Thanks. Most guys in the west are waiting for the day women like you become the dominant voice. That sis when guys across the western world will receive salvation from the dominant feminism.

The link tells one side of the story. The other side of the story hasn't made it to the Internet, so we have no idea what the truth is.

Note: the article makes no mention of what the child wants - and he's old enough for this to be important.

I'll give you good odds that the boy likes it in Colorado, wants to stay in the school where he now has friends, wants to stay with his dad - and the mom wouldn't accept it.

Who can argue against the concept of equal protection under the law? However, you can't take a 12 year old along on deployment to a combat zone - or any other TDY assignment. So now we're back to women in the military being separate, but equal, with special considerations if they are mothers with custody? Given enough social engineering and money, the military could handle it. And when mom is passed over for promotion because she isn't carrying her share of the load, what then?

Like a lot of life, it's unfair.

"Given enough social engineering and money, the military could handle it."

The military bends over backwards to accommodate parents, in particular, single parents. Frankly, it goes much too far. Taking this particular woman as an example: because she is a single parent, she has been placed in a job where she cannot be deployed overseas. This means that other nurses, who do not have children, will deploy more often. This is unfair.

If you are in the military, it is your responsibility to ensure that your personal life does not prevent you from carrying out your duty. Where children are concerned, this means having a child-care solution ready, in case you should be deployed. If you are unable, or unwilling to do that, then you are in the wrong profession.

I can't think of a better reason to deny physical custody than long deployments. It is not healthy for a child to get used to one caregiver and one home, and then be uprooted for a year or more every time mom leaves. Seems much more logical that the boy live with his dad full time for continuity of care, and mom gets visitation when she's home. Like Amy says-once you're a parent, it's not about what you want it's about what the kids need. And kids need stability. Now if she was willing to change careers and do civilian nursing when she's home every night, I might feel more sympathy for her. But I think I'd still say a boy that age needs his dad.

Regarding your last paragraph, Amy, how about holding an interview with "old-fashioned liberal" Wendy Kaminer? I think you two would get along even better than you might think.

Quote of hers: "When a Harvard student claims she's oppressed because she's a woman, you know you've just stepped through the looking glass."

To make it even more interesting, have Katha Pollitt there too - of course, she would not be so close to your views as Kaminer would be, but that's not to say that she's necessarily wrong about anything.

What do you think the military is?

Say that out loud.

Then ask yourself: Of what use is a pregnant soldier?

There are places you cannot say that out loud, because people want you to hide the plain fact that the military kills people, and that every effort that does not enhance that ability makes the military less effective.

YOU are supporting single mothers in the military today. They will do nearly nothing useful.

In that case, you'll have to be the one to contact Kaminer and ask, since she tends to focus more on legal issues, per se, than columnists. I don't think she tends to seek people out in general.

BTW, I once had a chance to ask her what she thought of Cathy Young, and she said, in effect, that she had mixed feelings about her - that Young tends to oversimplify issues.

I badly maligned, and probably misrepresented Kaminer here. Lenny's comment sent me looking for things WK's written that were readily admirable, and a bunch of them turned up just from her Atlantic page:

Watching public opinion and cultural mores shift in favor of gay rights, groups that consider homosexuality sinful seem likely to become increasingly strident and insular, which is good news for the gay rights movement. Let them isolate themselves. Isolation is their prerogative, and -- perhaps it's not unduly optimistic to believe this -- social irrelevance is their fate.

Feminism, at its most thoughtless, engendered an overbroad and unduly subjective definition of sexual harassment that includes speech and behaviors ranging from offensive remarks to actual assaults. Feminism, at its most thoughtless, equated every trivial discussion of sexual relations with political discourse and framed every allegation of sexual misconduct as presumptively true. Anti-feminists, reacting in kind, learned quickly to frame every allegation, leveled against right-wingers, as presumptively false. This is an old story, remarkable only in its ability to maintain any prurient appeal.

The sooner Occupy Wall Street (OWS) participants recognize that their right to dissent does not include the right to appropriate a public space forever or to enjoy immunity from lawful arrests because their cause is just, the sooner they're likely to forge an effective, left leaning counter movement to the Tea Party.

What word other than racism accurately describes the concept of "Indian blood," governing enrollment in tribes and the opportunity to profit from Indian casinos? What else but primitive notions of racial purity underlie the federal bureaucracy's process for obtaining a "Certificate of Degree of Indian or Alaska Native Blood," (in Bureau of Indian Affairs parlance, a CDIB)?

(I've still only ready the one book.)

Kaminer's comments about Cathy Young are surprising. If you'd mentioned them both at once two hours ago, I'd have suggested they were peas in a pod. Both of them can be confoundingly rational and evidence-minded... Neither (despite the cites above) have much use for the kind of blind-boner hillbilly conservatism that comes naturally to middle-aged white guys. (See also Postrel.)

I don't know if Kaminer actually calls herself a feminist (Wendy McElroy, who praised her in 2001, thinks of her as one) but anyway, here are a few things from Wikipedia:

"Kaminer, an equality or individual rights feminist, was an early opponent of late 20th-century 'protectionist' feminism, reflected in the movement to censor pornography, and of the 'difference' feminism associated with Carol Gilligan. She critiqued 'Feminism’s Identity Crisis' in an October 1993 cover story for The Atlantic.

"Kaminer was a member of the board of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts from the early 1990s until June 2009. She was a national board member of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1999 until her term expired in June 2006. In 2003, during her tenure on the national board, she became a strong critic of the ACLU leadership and was centrally involved in a series of controversies that culminated in a highly publicized effort to prohibit board members from criticizing the ACLU. Her 2009 book Worst Instincts: Cowardice, Conformity and the ACLU critiques what she regards as the ACLU’s ethical decline, ideological hypocrisy, and descent into groupthink."

