Glenn Sacks is a men's and fathers' issues columnist, commentator, radio talk show host and blogger. Glenn's have appeared in dozens of the largest newspapers in the United States. He has made hundreds of Glenn, read his biography .
As I ve discussed in , there has been an inordinate amount of criticism directed towards David Harris, the fallen husband of Murder by Mercedes killer Clara Harris. Some of the letters in the Houston Chronicle last week are good examples. Letter writers J.
Busa, Debbie Wilson and Julie Bertrand all blamed the victim. Busa wrote:
The parents of David Harris want the world to hear that their son was a good man. I disagree.
Harris was not a good man. He cheated on his wife, and his actions resulted in his death. There is so much pain and loss that arise from selfishness.
I don t understand how the parents of David Harris can stand before the cameras with quivering lips and say what a good man he was. Have they forgotten why everyone in this sad story went to the hotel that fateful day? Had Harris been at home with his wife and children instead of at a hotel with his mistress, none of this would probably have occurred.
Most parents look at their children through rose-colored glasses and are grieved when a child dies, especially under these circumstances. The elder Harrises claim their son was a good man. Does a good man forsake the marriage vows he took?
Amazing. As if David cheating and trying to get away from his sorry excuse for a wife who was also apparently cheating on him is the total sum of his 44 years on this planet.
In a about the case a few years ago I quoted Bob Dylan s line What has he done to wear so many scars?
Has he changed the course of rivers? Has he polluted the moon and stars? I also noted:
In Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear, Lear is abandoned by his family with the exception of one loyal daughter, Cordelia.
In the Texas tragedy David Harris has been abandoned by his family except for his loyal daughter Lindsey, who loved her father and begged her stepmother not to kill him What did David Harris do to deserve this cruel fate? He had an affair. As Shakespeare’s Marc Antony said of the fallen Caesar’s ambition, David’s infidelity was a grievous fault and grievously hath he answered it.
Today the Houston Chronicle published a letter from a friend of David s. James Skipper wrote:
I knew David Harris and, in my opinion, he was a good man — a good son and a good father. He succumbed to temptation just as many do.
We should all be grateful that our sins have not led us and our families into such unfortunate circumstances. In my new co-authored column (Houston Chronicle, 1/27/07) I discussed the widespread sympathy expressed by the media and the public for Clara Harris, the Murder by Mercedes killer who claimed she murdered her husband David over his infidelity. Last week Harris was held culpable in a filed by David Harris parents.
One of my Texas readers lived through a similar situation as Harris actually, what his ex-wife did to him was far more than what Clara Harris suffered and describes the rather different reaction everybody had to it. Mike writes:
My wife had an affair. He [the new boyfriend] moved into my house using a protective order to get me out of the house.
He was driving my car, etc. This was before, during, and after the divorce. No one cared.
It was treated as a complete irrelevancy.
I was beat upon at every stage of the process by everybody involved. If anything, it seems they were treating me as being bad for embarrassing her by making an issue about her affair.
I shouldn’t embarrass her seemed to be the attitude.
They beat up on me despite her affair. They had no sympathy for me at all.
The only thing I wanted was fairness in the divorce. I got no fairness at all It is an understatement that no one cared. It was as if he was the legally entitled party because he was with her [not me].
I had no rights at all. Of course, if I had killed her, there would be no sympathy. None at all.
My new co-authored column, , was published in the Houston Chronicle today. The column, co-authored with Mike McCormick, Executive Director of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, appears below. If you d like to write a Letter to the Editor of the Houston Chronicle about the column, their e-mail address is .
Police squad cars all across America bear the slogan, There s no excuse for domestic violence. Yet there is one situation in which the media and the public seem to feel that domestic violence is sometimes excusable — when the perpetrator is a woman, and the victim is a man.
Imagine a woman trapped in a loveless marriage with a jealous, potentially violent husband whom she believes may be cheating on her.
She stays in the marriage because she fears she could be separated from her children should they divorce, and finds understanding, companionship and passion in a relationship with a coworker. Her husband finds out about the affair and goes on a violent, jealous rampage, slaughtering her in front of her daughter as the daughter begs him not to kill her mother.
There would be no tears or excuses for the killer, and nobody would dare to proffer the fact that his wife had been cheating on him as a justification for the murder.
These are the facts of the Clara Harris case, with the genders reversed. Yet the reaction has been quite different.
The media on both the left and the right have poured derision upon the murder victim, referring to David Harris as a rat, a lying, cheating scumbag and Clara Harris unfaithful dog of a husband.
Commentator Susan Estrich asked, Who could blame [Clara] for getting into her Mercedes and running him over? and seemed a little sad that the Harris County criminal trial jury did. Conservative talk show host Joseph Farah penned a column entitled Free Clara Harris!
in which he wrote, I d give her a medal. She did the right thing. That creep deserved what he got.
Even the prosecutor in the murder trial, Mia Magness, expressed her disgust, saying that Clara, instead of killing David by her own hand, should have [done] like every other woman get his house, car, kids — make him wish he were dead. Lorna Mullens, the jury forewoman in the recently concluded wrongful death trial, also expressed sympathy for Clara.
CBS portrayed Clara as a pitiable, betrayed wife in the 2004 movie Suburban Madness, and Oprah Winfrey sympathetically interviewed the sobbing Clara from prison in 2005.
Of the 354 news stories covering the wrongful death trial that are indexed on Google News, 233 refer to David Harris as Clara Harris cheating husband. Not one mentions the phrase domestic violence.
