So I just got off the phone with a dear friend and came here to rant a bit. Be warned. I absolutely HATE the way that parental rights, most especially guardianship, are handled here, especially in the South.

How in the hell can we, on one hand, tell men that they need to be more responsible parents, more than a sperm donor, more than a financial provider, and then with the other hand primary guardianship to the mother with a rubber stamp?

Partially to blame is old school patriarchy... the outdated societal roles that are so often used to dictate our society for things like marriage rights and even citizenship. Here, it is the assumed role that the raising of a child belongs, by default, to the mother. It is so universally accepted that, for the most part, the only people fighting it are divorced fathers, and then, only the ones who are actually trying to BE fathers, and of those, only the ones who have divorced a woman who would try to prevent them from doing so.

Feminism doesn't get a pass here, either, because as with so many things, second generation feminism missed the point of the battle in interests of winning the war. The feminists who knee-jerk side with the mothers only think "This mother is a woman, she wants these rights, so we will fight for them." They completely miss the point that the true enemies of feminism are not MEN, but mandated gender roles. But most miss it in interests of giving men the middle finger, and so justice is carefully averted, and patriarchy gets just a little bit stronger.

There are men out there who love their children, who would be legitimately better guardians than the mothers of their children, who are denied the ability to do so by society's assumptions about gender and parenting. It pisses me off, and it should piss you off, too. It should piss off anyone who claims to care about the welfare of children, it should piss off anyone who claims to care about gender equality, it should piss off anyone who laments the deterioration of the "father figure", it should piss off anyone who believes in equal representation under the law.

And it doesn't. Liberal or Conservative, Progressive or Traditional, no one who hasn't been personally touched by the issue seems to care. I can't claim to have even thought about it until my friend's situation brought it all to light for me. More people should know. More people should care. Regardless of your politics, there is a reason why the current state of parenting rights in the courts of the United States should make you angry.

So get angry... and maybe we can actually make some progress in this.