Yahoo News Article
The judge's ruling in this case is insane. I cannot believe she does not realize what she has done.
The website in question was kept anonymous. The guy hadn't even identified the ex. No one ever would have known who he was, who she was, or anything had she not brought it up. According to the story, she even showed it to the kids... yet the judge blames the man for this. Really? She shoves documentation of her behavior in their faces, and for it being there, he is the abuser? WTF?
I am all for parents being smart and wise about how they refer to each other in front of the kids. I do not bash my husband's ex in front of them. However, there is a huge difference between what is morally and ethically right, and what should be legal. Yes, it's stupid to inflict your feelings toward your ex upon your kids. Yes, it would be immoral and unethical to slam your ex publicly if you identified her in whatever you said. However, it's not illegal to vent. It's not illegal to network, and it's not illegal to document an ordeal you have been through, especially if you keep the participants anonymous.
The only way for people struggling with an unevenly administrated justice system is to band together, share information, and offer each other advice and support. Without the ability to do that, each person would be starting the fight from scratch, unable to learn from the successes and failures of the others, and more importantly, extremely unlikely to be able to learn of and refer to findings in other cases.
It is absolutely ludicrous to think that a court should be able to choose a topic, and tell a citizen that he cannot even ever make any reference to it. It's even more so when that topic is the person's own life. He's been told he cannot do what many, many parents do, which they are not barred from doing; talking about his family online. He can't post cute, funny stories about family activities on facebook. He can't mention that his child support payments are making his budget tight. He can't explain that he's in a bad mood because he received a harassing phone call. He can't even preface a statement with, back when I was with (the ex) to denote the difference in himself between two times he is discussing. Technically, can he even call himself a divorcee? That is a reference to his ex, because you can't be divorced if you don't have one.
Here we have a judge giving a man a gag order to not talk about what's going on in his own life in the name of protecting people that the man's speech was never going to directly impact. That is just an excuse - this judge is not trying to protect the children. She's protecting the ex-wife.
I'm sure divorced men can easily see the danger in this ruling. That site was for the same thing as Men's Rights groups are for; networking, educating each other, offering a place to vent, and offering a place to find moral support. An attack on one such site is an attack on the right of any man to defend himself against any mistreatment by his ex.
What this judge basically did is tell this man that no matter what his ex-wife does to him, he just has to shut up and take it. I sure as hell hope he wins his appeal!
Among humans, when a condition or circumstance causes public outrage, it is the tendency of the population to experience a need for there to be a villain involved, in order for there to be an enemy of the movement to end the outrage.
ReplyDeleteHowever, folks are too lazy to accurately evaluate the outrage, breaking it down to the simplest parts. Instead, the general public tries to simplify the bigger, complex parts, and ends up assigning permanent, irrevocable responsibility for the recognized affront to an entire, associated segment of society, instead of the individuals or factors involved.
So basically, since some men were assholes to some women, all men are considered guilty of spousal abuse, even if found innocent, and even if they are in fact the victims. For those who do not stop and think, there cannot be a women's rights movement unless all men are the bad guys. Developments like this court case are the manifestation of that mindset.