PJ Media

Chaz, as far as I can tell, you’re the only person here who’s talking about absent and uninvolved fathers who wouldn’t be there for their kids. So I really have no idea why you’re directing such comments towards me. The rest of us have made it very clear that we’re talking about active and involved fathers who are trying to *prevent* loss of access to their children.

As for your “something” about marriage that cements paternal bonds, I’d like to see you compare its effect to how communities support and engage in the severing and destruction of paternal bonds, and how committed but non-marrying partnerships protects them from that

Here’s a couple of links for you to deal with in the process:

http://glennsacks.com/blog/?p=3128

http://glennsacks.com/blog/?p=3131&cp=all#comments

Tood, the fraction of decent women are *among* those who will agree to have children under such circumstances. Nobody said you wouldn’t have to weed out the unacceptable, unreliable, untrustworthy ones, because you’d still have to do that anyways.

I certainly wouldn’t want to have children with, let alone commit to, a woman who refused to recognize how badly the community is biased both against men and in favor of women.

If you explain to a woman that you love and trust her but you’re refusing to marry anyone at all because of how the *community* around the two of you can’t be trusted to protect your rights, and she says, ‘Well, that’s not good enough for me,’ OWTTE, then you do what any rational adult does in such situations: you kick her to the curb and move on to the next prospect.

Because if you’re so certain that there are enough women out there worth committing to and marrying, then what are your grounds for arguing that there simultaneously aren’t enough women out there to be worth committing to but *not* marrying?

Myth buster, again, it’s about the community, not the woman. Regardless of your subjective revelational opinion, the objective replicable reality is that you’re incorrectly conflating marriage and committment without support; my point all along has been to separate the two. Plenty of people throughout the history of this country have married without the involvement of religion, let alone in religious traditions very different from whatever yours are.

And I’ve made it clear throughout all this that I have no problem with men taking the risks involved in creating a family. Substitute “family” and appropriate variations thereof for “marriage” throughout your post, and we agree closely. The only difference is the mystical aspects of your personal belief, and with all due respect, those aren’t extensible to the vast majority of the rest of us, so they’re simply not relevant to the wider discussion here.

In short, you haven’t managed to justify marriage at all, because you’ve presented no reason for it other than your subjective revelational opinion, and while that might be good enough for you, it simply is not and never will be good enough for the rest of the world.