The Men's Marriage Strike: What the Political Class Has to Lose

Professional conservatives will lose the most, and they know it.

The conservative political class has become apoplectic. What has them so agitated that they inveigh against it with such vehemence? Transgenderists mutilating children? Family-court judges castrating boys? Homosexualists proclaiming a right to sexually molest children?

No, what really drives the promoters of “family values” into a frenzie is that men are not marrying and having children. For this, the men are castigated as “puerile”, “cowardly,” “unmanly”, and worse.

It is true that, as men discover the legal terms of marriage and divorce, they have embarked on one of the most remarkable actions of our time: a spontaneous boycott or “strike” of marriage, refusing to marry, start families, or even associate with women altogether.

This is not new. "Have anti-father family court policies led to a men's marriage strike?" some were asking more than two decades ago. In an undeservedly neglected book, Helen Smith has thoroughly documented how men are refraining from marriage when they realize the devastating effects of divorce inflicted on them unilaterally through literally “no fault” of their own.  No sane man marries and has children knowing that he can lose those children and everything else, plus be incarcerated without trial – all without having committed any legal infraction.  “I could not in good conscience urge any young man . . . today to marry, or even to date,” confesses one marriage advocate.  “There is simply no point in continuing to play by the old rules with women who openly despise those rules.”¹

For this, the political class now excoriates them mercilessly.  Even feminists do not tear their hair so much as conservatives, whose nagging and scolding know no limits.  

“Fatuous Denial”

Kay Hymowitz pioneered the technique with her claim that feminism was creating men who refuse to grow up.  Purportedly criticizing feminism (ever-so-gently) and making sure not to anger the almighty divorce industry, she exemplifies how conservative politicos carefully frame their critiques of feminism to validate its venom against men for evading its traps by not marrying, reproducing, or otherwise putting their necks in the noose.² 

Now politicians like Senator Josh Hawley are getting into the act.  (I have already addressed Hawley’s moralizing in a previous post.) He too refrains from criticizing the divorce industry he serves, which would quickly end his career.

Now this has mushroomed into a major right-wing publishing genre.  One neonconservative think tank, publishing in a glossy neocon magazine – both of which presumably exist to inform and influence public policy, not to berate private citizens – even acknowledges, “Men can have…their bank accounts drained and their children taken from them.”  (They omit jailed without trial, then released to lives of homelessness.)  Yet it still calls men’s refusal to marry “cowardly” and “unmanly”.  Rather than summoning some courage of their own to confront the corrupt divorce machinery as a public policy matter (which one might have thought is the purpose of think tanks and current-affairs journals) and suggest reforms of oppressive and blatantly unconstitutional laws so that men – and women and children and societies – can have families (and constitutional rights), they find it safer to scold private individuals.

Perhaps most bizarre, evangelical Christians now make this the cornerstone of their preaching.  Mark Driscoll, an influential media minister, fulfills all the stereotypes of the smug, self-righteous, morally superior televangelist.  Calling unmarried men “selfish and self-indulgent,” he departs from standard sermon technique by lambasting them in the second person (“You guys are a total joke…”), while exempting himself from the status of sinner.  (“Lord God…I pray for those men…who are cowards….”)  Driscoll’s calling at one time required men of God to stand up and call out state officials who abuse their power and perpetrate injustice.  But now the pastorate assumes the role of public scolds (a habit for which more determined Christians in past ages invented tongue-clips, bridles, and ducking stools).  Their own craven cowardice before the divorce industry not only drives men from their congregations; it denies themselves the venerable role of public consciences.  Were Direscoll to speak out against government tyranny on behalf of, not just the men, but justice itself, he would certainly be made to suffer for it (which is what I thought Christians are called to), but it might also restore the integrity of churches and families and freedom for all of us.

The pointlessness of this has long been obvious to anyone with common sense.  “The conservative commentariat is clueless as usual about these realities,” Roger Devlin pointed out years ago.  “All they have to offer is empty sermonizing about the sacredness of the marriage vow.”  But no amount of nagging by sanctimonious apostles of marriage will persuade men to commit their lives to a fraudulent contract that provides no protection against the confiscation of their children and can send them straight to jail.  “Preaching hasn’t worked,” wrote Laura Wood some years ago.  “As long as our government sustains single mothers, as long as family courts continue to strip spouses of their assets and children when they have done no wrong, preaching is an exercise in fatuous denial.”³

The Threat to the Political Class

Especially ironic in all this is advocates of limited government lambasting private citizens for initiating spontaneous action against oppressive government.  It exemplifies professional conservatives’ successful determination to lose every battle.  When handed a plausible and effective respite from their unbroken string of defeats, with private citizens already undertaking effective collective action against the radical Left and its most diabolical achievement, the Right responds by vilifying the citizens, trying to smother their initiative, and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.  

