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Archive-name: mens-issues/mens-rights/part1
Posting-Frequency: monthly See reader questions & answers on this topic! - Help others by sharing your knowledge URLs http://gidday.howzitgoing.com/altmrfaq.html http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/6708/altmrfaq.html http://members.theglobe.com/zohrab/index.html http://www.freeyellow.com/members2/zohrab/altmrfaq.html http://members.tripod.com/peterzohrab/altmrfaq.html http://peterzohrab.tripod.com/ altmrfaq.html http://members.xoom.com/zohrab/altmrfaq.html http://nzmera.orcon.net.nz/ http://www.angelfire.com/pe/terzohrab/ http://mera.50megs.com/ Maintainer: Peter D. Zohrab zohrab@xtra.co.nz USENET ALT.MENS-RIGHTS NEWSGROUP Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) PART ONE OF SIX (posted to Usenet around the FIRST day of each month). by Peter D. Zohrab As creator of the Usenet Newsgroup alt.mens-rights, I'm providing an FAQ, divided up into 6 parts for practical reasons, containing: 1) A specimen, condensed Men's Rights manifesto; and 2) A Men's Rights Resource-List (in 5 parts). 1) SPECIMEN MANIFESTO (from the New Zealand Men's Rights Association) MANIFESTO of the New Zealand Men for Equal Rights Association (formerly known as the New Zealand Men's Rights Association) AS AMENDED ON FEBRUARY 6TH 1998 A. Information Issues Information issues are basic to the success or failure of the Men's Movement. We have to be able to get our point of view across in an intellectual climate where women are generally considered to be the victims of male oppression in an evil patriarchy. 1. Media Bias Anti-male bias in the media must be monitored and records kept. Complaints must be lodged where appropriate, and publicity given to the complaints. 2. Teacher Bias Teacher unions usually have separate female officers on their executives and at branch level. These often use member funds to circulate Feminist propaganda, which then gets passed on to students and parents. This propaganda sometimes gets discredited later (e.g. the theory about boys dominating coeducational classrooms). 3. Men's Studies Women's Studies departments offer pseudo-academic courses in man-hating. Women's Studies departments at universities act as centres of Feminist propaganda-writing, and also as headquarters for Feminist activism within the university community. Some U.S. universities already have Men's Studies departments. Men's Rights activists should push for equity. This means that every university that has a Women's Studies Department should either abolish it, or have a Men's Studies Department as well, in order to counter Feminist propaganda. 4. Ministry of Men's Affairs The Ministry of Women's Affairs is just a Feminist propaganda-house. For the same reasons that men need Men's Studies departments in universities, men also need a Ministry of Men's Affairs in all countries (such as New Zealand) where a Ministry of Women's Affairs exists. The alternative solution is for all Ministries of Women's Affairs to be abolished. B. Legal Issues Feminism has captured the legal system to the detriment of men. Legal issues are second in importance to Information issues in the Men's Movement. In fact, one of the main reasons for pushing the information issues is to achieve our goals as regards legal issues such as the following. 5. Divorce Law This should cease to discriminate against men in areas such as child-custody and false child abuse and domestic violence accusations in the Family Court. A mere accusation of child abuse or domestic violence should not have any effect on the accused's chances of obtaining custody. The charges should have to be proved in court first. 6. False Accusations People making false accusations (such as accusations of rape or child sexual abuse) should be prosecuted as a matter of course and police policy, and the penalties should be made equivalent to the penalties involved in the type of crime that the false accusation related to. This is necessary as a deterrent. 7. Sex Abuse and false memories A balance needs to be achieved between the needs of society to protect itself against sex abusers, and the need to protect innocent people from manufactured memories of supposed abuse in childhood produced in adult minds by Feminist councellors. 8. Domestic Violence The anti-male hysteria surrounding this issue must be removed, by publicising statistics showing that women batter men just as often as men batter women, by encouraging battered men to come forward, and by educating police and public to take a more balanced view of this issue. More research must be done and publicised into the causes of domestic violence, since it is currently presented as if men beat their wives for no reason at all. Feminists must not be allowed to monopolise this issue, as they tend to ask misleading questions. For example, Feminists stirred up some hysteria some years ago by publishing the results of a survey in Australia which showed that a majority of men thought that they might, under certain circumstances, be justified in hitting their wives. The issue looks a bit different if you ask questions like: - Are men NEVER justified in hitting their wives, no matter what they do or say ? - Are women ever justified in hitting, or otherwise injuring their husbands ? The problem is that Feminists have been pushing the legal systems of Western countries towards a situation where women can successfully plead provocation in crimes against men, while men cannot successfully plead provocation in crimes against women. 9. Sexist Laws Sexist, anti-male offences such as "Assault on a Female" must be removed from the statute-books. 10. Law of Evidence The restrictions on defence lawyers in rape trials must be removed, in order to safeguard the rights of innocent defendants. It is up to judges and juries, not parliament, to decide what evidence is relevant in a given case. 11. Syndromes and legal defences Men must campaign against women-only defences and men-only crimes. Feminists have been steadily working towards the goal of getting all women treated as innocent victims, no matter what they have done -- and all men treated as criminals, no matter if they are innocent. 12. Rape The definition of rape must be restricted, and all attempts to expand the definition of rape to include anything a woman might afterwards wish she hadn't done should be strenuously resisted. 