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ACTION POINTS for Committed Dads

●   Make plans to “camp out” with your kids in the coming weeks, even if it’s in the living room or the basement and you use the microwave to make the s’mores. (But no TV allowed.)

The Nazi Party actually cared nothing about the "happy home." Indeed, one goal was to destroy family autonomy among party members and enemies of the party alike. As Koonz explains:

Referring to Himmler's command to the SS ranks that they sire out-of-wedlock children, she concludes:

In 1995, Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams published the book, The Pink Swastika. Inspired by the 1945 work of Samuel Igra, Germany's National Vice,[8] Lively and Abrams describe "the homoerotic" foundations of Nazi militarism. Their thesis is that "the National Socialist revolution and the Nazi Party were animated and dominated by militaristic homosexuals, pederasts, pornographers, and sadomasochists."[9]

This book generated howls of protest from the contemporary "gay community," including several websites designed solely to refute its argument. And the book does have a number of real limitations. Neither author appears to have had professional training as an historian, and their conclusions frequently jump well ahead of the facts. Most of their sources are secondary in nature; that is, the authors have not reviewed the primary documents. And the volume is published by an obscure press without the full tools of scholarship.

All the same, Lively and Abrams pull together a good deal of material, some familiar to this historian and some new. Independently confirmed, their case rings at least partially true.

For example, they trace the common roots of the early German "homosexual rights" campaign and the early Nazi Party to a hyper-masculinized nationalism, circa 1900. In 1896, for example, Adolf Brand founded Der Eigene (which could be translated as the "Self-Aware," or the "Self-Owner"). It was the world's first serious homosexual journal. By the late 1920s, it claimed an astonishing 150,000 subscribers. Critical of a "feminized" male homosexuality, Brand called for a hyper-masculinity, complete with man-boy love. As he wrote in a promotional pitch for "The Self-Aware": "[Der Eigene is for men who] thirst for a revival of Greek times and Hellenic standards of beauty after centuries of Christian barbarism."[10]

Over the years, child support has increasingly functioned less as a way to reduce or recover welfare costs and more as a forced subsidy on middle-class divorce. States are paid by federal taxpayers based on the amount they collect. This encourages them to neglect welfare families, for whom the program was designed, because there is little money to be had. Instead, enforcement agencies have shifted their focus to middle-class families, for whom the program was never intended, because they can collect large sums and, with them, lucrative federal funds, which can then be spent for any purpose. Using child support, state governments found they could raise revenue through the growth of single-parent homes.

The perversity of the incentives is diabolical. States have a financial incentive to generate fatherless children in the middle class, which they procure by providing sweeteners for single motherhood—expedited divorce, automatic and exclusive mother custody (regardless of fault), minimal visitation by fathers—turning as many men as possible into payers (including some who are not even fathers) and setting child-support awards as high as possible. It is hardly surprising that the vast majority of divorces in which children are involved are now filed by women.