CAD'S RIGHTS: I am not a clairvoyant nor do I play one on television, but I’ve known this was coming for the past fifteen years or so. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the concept of child support rests firmly on the belief, once common throughout the United States, that men ought to support the children they father. This belief was itself the product of a time wherein abortion was dangerous and not readily available, and birth control was at best crude and not very effective. We now live in a world where abortion is both safe and commonplace and effective birth control is widely available. In addition to this, through a series of court decisions, radical feminists have more or less eliminated the male role in the decision to become a parent, reducing him to little more than a sperm donor and an open wallet. Children today are wholly optional, it seems, and only women get to exercise the option. Sooner or later, a case such as this was bound to occur.

I do not know if the courts will entertain this gentleman’s argument, and I use the term gentleman in the most generic sense possible; most judges are old enough to believe the old premise that fathers should pay for their children, and those that don’t will look to the vast corpus of legal opinion that exists on the subject and refuse to throw the baby out with the law books. This attitude, however, will not survive in the long run. The radical feminists have fatally undermined it, thereby proving yet again that the law of unintended consequences is still with us and doing quite well these days, thank you for asking. The radical feminists' constant demand for unfettered sexual rights without any sexual responsibilities have led inexorably to this argument: if a woman cannot be compelled to be a mother, then it necessarily follows that a man cannot be compelled to be a father. If the courts do not accept this argument now, they will sometime in the next twenty to thirty years; it is only a matter of time, for this is the inevitable conclusion of the demand for complete sexual freedom.

It will be more than a little amusing to watch the feminists upend all their usual arguments in order to keep child support going; it will, I think, be very similar to their performance during the Lewinsky scandal, where more than one prominent feminist shaded her demand for ever more stringent protections against sexual harassment in the workplace with her desire to keep President Clinton in the Oval Office. If nothing else, this episode might teach the feminists that running to the courts for redress for all of the nation’s ills might not be such a good idea; any state legislator in the country would laugh off this guy’s argument in a heartbeat, if for no other reason that there are no votes to be had in being known as a defender of cads’ rights, but the courts must follow precedent and the Constitution, and if the Constitution gives women the right to be irresponsible dolts then it must give men the same right. After all, we live in a country that prides itself on giving the equal protection of the laws to everyone, even sexually irresponsible jackasses.