I had been with my two sons, James and Jude, every day of their lives until the age of three.
We lived in Dallas, Texas. When my wife filed for divorce, I had to leave my sons’ home.
I had the two boys only half of the time. My first night away from them, I lay uneasily in my bed. I began to shiver. I wondered if I might be cold, although it was the hottest part of summer.
Shivering and clutching my sides, I gradually came to understand that I was crying. I am a man, and my emotions are usually under my control. I allow myself to be sad or to be happy or to be tired or even to be angry. I observed myself, shaking as I wept for my sons, fearing for them, unable to avert the tragedy awaiting them in the near future.
Nowadays, divorce requires no exceptional circumstances, only fickle sentiment. Our customs adapted to the absence of fathers. We now don’t even expect children to have fathers. But I expected my children would have a father.
As I regained my composure, lying in a silent house, in my bed, I understood what I must do. I must give my posterity a path to manhood in a fatherless society.
I grew up on a farm and ranch in a very rural area of Texas. My life then was full of struggles. I had no father. My mother had exiled him by divorce when I was eight years old. I would sit in the bar ditch along the dirt road outside my home. With a stick I would spell my father’s name in the dirt. I would sit there all day, waiting for my father to come back.
The farm hands who occasionally drove by — all from Mexico, all fathers with children, all with intact families — took pity on me. They sometimes stopped and talked with me. They were hard men. Good men. One day, I would want to be like them.
My mother for months thought I was playing outside. One day, Joe Garcia, with a stern look on his face, drove his pickup into our driveway. He stepped out of the truck and waved at me.
“Jefe!” He called me “boss” in Spanish, because it sounded like my name “Jeff.” It was our private joke.
He walked in muddy boots to our front door, and knocked. My mother answered the door.
He told her that I was waiting for my father. My mother told me in angry words to come inside. She never allowed me to wait for my father again.
One day, as I was working at home, my then three-year-old son James came to me and leaned on my leg. He always did that when I sat. Completely unbidden, he told me that his mommy said he was a girl.
A cold terror took my breath away. James’ mother was a pediatrician. She had become a radical leftist. Now she was tampering with James’ gender identity.
She eventually enrolled James in school as a girl, without my consent. James was taught for years by pubic school teachers that he really was a girl. He used the girl’s restroom. When I took him to school in boy’s clothes, his teacher gave him a dress.
I couldn’t do much to change things with only two weekends a month with my sons. Still, James never presented as girl with me. He had a chance at a normal life with me. But the court gave him to his mother to be transitioned to a girl.
It seems to me that women think a lot about their rights. Men seem to think more about their duties. As I’ve aged, this has become less dichotomous than it first appears. Rights and duties are concomitant, two sides of one coin.
We all have duties. We need rights broad enough to allow us to fulfill those duties, but not so broad as to burden our fellow citizens. We all have rights. We can exercise those rights, but we cannot exercise them so imprudently as to burden our fellow citizens.
Rights and duties cannot be separated, yet today one rarely hears anything of our duties to one another. The best definition of the leftist worldview is this: the Left wants rights without duties, and duties without rights.
The sexual revolution that created the massive rise in divorce, which engendered the fatherless society — it is all based on a logical impossibility. This impossible, utopian ideal governs us and our families. This ideology promised more freedom, but only burdened us with duties that are impossible to fulfill. This wicked world system created by the Left has almost completed the murder of my son, James.
I wanted to give my sons a path to manhood in a fatherless society. This is the idea I came to in my despair. I was so in thrall to the wicked world system of the Left, I didn’t notice that I was creating a duty where there was no right.
In divorce, fathers have no right to raise their children. One cannot be a moral force in a child’s life with only two weekends a month together. There is no path to manhood in a fatherless society.
When I was in my mid-thirties, I located my father. I wanted to go back to that ditch and make him come back to get me. After a time, I noticed that my father’s absence from his children had broken him. He had taken to drinking.
I moralized about this for a year or so, but much like my thinking about rights and duties, I saw a deeper truth. Drinking was his bar ditch. That was how he waited for the family he loved to come back. He was still in love with my mother, after all those years.
This time with my father was tumultuous. My father was irritated by my presence, as though I was telling him to come inside, telling him that he couldn’t wait for us anymore. After all, I had grown up. The time for waiting was over.
He didn’t want to stop waiting. And so we parted forever. I told my friends stories about why I wasn’t spending much time with my father. The stories weren’t true. The long absence of divorce broke our bond of attachment. We had both been waiting for each other, but in the end there was nothing left to wait for but waiting itself.
