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Fathers Battling Injustice
The 'epitome' of compassion??
Posted By: Susan
Date: Thursday, 30 March 2000, at 12:57 a.m.
WINNIPEG SUN
March 29, 2000
Deadbeat dads really do exist By LYN COCKBURN
I was once denied a job because I had a baby and therefore, said the interviewer, "you might take too many days off."
A friend in a small town where I once taught was told, "Don't bother putting in your application for the principalship because we've never had a woman principal and we're not going to start now."
Last year, another friend confided in me that she wasn't quite sure how to report the sexual harassment she was enduring day after day, since it was one of her bosses who was doing the harassing.
And this year, an acquaintance finally received the promotion she has deserved for the last five years -- after two incompetent men were promoted over her and fired.
So this is another column about downtrodden women, is it? Nope, it isn't.
It's about extrapolation. It's about taking one, two or even 10 examples and leaping to some universal assumption.
It's about the temptation to paint the canvas large with generalizations.
Using the above cases for example, it would be easy to put forth as truth that all women are always treated unfairly in all workplaces. What is really true is that some women are treated unfairly in some workplaces. Ditto, people of colour, Jews, Asians and yes, white men.
That's why I am hugely irked by Donna Laframboise's series in the National Post titled Myth of the Deadbeat Dad in which she brings up example after heart-rending example of unfortunate men screwed by the legal system and by their ex-wives, men who are stripped of their salaries and their dignity, not to mention their children. And so, postulates the author, this proves there's no such thing as the deadbeat dad -- only a sad string of downtrodden men disabled by the incessant demands of shrewish exes and misguided children.
I've got one word for you, Donna, hon. Drivel.
And I have another example for you.
A guy I taught with a few years ago, a good guy, a friend, married badly. He stuck it out for four years with a woman who had a temper akin to Marty McSorley's as well as a badly spoiled teenaged son from a previous marriage. The relationship finally came to its logical conclusion, whereupon a judge ordered my friend to pay child support -- for a boy who was not his. He paid, and paid and paid. Finally, he went to court to ask for the payments to be at least lowered, if not dropped.
The judge responded by upping the payments, even though by this time, the boy had graduated from high school and had a job, even though he insisted he was going to college. My friend contemplated everything from leaving the country to teach in Botswana to giving up teaching in favour of becoming a pianist in a bar, an ambition deterred by his total lack of musical ability. Instead, he paid and paid some more.
Not then and not now does he extrapolate from his own obviously unfair situation to the assumption that all divorced fathers are screwed by the system. In fact, my friend is the first to assert that parents, men and women, must accept both monetary and emotional responsibility for their children. He does not deny the existence of deadbeat dads, nor does he have any sympathy for them.
Neither, it seems does the Manitoba government which has recently joined a number of other provinces in coming down hard on deadbeat parents behind on their child support.
Last year, the province sent out some 690 notices threatening to suspend driver's licences of parents behind on their payments -- which happily, motivated some to pay up.
In all, Manitoba collected $45 million (up about $10 million from the year before) from deadbeat parents, yet, at the end of 1999, $44.9 million in child support payments remained unpaid.
And in those statements, Donna, lies no suggestion that all divorced fathers are deadbeats or that deadbeat fathers don't exist. They aren't and they do.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lyn Cockburn can be reached by e-mail at lcockburn@wpgsun.com. Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@wpgsun.com.
Copyright © 2000, Canoe Limited Partnership. All rights reserved.
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