The truth behind the Clara Harris case has come from the mouth of a child — David s daughter, Lindsey.
Only 16 years old at the time of the murder, Lindsey rode in the front seat with Clara and begged her not to kill her father. Lindsey has denounced the widespread media sympathy for Clara, saying:
[Clara has appeared] in print and on television to persuade the viewers that she is actually the victim, but she is no victim. What she did was the ultimate act of selfishness, caring only about obtaining revenge and thinking not one bit about how her horrible act was going to affect me or my brothers, Brian and Bradley.
Anyone who shared my ride in the car that evening, seeing my dad s face as he was about to be hit, and experiencing the horrible feel of the car bumping over his body would understand that this murderess deserves no sympathy.
Bobbi Bacha, vice president of Blue Moon Investigations, the private detective agency Clara had hired to spy on David, also conducted an investigation of Clara. Though the media have largely ignored it, in November 2002 Bacha presented the criminal court with several audio tapes on which witnesses claim that Clara was also having an affair before she killed David.
Lindsey says that Clara mistreated and neglected David, and that her father often confided in her how lonely he felt. Coupled with Clara s temper and evident capacity for violence, David had ample reason to want to get out of the relationship. Instead of letting him go, Clara killed him.
While many see the Clara Harris case as one of love and betrayal, it is in fact a garden-variety domestic homicide. Clara Harris is no better than high-profile wife-killer Scott Peterson. Perhaps Clara is even worse — at least Peterson spared us the crocodile tears.
To learn more about the Harris case, see my other work below:
My columns: (Houston Chronicle, 9/19/03), (San Francisco Chronicle, 4/8/05) and (LewRockwell.com, 3/4/03)
To hear Oprah s sympathetic perspective on Clara Harris, see . Jury selection in that civil trial will begin Monday.
My new co-authored column, (Chicago Sun-Times, 12/24/06), discusses some of the positive developments for fathers in the media in 2006. One of those we discussed is the new Sony Pictures movie The Pursuit of Happyness. Family law attorney Jeffery M.
Leving and I wrote:
Happyness stars Will Smith as Chris Gardner, a homeless, hard-luck single father with a five year-old son. Through sheer force of will, Gardner raises his boy and pulls them out of poverty, eventually becoming a multi-millionaire. The movie is based on a true story and co-stars Smith’s eight year-old son as Gardner’s son Christopher.
As Gardner, Will Smith strives to create a normal environment for Christopher, even when the two were spending their nights on the floor of a public bathroom in Oakland. Gardner explains:
We may not have known where we were going, where we were going to eat, or where we were going to sleep, but we were together every day. There are probably a lot of folks whose children live in million-dollar houses who can t say that.
Appearing recently on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Christopher, now 25, recently paid his father the greatest compliment any parent could receive:
I didn t know we were homeless. I just remember that we were doing a whole lot of moving. I just know that when I looked up, he was there.
I looked around, he was there.
Other progress for fathers in the media we cited included: the successful conclusion of our ; the success of Tim Russert s ; Ford Motor Company‘s controversial “Bold Moves” divorced dad ad; and others. We concluded:
While the Father Knows Best depiction of dads was always a distortion, the Father Knows Nothing media theme of the past couple of decades has been a far greater one.
Dads deserve a media rehabilitation—hopefully 2006 was its beginning. fraud, misses an important point--many duped dads still want to parent their nonbiological children, provided they are allowed a meaningful role in their lives. Some duped dads even wage long, expensive legal battles to remain in the lives of the children with whom they have bonded.
Paternity fraud receives substantial media coverage, but these men rarely make the news stories. daughter, Lindsey. Only 16 years old at the time of the murder, Lindsey rode in the front seat with Clara and begged her not to kill her father.
..
Harris case as one of love and betrayal, it is in fact a garden-variety domestic homicide.
Clara Harris is no better discussed fathers rights, domestic violence, and his co-authored (Baltimore Sun, in Lexington, KY, on January 22.
in a largely celebratory tone. One metro daily explains, Who needs a man?
Not most women. ..
.
The message is clear--men don t measure up, and are no longer needed nor often even wanted. Since women have careers now, we are told, men s traditional contribution--financial support--has become largely irrelevant, and men do not now nor did they ever contribute much more than that.
fathers. However, according to the US Department of Justice, mothers and fathers abduct their children in equal numbers..
.According to the US Department of Justice s Office of Juvenile Justice, is the win-lose child custody system.
a couple divorces or separates, one and only one parent is awarded true custody of the child, and many noncustodial lives.
..This sets up a situation where disenfranchised parents their children.
interests--they rarely are. And in some cases parents have lost custody because they are unfit. Yet current divorce policies set up incentives to abduct.
good news. Domestic violence appears to have declined by more than half from 1993 to 2004. Unfortunately, misleading male victims of domestic violence.
three construction laborers, a landscaper, a salesman and two tradesmen, most of them Latino men with dour expressions on their faces. Are they the featured men in a report about hard times for blue-collar workers in the state of Texas? The hopefuls for a local job training program?
No--they Child Support Evaders.
The 10 men collectively owe nearly $700,000 in back child support. Not one appears to have an education, and the big wage earner in the group is a plumber.
Abbott says to pay their child support but refuse to do so. One wonders is. By Jeffery M.
Leving and Glenn Sacks
In a highly-publicized new decision, a Virginia appeals mother...
Opponents of gay marriage, gay activists and the impact on same-sex marriage.
News RSS