It's time to stand up for men's rights

It’s time to stand up for men’s rights 

Michael Coren

QMI Agency 

May 08, 2014

http://www.winnipegsun.com/2014/05/08/its-time-to-stand-up-for-mens-rights

 

Earlier this year, Queen’s University student and feminist activist Danielle d’Entremont was punched multiple times in the face by a stranger.

 

Danielle has linked the attack to her opposition to an event hosted on campus by men’s rights group Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE). The group has just offered a $1,000 reward to bring Danielle’s attacker to justice.

 

Frankly, I have no idea if the repulsive physical attack was politically motivated or not and neither does the victim nor CAFE. The greater point, however, is that groups like CAFE are tired of contemporary feminism marginalizing and libelling men.

 

Are they correct? I didn’t think so until a few years ago I was asked to write a men’s column for another daily newspaper.

 

What I encountered was evidence of a campaign to discredit men and a legal and sociological campaign to remove their rights as husbands and partners and, in particular, fathers.

 

I’m very lucky to be in a happy marriage with a wonderful wife and with four great kids. I have never been a victim.

 

As soon as I wrote this column, however, I was inundated with stories of men, good men, who had lost their homes, their savings, their freedom, their children, after false and malicious complaints.

 

The anecdotes had similar themes. A married couple with children. The marriage falls apart, nobody’s fault in particular. She gets a lawyer, and suddenly alleges that she’s been abused — it’s not true, but it means he has to leave the home, has hardly any rights, can’t see the kids.

 

They divorce, he has to pay a lot of money in support even though she’s already with another man and doing very well financially. He now lives in a basement apartment.

 

He’s allowed to see the kids every second weekend, one night a week. But often she says they’re not well or she’s just not there when he goes to pick the children up. After repeated pleas he shouts, bangs on the door. She calls the police, he’s arrested, convicted, put on probation and humiliated.

 

Or how about the couple who argue and hit each other, or she hits him and he does nothing.

 

The cops come and only he is arrested. Don’t expect sympathy or fairness from the police and judges — this is political law now and they are terrified of finding against a woman accuser.

 

Men having to pay extremely high levels of alimony even when the man is poor, the woman now wealthy. Men lied about, assumed to be in the wrong, treated like a natural abuser.

 

Yes, I know you’ve heard all of the stories about abusive men, women victims and deadbeat dads and of course some of that is true, but nowhere near in the numbers that we have been told to believe.

 

Almost all of the feminist movement’s demands were given, and rightly so, decades ago, and while there is clearly work still to be done, we do not live in the 1890s. Now we have feminists silencing contrary speech on campus, women’s studies courses that waste minds and money and feminist law that denies equality.

 

It’s enough to make you cry, but real men don’t do that, do they?