETITION
We need your help to demonstrate the public support which exists for Shared Parenting. For years public officials have heard about the millions of people who support Shared Parenting and family law reform. Unfortunately they rarely see this sentiment expressed, which leads them to question its existence. We need to demonstrate that support in a tangible way.
Our goal is to generate as many electronic and physical signatures on the petition as possible. Thereafter ACFC will print and bind all the signatures into a book which will be presented to Congress as part of the DC Rally 2008 weekend.
Petition results will be further parsed for use in activities related to framing public policy not only at the national level, but at the state level as well.
Once you've signed the petition, please help PASS IT ALONG. We have created a button which can be easily placed on websites, MySpace and facebook pages that will allow people who visit your sites to also sign the petition. ACFC wants to recognize your support of this effort. After you've placed the button on your page or site, send us an email to info@acfc.org and we'll add your name to the Hall of Fame as a petition supporter.
If you do not have a website you can still pass the petition along. Please email a link to all the people in your address book and ask them to sign it and send it on. Every citizen, whether they've been through family court or not, has an interest in signing this petition.
We'll be updating you regularly on the progress of this campaign. THANKS FOR PARTICIPATING.
To sign the petition, click here.
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March 18th, 2008 at 1:40 am
Yeah, i did this one last week, and passed it along to several others.
The ACFC is the real deal!
March 18th, 2008 at 4:47 am
Sorry Glenn and Mike, I WON"T sign any petition that promotes enacting laws with weaker shared parenting policies than the jurisdiction in which I now live, and which will only fuel the fire for feminists to work harder at saying men are abusers, neglecters and abandoners, and that the sum of a man's "contribution" to parenting means footing the bill for whatever Mom wants to SAY is Dad's contribution to parenting.
Every judge and legislor in America could easily say he/she already does exactly what this petition suggests, in fact most could say they advocate for it quite strongly, and the biggest thing limiting father's involvement with their children is their own behaviors of abuse, neglect or abandonment.
Now we have ACFC promoting a petition that will only help to redouble women's efforts at winning their private "gender war" battles by insisting on newer, more creative examples of abuse, neglect or abandonment - as if the advantage they hold merely by suggesting these exist within their relationships with their children's fathers isn't enough already.
There is a close parallel between the disparity in the treatment of men's and women's health, and the disparity in treatment between mother's and father's "contributions" to parenting. It is NOT that men created the "gender" wars, at all - no man would ever be foolish enough to choose to start a war with women.
Rather, it is that we ENGAGE the battlefronts in a manner that is akin to bringing pea shooters to fight RPG launchers and machine guns.
In the course of a custody battle, women will stretch the truth to the furthest possible reaches of reality, and fight furiously for "their share" of time and money to be divided between them, men come to the battle openly apologizing for whatever they've been accused, making few or no accusations in return - though it's very likely the downfall of the relationship was no more his fault than hers - and then ask for their own contributions to parenting to be viewed as anything but equitable - typically more than 80% of the financial burden of raising our children, in exchange for less than 20% of the time and decision making involved.
It IS hard to blame men for not fighting harder though, as I learned, the minute you stand up for yourself or your chidlren, you are viewed as a crazed lunatic who really SHOULD lose his parental rights.
This is the kind of "shared parenting" situation we already have in America, and petitions like the one promoted by ACFC will only serve to further imbed these standards into the fabric of our feminist, divorce-loving culture.
To all the fathers who have to follow in the wake of this nonsense - good luck - I feel for you. Until men are willing and prepared, first to ASSERT that children's time with us is EQUALLY as important as with Mom (and as the petition shows, we are a long way from doing that), and second, to ENGAGE the adversarial process with as much vigor and tenacity as women do, this pattern will not improve.
I greatly fear for my children's generation that American men are collectively becoming such passive wimps about the well-being of their own children, that the very idea of a "father figure" in my grandchildren's lives will seem like an utter illusion. I only pray that we will find the residual testosterone to reverse this trend.
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March 18th, 2008 at 8:13 am
Mike and Glenn have worked hard for this cause, and I support this petition. Now if I can figure out how to sign it, and pass it on I will.
March 18th, 2008 at 8:44 am
I signed the petition and sent a copy to my publisher. I told him every little bit counts.
OT, I've been away because of my book, "How To Train Your Woman" which is totally out of my hands now and will be released mid April. I'm going to advertise it here. And let me warn you it's loaded with dynamite so feminists beware!
I also list the ACFC web address in my book along with www.mabtw.com and various other men's rights groups along with this one. I'm so excited about all this. And I'm working on my third book "Feminists Are Liars" which debunks common feminist myths such as the glass ceiling, men only commit domestic violence, 25% of women will be raped in college and various other whoppers.
March 18th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
I signed the ACFC shared parenting petition and it is also added to crispe.org website. Hopefully we get a viral marketing thing and get millions of people signing up.
Marcy Ganz
San Diego, CA
http://crispe.org/
March 18th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
Done and put on my myspace
b
March 19th, 2008 at 6:32 am
Why don't you all see how this will backfire?
March 19th, 2008 at 8:53 am
Andrew, I'm completely failing to understand how this will "backfire." The accusations, blame, and hysteria by mothers who want to push fathers out of their children's lives will not end with or without rebuttal presumption of shared parenting. Isn't the entire point of the petition and DC Rally to see fathers step up and assert that their rights to be an equal parent to their children completely in line with what you implore in your first response?
How many fathers (absent such an initiative) have gone into court, beaten back every false claim, accusation, hysterical story and asserted that his parenting rights are equally important - only to have a judge rule that he can have every other weekend and a dinner visit during the week? My answer would be "most."
March 19th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Personally, I think a huge problem is just plain old lack of awareness on the part of most of the public. I sent an email around to my close friends --- none of whom have faced these issues themselves --- asking them to consider the petition. I tried to point out a few common misconceptions:
'I know it sounds like a no-brainer that shouldn't even have to be said, but ... some judges are eager to dramatically reduce the access one parent has to their kids after a divorce. Usually that parent is the dad, but we know anecdotally that is not always the case. I also think some people assume that the the parent with reduced access must have been shown to have "done something wrong," but I can tell you that is *certainly* not the case. '
I hope we can use the petition to make some headway in raising awareness.
March 19th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Dear Glenn,
I usually appreciate your efforts and have gratefully observed your advance on father's rights, but I think an error is about to occur. One must impute a large degree of cynicism mixed with concern about a public collection of names of persons that have lost their rights and voice because of court rules. Entrapment is not above federal and local police that may need a political boost. You inadvertently collected people that enforcement agencies will triumphantly capture and rupture financially under the banners of law and a system that made many of those people criminals through no fault of their own. I for one cannot be too outspoken for fear of becoming a statistic in these efforts. At a loss of 50% of my income my thread of life is slim and that is the good part. More can be taken from me. I was warned by two judges not to 'fall behind'. If this is not clear try making your life function on $185.00 a week after having lost not one but two homes worth $500,000 each and denied access to your ten year old child. You have to agree that no one signing your partition is happy with the deal justice has handed them. That system might devise another unhappy moment for some of us who exist without rights. Mike.
March 20th, 2008 at 12:40 am
l personally think you are going about this all wrong. lf you want equity, you have to demand what they are getting now. l was a single parent of two girls for a number of years back when it was unheard of for a man to be a single parent, so l know it can be done. l got equity, but l was williing to raise those girls by myself to get it. Are most fathers willing to go to that extreme? Extreme demands are what get acceptable results.