Charles Ponzi certainly couldn't be faulted for a lack of ingenuity. Way
back in 1820 Mr. Ponzi began to lure people in with the promise of
double your money in 90 days. Word spread, and soon Ponzi found himself
ensconced in a 20-room mansion and was raking in $1 million a week.
A similar Ponzi scheme is at work today. This time it's an ideological
pyramid scam, and it has to do with families and fathers.
The Mother of All Confabulations goes back to 1986. That's when feminist
Phyllis Chesler alleged in her book Mothers on Trial that divorcing
fathers win child custody in 70% of cases.
Never mind that the actual number of fathers winning custody was
only
15%. And don't worry that
Chesler's conclusion was based on a sample of 60 discontented women
referred by feminist lawyers -- still, it made for a great story.
A decade later, the National Organization of Women was beginning to run
out of real issues. So it set out to invent new outrages calculated to
rally the faithful.
In 1996 the N.O.W.-nincompoops passed a resolution that repeated
Chesler's bogus 70% custody figure. Then they added a new twist,
claiming that patriarchal oafs who wanted to stay involved in their
children's lives after a divorce
represented
an "abuse of power in order
to control in the same fashion as do batterers."
How's that for high-decibel gender-baiting?
That claim may have succeeded in swelling the N.O.W. membership rolls,
but it still needed some scientific apple-polishing. So they brought in
the Wellesley Centers for Women, a group with an impeccable reputation
for research integrity.
Well, almost. It was the WCW, of course, that had earlier published that
fraudulent fiction of female academic underachievement, How Schools
Shortchange Girls.
And sure enough, the Wellesley women delivered. In 2002 the WCW
published "Battered Mothers Speak Out: A Human Rights Report on Domestic
Violence and Child Custody in the Massachusetts Family Courts." People
were ecstatic because the report vindicated everything that the N.O.W.
had been saying.
Take look closer, and you see the WCW report is based on interviews with
a small group of 40 Massachusetts women. Worse, the report lacks any
objective proof of their allegations of rampant legal bias.
Which once again proves you can reach almost any conclusion, just so
long as you're allowed to hand-pick your subjects and don't ask too many
hard questions.
Soon, the whole M.O.M. Squad -- Joan Meier, Jay Silverman, Lundy
Bancroft, and others -- was singing the Chesler catechism. Take a look
at what they pass off as "research," and you'll see they all reference
each other in an ever-expanding circle of
self-serving
citations.
Most disturbing of all is the tale of sociologist Amy Neustein. She was
one of the featured speakers at the
M.O.M.
conference that was recently
held in upstate New York.
Last year Neustein wrote a piece in The Jewish Press alleging her
ex-husband sexually abused their daughter Sherry. Neustein won lots of
sympathy points telling
people she lost the custody battle due to a
"malfunctioning court system that punished me for trying to protect my
daughter from abuse."
But a few months later Sherry, now a graduate student in New York City,
came along with a rather
different account: "She would begin by telling
me a sordid -- and false -- story about my father, such as a detailed
account about how he had molested me or about how he had thrown me
violently against a wall.. The truth, however, is that my father never
sexually abused me."
And let's not forget Sadiya Alilire, the woman who was portrayed in PBS'
Breaking the Silence as a heroic mom who was done wrong by the legal
system -- but was later
outed by court documents proving her to be a
serial child abuser.
Seven months after Charles Ponzi set up shop, his house of cards began
to collapse. On August 10, 1920 the newspapers revealed Mr. Ponzi was
bankrupt and pronounced his scheme an odious ruse. He was later
sentenced to five years in prison.
But 20 years after Phyllis Chesler made her preposterous claim, her
siren call of family destruction continues to make the rounds. Worse,
the Mothers Opposed to Men are on the offensive, setting up websites,
attracting sympathetic media coverage, and lobbying state legislators.
This time, it's not persons' money that's at stake. It's our families
that need to be shored up, and our children who
desperately
need their fathers.
Remember how the Great Society evicted fathers from their homes and
turned Black families into wards of the government? That's what the
M.O.M. Squad has in mind for the rest of us.
