PJ Media

I am not a clairvoyant nor do I play one on television, but I’ve known something like this gentleman’s challenge was coming for the past fifteen years or so. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the concept of child support rests firmly on the belief, once common throughout the United States, that men ought to support the children they father. This belief was itself the product of a time wherein abortion was dangerous and not readily available, and birth control was at best crude and not very effective. We now live in a world where abortion is both safe and commonplace and effective birth control is widely available. In addition to this, through a series of court decisions, radical feminists have more or less eliminated the male role in the decision to become a parent, reducing him to little more than a sperm donor and an open wallet. Children today are wholly optional, it seems, and only women get to exercise the option. Sooner or later, someone was going to challenge this situation in the courts.

I didn’t think the courts would go along with this gentleman’s argument, and I use the term gentleman in the most generic sense possible; most judges are old enough to believe the old premise that fathers should pay for their children, and those that don’t will look to the vast corpus of legal opinion that exists on the subject and refuse to throw the baby out with the law books. This attitude, however, will not survive in the long run. The radical feminists have fatally undermined it, thereby proving yet again that the law of unintended consequences is still with us and doing quite well these days, thank you for asking. The feminists’ constant demand for unfettered sexual rights without any sexual responsibilities have led inexorably to this argument: if a woman cannot be compelled to be a mother, then it necessarily follows that a man cannot be compelled to be a father. If the courts do not accept this argument now, they will sometime in the next twenty to thirty years; it is only a matter of time, for this is the inevitable conclusion of the demand for complete sexual freedom.

It will be more than a little amusing to watch the feminists upend all their usual arguments in order to keep child support going; it will, I think, be very similar to their performance during the Lewinsky scandal, where more than one prominent feminist shaded her demand for ever more stringent protections against sexual harassment in the workplace with her desire to keep President Clinton in the Oval Office. If nothing else, this episode might teach the feminists that running to the courts for redress for all of the nation’s ills might not be such a good idea; any state legislator in the country would laugh off this guy’s argument in a heartbeat, if for no other reason that there are no votes to be had in being known as a defender of cads’ rights, but the courts must follow precedent and the Constitution, and if the Constitution gives women the right to be irresponsible dolts then it must give men the same right. After all, we live in a country that prides itself on giving the equal protection of the laws to everyone, even sexually irresponsible jackasses.

As for the rights of cads, I thought everyone knew that the major unintended consequence of women’s liberation was the liberation of the caddish impulse in most men. Once upon a time, if a young man wanted to sow a few wild oats or a older man wanted to pretend he wasn’t getting old, they would both hie themselves hence to the nearest house of assignation, there to indulge the reproductive urge without having to deal with any of its consequences. Everyone involved knew the rules: the man wanted sex, the girl wanted money, and afterwards the man would go home and pretend to be a moral pillar of his community. You would certainly not marry a denizen of the demimonde nor would you encourage a decent girl to become a demimonde herself, and if you should impregnate a “nice” girl, the rules were clear: you had to marry her, whether you wanted to or not, if only to avoid being blown apart by her menfolk’s shotguns.

Our modern era does not prize the concept of the nice girl anymore, since there is no real need for any girl to be nice in the sense that the term usually meant, which is to say, sexually chaste before marriage and monogamous afterwards. The invention of the birth control pill, the advent of readily available abortion, and the relative ease of modern divorce have changed the traditional equation. I am sure that many women would say, hallelujah, to the old order’s passing, and they may well be right about the overwhelming hypocrisy of that order, but it seems to me that Oscar Wilde was right when he said that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. The old order served a purpose by channeling humanity’s greatest creative and destructive drive onto a constructive path that served, in the broad number of cases, the best interests of everyone involved. The old dispensation did not serve all equally well, though; it stigmatized gay men and lesbians viciously, and often victimized women, especially lower class women, by limiting their educational and economic opportunities, thereby trapping them in marriages where they were utterly dependent on the goodwill of their husbands.

It was largely to stop the abuses of the old order that activists created the gay rights and the women’s liberation movements, and both movements have done a tremendous amount of good for their specific constituencies and for the nation as a whole through their efforts to eliminate the mental exception. The mental exception is what comes at the end of the Pledge of Allegiance, when the person pledging allegiance to the flag says, “…with liberty and justice for all…” and then mentally makes the exception for blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Catholics, women, gays, or life insurance salesmen, whom they can treat in as abusive manner as they want without worrying too much about their rights.

In freeing women from the old order, however, the women’s liberation movement tossed much good out with the bad. The women’s movement’s systematic demonization of men has led to a situation in which men bear almost no responsibility for the children they sire. We now live in an age where a woman can choose to become mothers, but men cannot choose whether or not they become fathers. Men do not have a say in whether or not their sexual partners have an abortion or not, which is to say, they have no choice in whether or not they become fathers, and yet the law, and the women’s movement as well, insist on their paying for children they do not want.

This last vestige of the old dispensation will soon disappear as well. After all, we now live in a world of rights, and if a woman has a right to choose then so does the man, and compelling him to pay for a child he does not want seems grossly unfair and is probably a violation of his constitutional rights. The women’s movement will fight such an interpretation of the law; their ideal world is one in which men play the role of sperm donor and sugar daddy, paying all the bills and seeing the children every other Tuesday in July, but the more I think about it, the more likely this scenario becomes. You can only undermine institutions for so long before they come down, bringing down everything else with it. You cannot, I think, knock down all the supporting walls out of your house and then complain to all and sundry when the roof comes crashing down on your head.