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Wait a minute; don't you apologize, Meghan, for extending too much sympathy, even if it is to Clark Rockefeller! Because one of our most serious problems has got to be a general deficit of sympathy, especially for the undeserving. You know how in Eat, Pray, Love the author's Italian buddy Luca Spaghetti says every place on earth has a guiding principle that can be summed up in one word, and Rome's word is sex? I think Elizabeth Gilbert says power is New York's word. Anyway, I am sorry to conclude that in this country we're all so obsessed with who does and does not deserve all kinds of things—love, death, forgiveness, and, above all, help from the government—that resentment seems to be America's word. So, if you threw away your sympathy on somebody who's really rotten, my word for you is brava.
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E.J., clearly you're right about Clark Rockefeller—as the evidence mounts (and boy does it seem to be mounting), it seems clearer and clearer the guy is a con artist and murderer. So yes, no sympathy there! Whatever empathy I had for him was based on the assumption that he was just a rich, eccentric dad who loved his daughter, not a murderer and liar. Thank god the child is safe. And that'll teach me not to extend my sympathies further than they're warranted!
Meanwhile, though, the intellectual issues surrounding child custody arrangements in America remain worthy of discussion ... and have nothing to do with this case.
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E.J., you ask (quite sanely!) whether I "seriously" feel any sympathy for Clark Rockefeller, who, after all, stole his daughter from a social worker in broad daylight, as it were. Alas, the answer is yes, possibly. I don't honestly know. I think the guy deserves his day in court and till more is known about the situation I'll reserve making any judgments. Con men can love their children, too, after all. Anyway, my point in that first post wasn't so much any profound sympathy I felt for him—kidnapping a child, even with the best intentions, is traumatic for that child!—but that Rockefeller's amazing story made me think more about how as a culture we make decisions about custody and whether there's room for improvement with some concerted effort from all parties. You're totally right, I think, to take me to task for implying that feminism caused this; the history you cite is fascinating evidence that it didn't. (I just needed a good headline.) But I can say that I have encountered many parity-minded women who are content, in a sense, to turn a blind eye to lack of parity when it comes to divorce and child-rearing. Sure, the problem may be largely intractable; as Dahlia points out, there is often no good way to solve the problem of joint custody when you have two working parents, one of whom might need to move for work. However, I do feel that an honest and open discussion about custody and fathers' roles might lead to some interesting adjustments in how custody law works; certainly, the burgeoning dads' rights movement that Dahlia mentioned would like to see that happen. Meanwhile, I'm struck by just how many fathers out there I've talked to who feel themselves to be stuck in a position of having to accommodate past the letter of the law, in part because of fears that the laws are so much more sympathetic to mothers than fathers. They'd rather lose a lot than end up losing everything.
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