For my sons to have a path to manhood, they would have to live in a society with fathers.
There is no path to manhood in a fatherless society. It seemed impossible. Eager to fight back, I found a duty that might make it possible. I must embark on a restorationist project to return fatherhood to its rightful station in society. This presented problems.
I am not a man well-suited by temperament to lead democratic movements. Much less am I suited to lead grand social restorationist projects. I wasn’t even philosophically sure that it could work. After all, I was skeptical of the Left’s belief that rational human action could engineer society. Wasn’t I supporting using rational human action to re-engineer society?
There are more serious problems. I was quite out of step with the zeitgeist. The sexual revolution promised liberation and freedom. Most people think that is precisely what it did. I would have to convince them that, on the contrary, what looks like liberation of human sexual aspirations is really a form of totalitarian social control.
And even if I could do that, it would take longer than the childhood of my sons. This conservative utopian vision would not save my sons. My sons would indeed grow up in a fatherless society.
I do not believe in leadership styles. There is one style of leadership: lead by example. When my sons wanted to learn judo, I did judo with them. When my sons wanted to learn how to use a knife to whittle, I whittled with them. When my sons had to learn how to write in cursive, I wrote everything in cursive.
Then my sons asked me if they could box. I was a boxer in my youth, but I was 56 years old.
Nevertheless, we all enrolled in boxing. I wanted them to see a real boxing match.
I wanted them to feel confident being hit. So I went back in the ring, to set the example.
I remember Jude looking at me with awe as I stepped in the amateur ring with a 24 year old heavyweight. Our bout started strategically. We studied the other’s footwork and tested reactions with jabs and feints. I landed a hard cross to the fellow’s chin. A second later, he jabbed and then landed a hard cross to my liver.
It dropped me. Great, my boys were going to see me take a TKO in my first match.
Then I heard Jude say in a confident and playful voice, “It hurts just as bad on your knees as it does standing up, Dad.”
This made me laugh, and I stood up before the end of the count. I never let that guy get close to me again. I won the match on points.
In 2019, in a small court room in Dallas County, I put a question before the court. Can a mother transition her son, James, to a girl without the father’s consent? The world’s foremost experts on both sides of that question, and on both sides of the transgender debate, arrived in that small courtroom.
After a week at trial, the decision was: no, no she can’t do that. I got 50-50 custody and no child support. My ex-wife could not use any medical intervention to change James into a girl. We both had to agree in order to change the status quo.
Later, the leftist Dallas County establishment managed to remove my judge in a transparently corrupt recusal proceeding. The new judge, Mary Brown, 301st District Court, took away my sons. The judge allowed my ex-wife to transition my son, James, to a girl.
He wears dresses. He uses the girl’s restroom. I worry that he will succumb to the lies, that he believes he is really a girl.
The court and my ex-wife have savagely abused my son. And it is all being done with no consequences for the abusers, who use government authority and immunity as a cover for these vicious crimes.
I was given only supervised visitation. It costs $600 per visit. They won’t let me change James out of a dress. They won’t let me use male pronouns for my son. They won’t let me teach James traditional Christian doctrine on sexuality and gender.
So, I cannot cooperate with supervised visitation. I will not allow a judge to coerce me into abusing of my own son.
My sons are growing up fatherless, as I did. Their mother removed me from their lives, as my mother did to me.
I can see only one peaceful path to save my sons. I am running for office in Texas. As a State Representative in House District 63, I will introduce legislation to prevent judges from sexually abusing children. I will enter articles of impeachment for judges that abuse Texas children from the bench. I will never stop fighting for my son’s life.
This article is illegal. In January 2020, Judge Mary Brown, in Dallas, Texas, put me under an unconstitutional gag order. It doesn’t prevent me from talking about my case. It prevents me from talking about political topics.
It permanently bans me from all newspapers, blogs, news reports, stories, and social media. The judge did this to prevent me from telling you about what she’s done to James. They tried to silence my speech to prevent me from testifying to the Texas Legislature on outlawing sex-changes on children.
This gag order is directly intended to prevent me from running for office. But I don’t follow illegal orders or mandates from lawless judges or any official. They will not silence me.
Are my sons waiting for me? When we meet next, will the waiting be the only thing left for us?
Answering these questions is what it takes to be a father in our fatherless society.
The only thing that keeps me going is Jude’s saying. It hurts just as much on your knees as standing up. I might as well keep fighting, keep swinging, no matter what. I will always get up, as my sons expect of their father.
