In what I have written about our societal bias against fathers, I have gone out of my way to stress that the issue should not be dragged into the gender war. To the extent that I have referred to feminism, it has been to invite feminists to extend their concern about inequality to this glaring issue of discrimination.
Some feminists have told me privately that they agree with most of what I have said on the subject but that this is a battle men must fight for themselves. So be it. But when I read, as I did last week in Nuala O'Faolain's column in this newspaper, that to raise this issue at all is to engage in an attack on feminists, I sense we are getting closer to the jugular than I imagined. As I suspected, some feminists are intent on adopting a reactionary stance to "equality" when it concerns men.
Nuala O'Faolain, in a response to an article I wrote here a month ago, talked about the "intellectual shoddiness" of my argument. This is an appropriate phrase to describe Ms O'Faolain's own article.
The first quarter of her column dealt with something that did not occur: an attack by me on feminism. She criticised "male columnists" who write about "what they often sneeringly call feminism". Wrong page, I'm afraid. She, for her part, referred sneeringly to what she termed my "chagrin", which she adjudged an inappropriate motivation for writing about gender relations. I defy anyone with a child not to be chagrined upon discovering that what should be a sacred relationship is not defended in Irish law.
Ms O'Faolain quoted what she contended was my "central" argument about fatherhood: "If a mother desires, the apparatus of the State will move in to facilitate her in taking a child away from its father." Although I did write this (in this column on July 1st), it is not my central point. This is to do with the relativism saturating our attitude to equality.
Having constructed her straw man, Ms O'Faolain went about trying to knock him down. In "real life", she maintained, "mothers don't dream of taking a child away from a father just because that is her [sic] capricious `desire': nor does the State just roll over and do whatever she tells it to. I presume that arrangements about custody and access, where parents disagree, are made in the courts. Neither I nor John Waters knows how often, if at all, blameless fathers are denied access to their children by the Irish courts".
Presumption is not an ideal journalistic device. Nuala O'Faolain does not know how much I know about this subject, because she has never discussed it with me and has apparently read just one of several articles I have written about it. As it happens, I know quite a bit about this because I have spent time discussing it with fathers, mothers, lawyers, politicians and others.
I know that blameless fathers are banished regularly from the company of their children by Irish courts. If the mothers did not want this to happen, I "presume" they could stop it. It is true that, since family cases take place in camera, it is not possible to provide chapter-and-verse instances and statistics. This, as I have said before, is a device the State apparatus employs to keep this issue under the carpet.
INCIDENTALLY, Ms O'Faolain's use of the phrase "where parents disagree" is resonant of the institutionalised hypocrisy which infects official responses to criticism on this issue. Fathers do not end up in court because they "disagree" with mothers: they do so, almost invariably, because they have been denied the society of their children, and they "disagree" with this.
Ms O'Faolain's assault took the form of a flimsy necklace of presumption, assumption, assertion and statistics. She maintained that the reason the law expressed a mistrust of fathers was that "the common experience of the planet" is of men deserting their children. She conceded there were no figures to support this but maintained that it was "indicative" that recent census figures reported "almost 130,000 households where children are living with a lone parent and that four out of five of the lone parents are female".
What this is "indicative" of is the extent to which the law is biased in favour of mothers. She quoted statistics provided by the British Child Support Agency, showing that fathers accounted for 95 per cent of absent parents. (British law in this area is similar to ours, because we have slavishly imitated it.)
A question: if we treat fathers as sources of spunk and spondulicks, denying their moral rights even when they flawlessly carry out their material responsibilities, is it surprising if some men accept society's verdict that fatherhood is a meaningless state and carry this logic to its inevitable conclusion?
In other words, how do we know whether absentee fathers are the chicken or the egg? We don't, and have shown no interest in putting it to the test. If this State were to give equal rights to fathers, and vindicate these rights with all its might and main, and if, after a due period, the number of absentee fathers remained at its current level, I would happily accept Nuala O'Faolain's invitation to direct my "aggression" at "irresponsible men".
"The facts about men and women and children," Nuala O'Faolain asserted, "are what stand in the way of a crusade for equal rights for the male and female parent." It depends what we mean by "facts". Do we mean "facts" arising from the self-perpetuating logic of our present system, or perhaps the "facts" which arise out of a series of presumptions?
Ms O'Faolain wanted to know if I could outline a scheme, "better than the present court-based one, which would better protect the interests of the largest possible number of children, mothers and fathers?" And if not, could I consider adopting a less aggressive tone when I deal with this matter?
The answer to the first question is that I already have, in this newspaper and in several radio interviews, outlined various suggestions for addressing this issue. The answer to the second question is that I will become less aggressive when this State confronts its hypocrisy and moral failure, and when people without any emotional stake in the issue stop using it as a gender football with which to work off their antipathy towards men.
"I know," Ms O'Faolain allowed, "John Waters has thought about this complex situation far more deeply than most people." This presumption may be correct. Certainly, I have thought about it more deeply than she has. "John Waters," she conceded, "is right when he says the whole bias in court custody is in favour of the mother." This, she suggested, was a good thing, because "a child `belongs' to its mother in a way that it cannot belong to its father".
I have news for Ms O'Faolain: a child "belongs" only to God.