Manifesto of the New Zealand Equality Education Foundation
(as at 4 May 2005)
INFORMATION ISSUES
Information issues are basic to the success
or failure of the Men's Movement. We have to be able to get our point
of view across in an intellectual climate where women are generally
considered to be the victims of male oppression in an evil patriarchy.
1. Media Bias
Anti-male bias in the media must be monitored
and records kept. Complaints must be lodged where appropriate, and publicity
given to the complaints.
2. Teacher Bias
Many teacher unions (such as the PPTA) have separate female officers
on their executives and at branch level. These often use member funds
to circulate Feminist propaganda, which then gets passed on to students
and parents. This propaganda sometimes gets discredited later (e.g.
the theory about boys dominating coeducational classrooms).
3. Men's Studies
Women's Studies departments offer pseudo-academic courses in man-hating.
Women's Studies departments at universities act as centres of Feminist
propaganda-writing, and also as headquarters for Feminist activism within
the university community. Some U.S. universities already have Men's
Studies departments. Men's Rights activists should push for equity.
This means that every university that has a Women's Studies Department
should either abolish it, or have a Men's Studies Department as well,
in order to counter Feminist propaganda.
4. Ministry of Men's Affairs
The Ministry of Women's Affairs is just a Feminist propaganda-house.
For the same reasons that men need Men's Studies departments in universities,
men also need a Ministry of Men's Affairs in all countries (such as
New Zealand) where a Ministry of Women's Affairs exists. The alternative
solution is for all Ministries of Women's Affairs to be abolished.
LEGAL ISSUES
Feminism has captured the legal system to the detriment of men. Legal
issues are second in importance to information issues in the Men's Movement.
In fact, one of the main reasons for pushing the information issues
is to achieve our goals as regards legal issues
such as the following.
5. Divorce Law
This should cease to discriminate against men in areas such as child-custody
and false child abuse and domestic violence accusations in the Family
Court. A mere accusation of child abuse or domestic violence should
not have any effect on the accused's chances of obtaining custody. The
charges should have to be proved in court first.
6. False Accusations
People making false accusations (such as
accusations of rape or child sexual abuse) should be prosecuted as a
matter of course and police policy, and the penalties should be made
equivalent to the penalties involved in the type of crime that the false
accusation related to. This is necessary as a deterrent.
7. Sex Abuse and false memories
A balance needs to be achieved between the needs of society to protect
itself against sex abusers, and the need
to protect innocent people from manufactured memories of supposed abuse
in childhood produced in adult minds by Feminist counsellors.
8. Domestic Violence
The anti-male hysteria surrounding this issue must be removed, by publicising
statistics showing that women batter men just as often as men batter
women, by encouraging battered men to come forward, and by educating
police and public to take a more balanced view of this issue. More research
must be done and publicised into the causes of domestic
violence, since it is currently presented as if men beat their wives
for no reason at all. Feminists must not be allowed to monopolise this
issue, as they tend to ask misleading questions. The problem is that
Feminists have been pushing the legal systems of Western countries towards
a situation where women can successfully plead provocation in crimes
against men, while men cannot successfully plead provocation in crimes
against women.
9. Sexist Laws
Sexist, anti-male offences such as "Assault on a Female"
must be removed from the statute-books.
10. Law of Evidence
The restrictions on defence lawyers in rape trials must be removed,
in order to safeguard the rights of innocent defendants. It is up to
judges and juries, not parliament, to decide what evidence is relevant
in a given case.
11. Syndromes and legal defences
Men must campaign against women-only defences and men-only crimes.
Feminists have been steadily working towards the goal of getting all
women treated as innocent victims, no matter what they have done --
and all men treated as criminals, no matter if they are innocent.
12. Rape
The definition of rape must be restricted,
and all attempts to expand the definition of rape to include anything
a woman might afterwards wish she hadn't done should be strenuously
resisted.
13. Police Bias
Instances of anti-male police bias must be recorded, filed, protested
about, and brought to the attention of the media and the public. The
Police must be made aware of the need to train recruits to avoid anti-male
bias in their dealings with the public.
14. Infanticide
Infanticide (the killing of infants) by women should be punished just
as severely as infanticide by men.
15. Conscription and Military Service
Men's sacrifices in war must be suitably recognised by Society. They
are not suitably recognised if officials and the media pretend that
women made equal sacrifices in wars when they actually did not do so.
