More accurately, single fathers don’t like what “family law” has done to Thanksgiving (and other holidays).
Take today for example, Thanksgiving day. I’m sitting here at the computer dreaming of my children, staring at a rather unloving and unresponsive computer screen.
This year Thanksgiving happens to fall on “my weekend,” the weekend I would usually have my children stay over, but this year Thanksgiving is my ex’s to be with the children. That means that they stayed with me two weekends ago, won’t this weekend, and will again in two weeks. That’s a total of four weeks, nigh on a full month, between times they stay with me. To add to the pain, my weeknight, the night I usually see my school-age children, is Thursday … tonight … Thanksgiving. So “at least” I saw them a few hours last week, but now am not scheduled to see them again for another week! That’s two full weeks between times I’m scheduled to see them … TO EVEN SEE THEM, let alone stay with them! Yes, I’ve been texting them, but how can a father be a father, in the gospel and truly caring fatherly sense, when seeing his children for only six hours in a four-week period, with that time mostly spent fixing dinner, doing homework, and the half-hour drive back to Mom’s? A father can’t.
Okay, I’m stretching a bit. Yesterday I asked their mother if I could see them this weekend for a few hours. “On Saturday morning, as long as they’re back by noon,” she replied.
“Family law.” Law is to provide protection. As single fathers we sometimes wonder what that means. Family law seems to protect mothers from their ex husbands, as if we’re a threat to her and to his own children. Who’s being protected?
Capitalism.org defines the purpose of law:
In a free society each and every man lives under a rule of law, as opposed to a whim-ridden rule of men.
Such a rule of law has only one purpose: to protect the rights of the smallest minority that has ever existed — the individual.
Such laws form a non-contradictory body of principled legislation, which hold a man innocent until he can be proven guilty according to an objective standard, as opposed to a plethora of regulations which hold a man guilty until he can somehow prove himself innocent, to the gratification of a bureaucrat able to gain a foothold in public office.
In a free society it is the actions of government — and not the actions of citizens — that are regulated.
Other posts will address specific aspects of “family” law, and how many are in fact unlawful. Besides the legality, the separation that family law puts between the father and his children is ludicrous.