13. Police Bias Instances of anti-male police bias must be recorded, filed, protested about, and brought to the attention of the media and the public. The Police must be made aware of the need to train recruits to avoid anti-male bias in their dealings with the public. 14. Infanticide Infanticide by women should be punished just as severely as infanticide by men. 15. Conscription and Military Service Men's sacrifices in war must be suitably recognised by Society. They are not suitably recognised if officials and the media pretend that women made equal sacrifices in wars when they actually did not do so. The NZMRA considers that it would be impractical for men and women to have identical roles in wartime. 16. Choice For Men (I) Men are entitled to a reproductive "choice", and should be allowed to terminate their parental rights and responsibilities, just as a woman can unilaterally, at present. A woman can terminate her parental rights and responsibilities unilaterally, by having an abortion. If women did not have this unilateral reproductive "choice", on the other hand (see "Choice for Men II" below), then men should not have one either. Unplanned parenthood can completely disrupt a man's life. It can disrupt his education, it disrupts his mental health, and it often disrupts his entire family life.... Paternity, or additional offspring, may force upon the man a distressful life and future. Psychological harm and heartbreak may result. Mental and physical health may be taxed. There is also the distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child. The continuing stigma of unwed fatherhood may be involved.... Men have been treated as an under class without reproductive rights.... Denying men reproductive rights is humiliating, oppressive, offensive to the basic principles of human dignity. The decision as to whether or not a particular man will terminate his parental rights and responsibilities is a decision that can be made by that man only. Women or men who trick their partners into involuntary parenthood should be prosecuted and punished by the law. 17. Choice for Men II (Abortion) A father should legally have an equal say with the mother in any decision relating to abortion. This is because the father's wishes have equal status with the mother's wishes, and both parents tend to have an equal financial, moral and legal responsibility for any child that is born. In many countries, the father is forced to contribute to the child's upkeep -- whether he actually lives with the mother, has custody or access rights, or not. Any abortion consent form should need to be signed by both natural parents. If this is not the case, then the father has the right to "Choice for Men I" (see above). 18. Abortion Notwithstanding the issue of Choice For Men, there is a natural tendency for Men's Rights activists to see abortion as yet another way that women can issue a contract to kill with impunity. 19. Tax Law Tax law should not discriminate against the two-parent, one-income family. Family income should be taxed as one unit. Feminism is hostile to the traditional two-parent, one-income family, which is associated with stable societies with low crime-levels. There is a mass of evidence associating increased numbers of single-parent families with increased crime. Women in the workforce drive down real wages by increasing the pool of available labour. This in turn makes the single-income family less viable. C. Other Issues 20. Men's Health and Longevity Equal funds should be allocated to research, prevention, information and treatment relating to male-only diseases (such as prostate cancer and testicular cancer) as to female-only diseases. As men have a greater mortality than women from most diseases, and a shorter life-expectancy than women, Men's Health should be a priority spending area within Vote Health. 21. Sports Apartheid Since Feminists favour Equal Employment Opportunity and oppose separate men's clubs, the sexual apartheid system in individual, non-contact sports should be abolished, e.g. female tennis players should play in the same competition as men players -- for the same prizes. The alternative is to enshrine sexual segregation in some areas of social and sporting life in legislation, with payments for sportsmen being set substantially higher than those paid to sportswomen -- to reflect the different objective standards involved. 22. Circumcision Circumcision is genital mutilation, and should be campaigned against by all those who are opposed to female circumcision. The fact that it involves less mutilation than female circumcision does is counterbalanced by the fact that male circumcision is more widespread than its female counterpart. Circumcision is particularly abhorrent when it is practised for purely secular, non-medical reasons. 23. Affirmative Action and Quotas These should either be abolished altogether, or applied across-the-board, including areas where women are underrepresented and Feminists have made no move to increase women's representation (e.g. prison populations, suicide rates, wartime death-rates, mortality rates from disease, etc.), and also areas where women are overrepresented (e.g. primary teachers). Any such across-the-board fairness would logically have to apply to ethnic minorities as well -- some ethnic groups do better than the majority on these statistics, and some do worse. 24. Sexist Language The media and Government should be just as careful to avoid sexist language that belittles men (e.g. "gunman" instead of "gunperson", "hatchet-man" instead of "hatchet-person") as they are to avoid language that belittles women. 25. Advertising Advertising that denigrates and belittles men must be combatted vigorously. http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm The Truth on Domestic Violence http://nzmera.orcon.net.nz/altmrfaq.html alt.mens-rights FAQ http://www.landwave.com/family/ More Truth on DV http://nzmera.orcon.net.nz/menlinks.html 1000 Men's/Dads' Links http://www.calib.com/nccanch/pubs/factsheets/canstats.cfm Child Abuse Statistics An "indigenous" people is that which committed the last local genocide http://nzmera.orcon.net.nz/contents.html Sex, Lies & Feminism User Contributions: |
alt.mens-rights Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), Part 1/6
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