Laws must either guarantee sexual equality in wartime conscription and
peacetime military service, or compensate men for this unequal burden
by giving them special privileges.
16 Paternity Rape
Every man has a right to have his paternity confirmed (e.g. by DNA
testing) at his sole discretion and at government expense, if he is
expected to contribute to raising or maintaining a child on the basis
of being its purported father.
17. Choice For Men (I)
Men are entitled to a reproductive "choice",
and should be allowed to terminate their parental rights and responsibilities,
just as a woman can unilaterally, at present. A woman can terminate
her parental rights and responsibilities unilaterally, by having an
abortion. If women did not have this unilateral reproductive "choice",
on the other hand (see "Choice for Men II" below), then men
should not have one either.
Unplanned parenthood can completely disrupt a man's life. It can disrupt
his education, it disrupts his mental health, and it often disrupts
his entire family life.... Paternity, or additional offspring, may force
upon the man a distressful life and future. Psychological harm and heartbreak
may result. Mental and physical health may be taxed. There is also the
distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child. The
continuing stigma of unwed fatherhood may be involved....
Men have been treated as an under class without reproductive rights....
Denying men reproductive rights is humiliating, oppressive, offensive
to the basic principles of human dignity. The decision as to whether
or not a particular man will terminate his parental rights and responsibilities
is a decision that can be made by that man only. Women or men who trick
their partners into involuntary parenthood should be prosecuted and
punished by the law.
18. Choice for Men II (Abortion)
A father should legally have an equal say with the mother in any decision
relating to abortion. This is because the
father's wishes have equal status with the mother's wishes, and both
parents tend to have an equal financial, moral and legal responsibility
for any child that is born. In many countries, the father is forced
to contribute to the child's upkeep -- whether he actually lives with
the mother, has custody or access rights, or not. Any abortion consent
form should need to be signed by both natural parents. If this is not
the case, then the father has the right to "Choice for Men I"
(see above).
19. Abortion
Abortion is the grossest form of human
rights violation on the planet, and is yet another way that women can
issue a contract to kill with impunity, in many countries.
20. Tax Law
Tax law should not discriminate against the two-parent, one-income
family. Family income should be taxed as one unit. Feminism is hostile
to the traditional two-parent, one-income family, which is associated
with stable societies with low crime-levels. There is a mass of evidence
associating increased numbers of single-parent families with increased
crime. Women in the workforce drive down real wages by increasing the
pool of available labour. This in turn makes the single-income family
less viable.
OTHER ISSUES
21. Men's Health and Longevity
Equal funds should be allocated to research, prevention, information
and treatment relating to male-only diseases (such as prostate cancer
and testicular cancer) as to female-only diseases. As men have a greater
mortality than women from most diseases, and a shorter life-expectancy
than women, Men's Health should be a priority
spending area within Vote Health.
22. Sports Apartheid
Since Feminists favour Equal Employment
Opportunity and oppose separate men's clubs, the sexual apartheid system
in individual, non-contact sports should be abolished, e.g. female tennis
players should play in the same competition as men players -- for the
same prizes. The alternative is to enshrine sexual segregation in some
areas of social and sporting life in legislation, with payments for
sportsmen being set substantially higher than those paid to sportswomen
-- to reflect the different objective standards involved.
23. Circumcision
Circumcision is genital mutilation, and
should be campaigned against by all those who are opposed to female
circumcision. The fact that it involves less mutilation than female
circumcision does is counterbalanced by the fact that male circumcision
is more widespread than its female counterpart. Circumcision
is particularly abhorrent when it is practised for purely secular, non-medical
reasons.
24. Affirmative Action and Quotas
These should either be abolished altogether, or applied across-the-board,
including areas where women are underrepresented and Feminists have
made no move to increase women's representation (e.g. prison populations,
suicide rates, wartime death-rates, mortality rates from disease, etc.),
and also areas where women are over-represented (e.g. primary teachers).
Any such across-the-board fairness would logically have to apply to
ethnic minorities as well -- some ethnic groups do better than the majority
on these statistics, and some do worse.
25. Sexist Language
The media and Government should be just as careful to avoid sexist
language that belittles men (e.g. "gunman" instead of
"gunperson", "hatchet-man" instead of "hatchet-person")
as they are to avoid language that belittles women.
26. Advertising
Advertising that denigrates and belittles men must be combated vigorously.
