[Indexed as: Fox, Gerald E., “Seek Equal Court Rights - Now: Divorced Men’s Lib,” Pacific Stars and Stripes, Sep. 15, 1972]
BALTIMORE (UPI) — A man paraded outside the Baltimore County courthouse wearing nothing but his underwear and a barrel. The front of the barrel bore a sign reading “divorce Maryland style,” and another on t h e back warned “this could happen to you.”
The man was Paul Hanson, 55, chairman of Fathers United for Equal Rights, a Maryland group protesting the courts’ treatment of men in divorce cases.
“The laws stink, the lawyers are putrid and the judges are so slow to change,” Hanson said in summing up his opinion of justice in divorce.
“Unless you’ve been through it, you wouldn’t believe some of the injustices. A man thinking he can get protection in a divorce court is completely naive.”
Hanson, an associate professor of English at Towson State College, has been through it. He is particularly incensed that the laws are based on the premise that, no matter who is at fault, “when a marriage fails, a man has to support the woman until the day she dies or remarries.”
So, two years ago, he placed a classified ad in the newspapers to find out how many other men in Maryland had similar gripes. The ad brought a half dozen responses and Fathers United was born. Membership is now over 350.
“We get mail from as far away as California but I ‘tell them to form grass roots groups in their own states,” he said. “A national organization grinds our things on mimeograph machines and doesn’t get much accomplished.”
Hanson’s group is out to strike down all of Maryland’s divorce laws. A class action suit has been filed in Federal Court challenging the laws on the grounds they deny due process and equal protection guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
“The problem is that the laws go back to the ecclesiastical courts of the middle ages, and our mentality hasn’t changed much since then,” Hanson said.
The group’s lawyer is Leonard J. Kebpelman who successfully argued the celebrated 1963 Madalyn Murray School Prayer Case.
Besides the suit and picketing courthouses, United Fathers has a lobby in Annapolis and finds lawyers and other counseling help for its members.
Why organize? “A man alone is lost,” Hanson said. “Some men come out of a courtroom and turn to alcohol, some run away, some feel they want to commit suicide.”
“You have to get organized and start getting vocal and do something ridiculous like putting on a barrel or nobody pays any attention.”
United Fathers has a surprising auxiliary, Second Wives Coalition.