(end)

Check out Kaminer's "True Love Waits." (It's an essay collection from 1996 and the title, as you might guess, is a sarcastic play on the abstinence movement. From that particular essay):

"But I wonder about the romantic idealism embedded in the True Love Waits campaign and the culture at large. Ideals will turn into illusions for kids who don't marry or marry badly or indifferently, or marry well for a time, only to discover that what begins as true love can end in betrayal.......(few will pledge to wait) until you marry or die, whichever comes first."

And from the introduction to the book:

"As Camille Paglia's success has demonstrated, what is most marketable is absolutism and attitude undiluted by thought."

And, from The Promiscuous Reader's blog:

......This reminds me an anecdote Wendy Kaminer tells in the introduction to her book True Love Waits. The editor of the National Review asked her to write a book review. She protested that she's "an old-fashioned liberal," and he reassured that it was okay, because she's "sensible."

"But you don't understand," I explained. "I believe in the welfare state. People think I'm conservative because there are messages about self-reliance in my work, and I value self-reliance, but I don't expect it of children." There was a long pause. He stopped reassuring me that I was sensible.

(end)

And finally, here's what Kaminer said in "The American Prospect" on the subject of the Violence Against Women Act (you can Google the rest of the essay - I'm afraid to post any links, lately):

"The price of upholding VAWA's civil rights remedy is an unconstitutional grant of unlimited power to Congress, power that will not always be used wisely or with regard to individual rights. We need to combat sexual violence without making a federal case of it."

Kaminer's comments about Cathy Young are surprising.
____________________________

Not too surprising......

While Young is not afraid to criticize men's rights activists, there ARE times where she simply won't acknowledge certain elephants in the room any more than MRAs do. E.g., the fact that MRAs keep demanding that fathers be recognized as being of great emotional importance to their children's well-being - and at the same time, they not only support men who want to abandon their unwanted children, they are unwilling to campaign seriously for more research and access to better male birth control AND for male patients to pay for it and USE it. (Warren Farrell used to campaign for it, but last I looked, he's even stopped talking about it on his website - lack of public interest, I'm guessing. I don't think Young has ever discussed male birth control at ALL, but Katha Pollitt did a pretty good 1998 column partly on that - it's called "Precious Bodily Fluids" and it's in her book "Subject to Debate.")

What's an MRA?

> Wendy McElroy, who praised her in 2001, thinks
> of her as one

Um, I don't get the feminists newsletters anymore. After they lost their minds over Paglia, they always seemed like tea ladies on a snit. "Oversimplifying issues" might be a charge worth considering from any other sphere, but not from there.

Um, I don't get the feminists newsletters anymore. After they lost their minds over Paglia, they always seemed like tea ladies on a snit. "Oversimplifying issues" might be a charge worth considering from any other sphere, but not from there.
______________________

Not sure what you mean. Kaminer isn't a member of any feminist website/newsletter that I know of. Just because she doesn't like Paglia much hardly means Kaminer is wrong about anything in particular. (IIRC, Kaminer has more admiration for Katie Roiphe than Paglia.)

And, if you don't know (and I'm sure you do), McElroy doesn't praise liberals often, if ever. Or most people McElroy would call feminists.

McElroy is not one of the larger figures in my intellectual life. By that I mean I don't know who she is or what she ever meant to anybody. You mentioned feminism... Beyond endless, wordy career strokage and counterstrokage, do these people make things happen?

I'll trade you a year's worth college boys for one auto-didactic Welch.

From Wikipedia:

"Wendy McElroy (born 1951) is a Canadian individualist anarchist and individualist feminist.....

"Among feminists, she identifies herself as being sex-positive: defending the availability of pornography and condemning anti-pornography feminism campaigns. She has also voiced criticism of sexual harassment policies, particularly the zero-tolerance policies common to grade schools, which she considers to be 'far too broad and vague' and lacking the sound research necessary to guide responsible policy-making decisions.

"In explaining her position in regard to capitalism, she says she has a 'marked personal preference for capitalism as the most productive, fair and sensible economic system on the face of the earth,' but also recognizes that the free market permits other kinds of systems as well. She says what she wants for society is 'not necessarily a capitalistic arrangement but a free market system in which everyone can make the peaceful choices they wish with their own bodies and labor.' Therefore, she doesn't call herself a capitalist but someone for a 'free market.'

"She credits Murray Rothbard's book Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles as being 'solely responsible for turning [her] from the advocacy of limited government to a lifetime of work within the individualist-anarchist tradition.'

"McElroy has been a vocal defender of the whistleblowing site WikiLeaks and its head Julian Assange."

(She's written more than 10 books, too - six of them in this century.)

She's been a long-time supporter of MRAs, but as of September 2008, they're not quite so much in her good graces, due to certain possibly violent types who can never be pleased. (For more on that, Google on "Wendy McElroy: My last post on the Men's Rights Movement." It's at the antimisandry website. Maybe she was only referring to that site.)

And here's something by Glenn Sacks from April 2009:

"Author Wendy McElroy, Syndicated Columnist Amy Alkon Back Campaign Against Lifetime’s ‘Deadbeat Dads’ "

(Sorry not to give a link, but I'm afraid to, these days.)

what no one has mentioned is the father in this case spent 25 yrs in the military. he moved to co pursuant to military orders leaving behind his son for more than one tour in iraq as the mother has. her assignment is nondeployable in
md. this child spent ten years in md and is denied all contact with all of his family he was raised with. with the exception of his father and a step family.... this mothers rights as a parent were denied after she graciously worked out custody for years on the basis of the fathers military assignments. this man knew what he was doing to his ex wife. hopefully this liitle boy will be back home soon.