No clearer proof exists of a professional political class that hates and fears its own citizens than the fury they pour out against men who initiate their own measures to defend their own freedom.  The rage is at least as fierce and vicious on the professional Right as on the Left.  And nothing more starkly exposes the nerve, the pressure point where the rest of us must hit back if we have any hope of freeing ourselves from the grip of both.

If ordinary citizens can achieve by their own spontaneous initiative what the professionals fail to accomplish, that makes the pros look incompetent and unnecessary.  It is not difficult to understand why they rave and rant.  The men are engaged in a genuine and spontaneous citizen initiative.  And thereby they are declaring the political class to be what it largely is: superfluous. 

This must be fully appreciated. It demonstrates why this strike is much more important, and has the potential to achieve far more, than justice for fathers and children in the courts, more even than restoring marriage and families, though it will do all that.  If conducted properly, it will curtail the power of not only the Deep State but the entire political class that pretends to oppose the Deep State, but is really just an extension of it.

By undertaking a truly spontaneous citizen action, aspiring male citizens are effectively declaring that the political class – not just obvious “RINO” Republicans or neoconservatives, but the entire entourage of professional hangers-on, Right as well as Left – is unnecessary, redundant, even parasitic.  By boycotting marriage and families, men acquire the leverage to achieve critical political changes and restore our democracy without relying on politicians, judges, lawyers, lobbyists, lapdog journalists, and the others who have usurped our citizenship and who mostly serve only to stand in the way.  Rather than mortgaging their citizenship to paid professionals, men can once again become true active citizens.  They are demonstrating that participatory citizenship can bypass professional political operatives and undertake spontaneous action to free itself.  And all the political class can do is fume and fuss and call them ugly names.

On One Condition…

Yet the grain of truth that makes the scolding plausible must be recognized and remedied. It is certainly true that renouncing women, marriage, and families is not a state to which men should resign themselves indefinitely, especially when it is done out of fear.  This would indeed be weak and defeatist, and it is not a healthy or wholesome life.  It is a denial of manhood itself, the essence of which is to love, procreate, and lead.  Unless done from compelling religious convictions, foregoing family life denies a man life’s greatest joys.  

Like any boycott or strike, this one must have a specific, well-defined purpose.  That purpose is to change the laws and the practices of the courts, welfare agencies, and other government bodies, so that we can all have real, functional families once again. 

So long as this larger purpose is kept firmly in view, a marriage strike is not defeatist but defiant, not weak but strong, not cowardly but manly.

Here is where the professional politicos could offer the men guidance and support, and help ensure that their impromptu revolt is focused, disciplined, and constructive. Instead, the pundits and parlor intellectuals prefer to complile their own impossible wishlists as they flail helplessly against the Deep State and the Left. By contrast, the men’s voluntary spontaneity demonstrates that their action is feasible and can actually achieve something.

In closing, and noting that the political class has achieved an almost complete media blackout of these injustices while freely venting its spleen against those who suffer from them, I must confess to a wicked desire to see a few of the scolds in tongue clips and ducking stools.

Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Political Studies at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw and author of Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (2007), and The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Government Power (2017), where the points in this piece are documented more fully.

1. Glenn Sacks and Dianna Thompson, "Have Anti-Father Family Court Policies Led to a Men's Marriage Strike?"  Philadelphia Inquirer, 5 July 2002; Helen Smith, Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – and Why It Matters (Encounter, 2013); F. Roger Devlin, Sexual Utopia in Power (Counter-Currents, 2015), 52, 54.

2. Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys (Basic Books, 2012).

3. Devlin, Sexual Utopia; Laura Wood, “The Thinking Housewife” (blog), 6 December 2015, quoted in Phyllis Schlafly, Who Killed the American Family? (Washington: WND Books, 2014), 144. The few more recent conservatives who push back against this (see links above) act as if they are the first to discover it and seem to have no knowledge of, for example, Smith’s important book.  This demonstrates conservatives’ lack of intellectual depth, in this case by their inability to build a body of recognized literature on public policy problems.  Every aspiring “influencer” seeks media stardom by “reinventing the wheel”, which spins pointlessly.