Stephen Baskerville (2019 TFRM Conference in Vegas) Part 2: The Destruction of Marriage and Fatherhood

In his 2019 speech at the Fathers’ Rights Movement Conference in Las Vegas, Stephen Baskerville warned that family courts are dismantling marriage and fatherhood. “By far the most serious threat to the integrity and survival of the family is the unjust system of divorce and child custody,” he declared. This second part restates his arguments on how no-fault divorce and child support systems incentivize family breakdown and undermine society.

No-Fault Divorce: A Government Intrusion
Baskerville described no-fault divorce as enabling “government officials to carve up entire families at the request of one member or sometimes not even that and separate innocent parents from their own children.” He argued: “When the government stopped enforcing the marriage contract, it began enforcing the divorce decree. The result was not the removal of the state from family life but an explosion of intrusive government machinery whose sole purpose is intervention in families.” He called this a “highly authoritarian attack” that licenses “the power to evict innocent citizens from their homes, seize their children, confiscate their property and jail them summarily“t.” In Taken Into Custody (2007), he documents how this machinery, including “vast federally funded social service bureaucracies,” wields “effectively police powers.”

Child Support: A “Massive Witch-Hunt”
Baskerville labeled the child support system “an engine for creating maximum divorce using very repressive government machinery.” He quoted attorney Judd Abraham: “A father is forced to finance the filching of his own children.” Challenging the “deadbeat dad” narrative, he stated: “No government or academic study has ever documented a non-payment problem. The initiative has been taken entirely by government officials and interest groups whose power and earnings have greatly expanded as a result.” Scholars like Sanford Braver, in Divorced Dads (1998), found no evidence of widespread non-payment, yet Baskerville noted: “Neither has any enforcement agency ever acknowledged this research… The entire thing is a massive witch-hunt against innocent citizens.”

He highlighted absurd cases: “Children who’ve been raped by adults must pay child support to the criminals who rape them… Men forced to pay child support for children not theirs and even for children who never existed.” He cited a Toronto girl’s plan: “I’m going to marry a really rich guy… then divorce him… but first I’m going to have his kids so I get child support.” Baskerville argued that “the child support system routinely forces legally innocent parents not only to surrender their children but to pay those who have taken them,” violating common law principles.

Incentivizing Divorce
Baskerville asserted that child support creates “a huge incentive for divorce.” He quoted Bryce Christensen of Southern Utah University: “Aggressive child support policies and the erosion of wedlock.” He explained: “There are many disincentives in the child support system. They incentivize the mother to divorce, they incentivize the state government to encourage divorce, they incentivize the courts and the judges… to set the child support levels as high as possible.” This, he said, is enabled by “guidelines… not set by legislators… but by enforcement officials,” a “violation of the separation of powers” and “an obvious conflict of interest.” He noted judges adding extraneous costs like “horseback riding or swimming lessons,” calling the system “absurdistan,” akin to Eastern European absurdities.

The Purpose of Marriage
Baskerville defined marriage’s role: “The purpose of marriage is fatherhood… Marriage exists so that children can have fathers… It thus creates paternal authority, allowing a man to exercise authority over the children that otherwise would be exercised by the mother alone.” He cited Thomas Hobbes: “In the state of nature… the dominion is in the mother… Only in civil society… is authority with children shared with the father.” He contrasted this with feminists who “renounce marriage as an institution of patriarchy and promote single motherhood and divorce as positive goods for their own sake.” He quoted Phyllis Schlafly: “The trend toward non-marriage… [is] a direct attack on fathers.”

Societal Fallout
Baskerville linked divorce tactics to broader issues: “Methods pioneered in the divorce proceedings have now been moved beyond family courts to exert a major impact on our larger society and politics.” He cited “accusations of rape on university campuses” and “more widespread accusations of sexual harassment and sexual assault,” which he stated as “largely fabricated” and modeled on family court practices. He referenced the 2018 Kavanaugh hearings as an example. As a note, the U.S. Census Bureau (2020) reports that children in father-absent homes are four times more likely to live in poverty and face higher incarceration rates (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2021).

Stephen’s Call to Restore Marriage
Baskerville urged fathers to restore marriage, stating: “No successful civilization has ever existed based on the mother-child diad… Societies that are stable, prosperous and free are based only on the two-parent family.”

In Part 3, we’ll explore his vision for fathers to lead a reform movement.

-David B
Fathers Anonymous