Guest Op-Ed from the Zedman (ZedmanZee@gmail.com)
Dear Scott Brown
If the current polls hold up on Election Day, you
will no longer be my senator. Based on
the direction of your campaign after the past few weeks, it would be a safe
guess that your staff’s post-mortem will dwell on the margin of female voters.
What could you have done differently that would’ve decreased that margin by
just a few precious percentage points?
You co-sponsored the reauthorization of VAWA. You reminded us again and
again how you are “pro-choice”. You
support the Lilly Ledbetter Act. You even changed your position on “marriage
equality.” What more could you have done
to pander to women voters?
Well, Mr. Brown, perhaps you forgot something: Me.
As a hard-working middle-class man and father, my
political positions tend to align against
those of the Democratic Party. Quite frankly, as a white, male heterosexual, a “negative-3-fer”
in the jargon of political correctness, I refer to the Democratic Party as the “party
of identity politics.” Essentially, I
consider a vote for a Democrat as a vote intrinsically against my own
interests, either an act of self-loathing... or insanity.
Case in point is the absurd Lilly Ledbetter Act. As
though employers actually pay women 72 cents on the dollar for what they would
pay a man. Why would anyone hire men if they could enjoy an immediate 28%
reduction in payroll costs by hiring a woman? The debunking of this “unequal
pay” factoid has been known for two decades and is just a couple of mouse-clicks
away for anyone who cares to know the truth. It is a comparison of what women
earn on average to what men earn on average, and is wholly a function of the
actual type of work that they respectively choose as well as the
time-on-the-job differentials that arise naturally between the sexes for the
obvious reasons.
Back to “me.” Regarding my demographical profile, any
Republican candidate should regard me as “his base.” But on Election Day, I
will be BLANKING THE BALLOT. I will not
go as far as some friends who plan to actually cast their vote for your
opponent. I have the decency to merely not
vote for you. You will lose my vote, a vote that by all rights you should have
received since your opponent is someone who apparently is not even aware of the
existence of half of the human race.
You refused to meet with representatives of the
Fathers Rights community who could’ve educated you on the evils of VAWA. It’s often said that the road to hell is
paved with good intentions, but has there ever been a better example of this
time-worn cliché than VAWA? This is a
law that funds and promotes the demonization of men and the criminalization of fatherhood
via pseudo-scientific, agenda-driven social “science” and the consequent laws
and criminal and judicial policies and procedures that are dutifully enacted by
pandering politicians such as yourself. Not only that, but it actually contributes
to real domestic violence via the promotion
of laws such as our notorious Ch. 209A “Abuse Prevention” law, which allows a woman
to criminalize a father, kick him out of his home, and take away access to his
own children based on hearsay evidence: simply telling a judge that she “fears”
her husband.
The next time you read of a domestic violence
homicide, you might want to search for the often unreported details of the 209A
“restraining order” that the victim had obtained against the perpetrator. Fact: it is impossible to know how many potential domestic violence homicides
were prevented by the issuing of a 209A restraining order. Conversely, it is possible to know how many such crimes
were motivated by the issuance of a 209A order.
Consider being the recipient of such an order as a
divorce tactic that restricts you from having any contact whatsoever, including
third-party contact, with your own (typically infant) children. Wouldn’t that
make one... angry? Try, the angriest you have ever been in your life.
Something that can feel like a death sentence, something that makes life not
worth living. Would such a person be deterred from personally enacting “justice,”
in their minds, by an order that is punishable by a two-and-a-half-year jail
sentence and a fine?
Thus is exposed the logical fallacy in the conceptual
basis for the existence of this law.
It is unquestionably unconstitutional, but until the
proper authority declares it as such, it is the law, and for those tens of thousands
of fathers that have been victimized by it over the years, those who live in a de-facto
police state, I encourage them all to also BLANK THE BALLOT on November 6.
Male politicians like you need to understand: there
will be consequences for willfully discarding the rights of men—and especially
rights of fathers’— for political expediency.
Shame on you, Scott Brown.
-Z
