The schadenfreude in watching society collapse comes from knowing that leftist ideology, by way of the law of unintended consequences, ushered in the fall.  Fifty years ago, no one would have thought that real men who instinctively protected women and children would transmogrify into eunuchs who send women into combat and murder the unborn.

Yet, just when you think you’ve heard it all, you haven’t.  In America, keeping pace with the latest moral outrage is akin to Zeno’s hare catching his tortoise.

Bid welcome to Matthew Dubay, of Saginaw, Michigan, a computer technician who has become the latest warrior to sally forth for “equal rights.”  His reasoning is simple: He doesn’t want to pay child support.  His depravity seems bottomless, but, given what the left has done to American culture and law, you almost have to agree with him.

Dubay and his attorney, Jeffrey A. Cojocar, are being joined by the Long Island-based National Center for Men in filing a federal lawsuit that they are calling “Roe vs. Wade for Men™.”  (The trademark symbol is part of the official name.)  The 25-year-old boy claims that the state’s mandate of $500 per month to support his unwanted bastard child Elisabeth, now 8 months old, is unjust.  But his case offers a twist.  Dubay was blindsided, he insists, because he did not have an “equal” voice in the decision to bring the child into the world.  The mother, Lauren Wells, a college student, could have put the child up for adoption or aborted her, but she did not.

Among the facts arrayed in Dubay’s ten-page lawsuit against Wells and the state of Michigan is the claim that he told Wells he did not want to be a parent.  Wells then “explicitly informed” Dubay that she was infertile and was using birth control as “an extra layer of assurance and protection.”  Thus did the procreation proceed.

Dubay’s lawsuit seeks to stop the enforcement of Michigan’s Paternity Act and features the boilerplate egalitarianism ever emanating from the miasma of the 14th Amendment.  Among other things, it claims that “the right to privacy . . . has never been confined solely to females,” for it “includes the right to procreate as well as the right to avoid procreation by men and women alike.”

Dubay says the paternity act is an “unequivocal violation of equal protection” under the 14th Amendment because it “imposes special broad and dissimilar responsibilities and obligations upon men such as Dubay, while affording certain privileges, rights and choices to be unilaterally made [sic] and exercised by females such as Wells.”  Not surprisingly, Dubay complains that the defendants damaged his reputation and self-esteem and caused financial harm.

The bottom line comes from Mel Feit, director of the National Center for Men: “Roe says a woman can choose to have intimacy and still have control over subsequent consequences,” he told the Associated Press.  “No one has ever asked a federal court if that means men should have some similar say.”

That’s why they call it “Roe vs. Wade for Men™.”  The men “want some say.”

Given what feminism tells us about men and women, Dubay’s argument has an odious logic.  An ideology rooted in the leftist, anti-Christian falsehood that men and women are identical, feminism says that women do not need a man’s protection or help, that they are not the “weaker sex,” and that all laws predicated on such “patriarchal” poppycock must be expunged.  Feminism claims that women can do anything men can do.  Amusingly, this lawsuit may prove men can do anything women can do; at any rate, feminism is self-evidently false, which hasn’t stopped women or men from chugging the feminist bilge.  Feminist mothers and gelded fathers importune boys to compete against girls in football and wrestling, and women even join combat units in the Armed Forces.  Our bemedaled admirals and generals in the Pentagon, sacrificing to Goddess Xena, send women to get killed and maimed in Iraq.

Before this step forward, however, the sisterhood sang songs of free sex.  Feminism says, and men and women now believe, that a woman can and should sleep around.  Simultaneously, a slattern has not only “the right to choose” abortion but the right to bear the child and demand payment from a man who was perhaps unaware that the child was born.  Feminism says nothing is wrong with abortion, turkey-baster bastards, or anything else.  And most men agree.

Dubay and his generational cohort believe that women who decide to bear children can rear them alone.  They learn it in school.  They see it on television.  They read it in newspapers.  Dubay merely regurgitates what the schools and mass media poured into his empty noggin.

So Dubay comes to the bar armed with settled constitutional law and cultural norms that approve rampant promiscuity and abortion on demand.  They say women will decide the question; the husband, even the parents of a minor, can just shut up.  Yet they say something else, the nail on which Dubay hangs his legal hat: Discrimination on the basis of sex is a sin under the law.

In the suicidal culture in which we live, Dubay’s loathsome logic is irrefutable.  If women can earn as much or more income as men, and if the decision to bear children is theirs, they have no legal claim on men.  Then again, goes the official lie, the courts award support for the child, not the mother.  And that is why Dubay will lose.

Dubay’s action is despicable and wrong.  A real man supports his children, and, in a society that reared real men, Dubay’s refusal to pay up in marriage, money, or both would invite the girl’s father or brothers to settle up outside the courtroom.  That said, Dubay can only operate in the culture that whelped him.  He invites that culture’s courts to explain to him why he is wrong.