MVI meets Judge
Last March the Child Maintenance Review Group called for consultation from interested parties. Men’s Voices responded and made a submission.
The review group was tasked with looking at how additional maintenance payments are determined within the Department of Social Protection, DSP, and whether or not a Child Maintenance Agency should be set up within the Department.
During the month of August The Chair of the Group, Judge Catherine Murphy has been engaged in meetings online with the parties. This has been an innovative enterprise; it is not often that groups get to meet with members of review groups or commissions even if this is limited to online meetings due to Covid.
Our turn came in the past week. We were invited to talk about our submission and any concerns we had in a frank exchange with the Judge. She proved to be open and receptive and well aware of the substance of our views. Among the issues we emphasised were:
Why should an additional payment be considered necessary by DSP when a Court Order or a Consent Order had already settled the maintenance payment between the parties?;
The impact on men of being removed from their homes, the financial hardships imposed, and the difficulties encountered in trying to fulfil their role as parent after such a traumatic event;
The importance of fatherhood in the development of children and how separation can make that link difficult to maintain;
Our opposition to a Child Maintenance Agency.
A Victory for Will Knowland
English teacher Will Knowland who was dismissed from his teaching position by Eton College and referred to the Teaching Regulatory Authority (TRA) has been cleared of misconduct by the TRA in what must be regarded as a victory for free speech.
Knowland was dismissed for his views set out in a video The Patriarchy Paradox, on how masculinity had been traduced by feminist ideologues and for his defence of traditional masculine values in the face of severe and ongoing attack. The lecture was intended to stimulate discussion by sixth formers in the school’s flagship debating course. Knowland set out his views in robust, vigorous language, making no concessions on a topic where most teachers are now silent, afraid to comment for fear of stirring up attacks by trolls.
Knowland will now take Eton to an employment tribunal.
Critical Race Theory
Critical Race Theory continues to make inroads in the Education system and in local councils in the UK as well as in the US. The obsession with white privilege, whiteness and white fragility is frightening.
American Express forced employees to undergo critical race theory training sessions, encouraging them to rank themselves on a hierarchy of “privilege” and apply the hierarchy in the workplace, with “privileged” employees deferring to “marginalised” groups.
An Atlanta school has begun segregating students by race, most ironically a new form of apartheid, and is now being sued by angry parents.
On a more hopeful note in the US, several state legislatures have advanced measures aimed at banning it from public schools, on the basis that its rigid moral categorization of people as either “privileged” or “oppressed” is offensive and even racist. The US Senate has voted to stop funding CRT in American schools.
According to an article in the London Times, Oxfam has forced its staff to take a survey on whiteness and white privilege which employees found “impenetrable, offensive and divisive”. Spiked has run an article on the chilling effect this has had on the free speech of the staff.
The US Senate has voted to stop funding Critical Race Theory in American schools
According to a report by Joanna Williams, Rethinking Race: A critique of contemporary anti-racism programmes, written for the UK think tank Civitas, British society is now less racist than at any previous time in its history but a modern anti-racism industry based on Critical Race Theory claims that racism is systemic, that unconscious bias is pervasive and that it is not enough not to be racist, we must all be actively anti-racist.
If you take part in training you will discover you are racist; if you don’t this is also proof of your racism.
Surveys in the US have likewise shown that racism there has been on the decline there for decades, yet the CRT activists would have us believe the country is sunk in it.
Added Note on the Gender Issue: BBC News’s in-house style guide has redefined the term homosexuality to mean “people of either sex who are attracted to people of their own gender”. Note: that’s attracted to people of the same gender, not the same sex. A number of people have commented that the language used is very similar to that of the activist group Stonewall.
We wonder what RTE think and whether it will follow suit.