Many, many men are tried and punished through family courts, which are void of due process, including the parents who lost their child and were active in Promise Keepers. What are your thoughts on that?
Family courts do have "trials" in which evidence may be presented in order to determine parenting time, legal and/or physical custody, governing jurisdiction, move-away rights, and child support. So there is a modicum of due process there. However, the rules are set up to effectively discriminate against most fathers, because fathers tend to occupy the provider role more so than mothers. Being the provider takes one away from the kids, and even after a family breakup the court wants that separation to continue supposedly to provide an uninterrupted stream of care from the same primary care provider that the child has known (namely, the mother). And it is here where the authority of fathers is nullified, supplanted by the authority of the judge. And so in the supposed "best interest of the child," the child is largely separated from his or her father on the pretext that this is what's best for the child. So-called "trials" in the family courts do not ensure the rights of the parents, because the parents are not criminal defendants who are on trial. You have more rights as a criminal defendant than you have as a parent in family court, for this very reason. In family court "trials," the parents are not the ones on trial; the State's supremacy is on trial. And the court's right to define what is best for the child is what gives it the justifying pretext for its power.
The family court, in assembly line fashion with its loaded dockets, is under no legally binding obligation to acknowledge the child's actual needs to retain substantial contact with the father. Those needs for substantial father-child contact are not only emotional, but also security-based. The more substantial the physical proximity between the father and his children, the less vulnerable the kids will be to physical threats.
To summarize: With family courts the authority is based on law, whereas with patriarchy the authority is based on blood. The State, legitimized by laws, possesses the ultimate authority over the child's wellbeing, rather than the parents. But in patriarchy, the child's biological family has the ultimate authority over that child. Also within patriarchy there is justice and order; you have parents subject to the authority of higher-ranking family clan (rather than our current system's authorities of legislatures and law enforcers). All of the lawyers, legislators and judges in our law-based system don't have an emotional or biological connection to the children whose lives they are micromanaging, but that's not the case in a patriarchal system. Blood is thicker than water or law, and that is why in a patriarchal system there is a much greater likelihood of an outcome that meets the child's needs because it preserves and reinforces the authority of the parents and the family, rather than reinforcing the authority of the State as in our current system. The fact that such a patriarchal model seems so unconventional these days is, to my mind, proof positive that we absolutely and manifestly do NOT live in a patriarchy, no matter what feminist ideologues may claim.
Although our law-based system can and does arrive at just outcomes (sometimes), in my view it is inferior to a patriarchal system,
especially in achieving just outcomes in matters that are related to family. A patriarchal system vests authority in the one who is most responsible for the wellbeing of the family, namely the father. But a law-based system retains the authority for the State, while continuing to impose obligations on the disempowered father. Law-based systems (whether conservative, liberal, libertarian, or other) are therefore more likely perpetuate injustices, compared to a patriarchy-based system.
