The National Coalition for Men (NCFM), formerly the National Coalition of Free Men, is a non-profit educational and civil rights organization which aims to address the ways sex discrimination affects men and boys. The organization has sponsored conferences, adult education, demonstrations and lawsuits. NCFM is the United States' oldest generalist men's rights organization. It professes to being politically neutral, neither conservative nor liberal.[3]
Free Men, Inc. was founded in Columbia, Maryland in January 1977. The name "Free Men" was used as an imperative (as in Free Men from unfair divorce laws[4]). By-laws were formally adopted in July. The four founding members were: Richard Haddad, Dennis Gilbert, Allan Scheib and Allen Foreman. Richard Haddad authored the "Free Men Philosophy" which included 26 items from which he felt men should be freed. These represented options. The first newsletter was named "Options".
This early chapter concentrated on forming "support groups" for men as counterparts to "consciousness raising groups" tailored to women.
Initial national interest resulted from appearances by author Herb Goldberg, author of The Hazards of Being Male. By 1980, the Free Men. Inc. organization in Columbia had begun to disintegrate. Nevertheless, undaunted by local circumstance in Columbia, others in different parts of the country began forming groups associated with the Maryland organization. Two new groups formed chapters in Boston, Massachusetts (Headed by Frederic Hayward, founder of Men's Rights, Inc. A strong supporter was Robert A. Sides who went on to represent NCFM on national television and radio talk shows) and Nassau County, New York. The strongest of the two was in Nassau County. As a result, it received all of Free Men, Inc.'s records as it became clear that the Maryland group was going to fold.
History
As of 2006, the National Coalition of Free Men had five chapters from California to New York. In the spring of 2008, the organization changed its name to the National Coalition for Men.[5]
The NCFM supported a Republican version of the Violence Against Women Act in 2012. The organization argued that the bill written by Senate Democrats excluded heterosexual men and would empower "false accusers at the expense of true victims",[7][8][9] and encouraged women present in the country without legal documents to make false accusations of abuse in order to stay in the country.[10] The liberal Center for American Progress has criticized the NCFM for its stance on the issue,[11] as did the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The NCFM has engaged in controversial behavior such as publicly outing alleged sexual assault victims whose cases were dismissed due to lack of evidence and labelling these women as "false accusers".[12] Critics argue that this discourages survivors from coming forward, and poisions the dialogue on campus sexual assault.[12]
In July 2020, NCFM's vice president and main attorney in several lawsuits, Marc Angelucci, was murdered at his home by a previous member of NCFM and rival men's rights activist, Roy Den Hollander, who is also suspected of murdering the son of a US District Judge.[13]
Lawsuits
In 2005 the NCFM filed a lawsuit against the state of California for funding domestic violence shelters for women only.[14] In 2008 the Court of Appeal ruled in their favor and held that the exclusion of male victims violates men's rights to equal protection and "carries with it the baggage of sexual stereotypes", because "men experience significant levels of domestic violence as victims" [15]
In the Southern Poverty Law Center's opinion, the National Coalition for Men is a "Male Supremacy Hate Group".[10][25] The Center states that the group distorts statistics to create female privilege, scapegoats women, and creates false equivalencies between the oppression of men and of women.[10][26][25]
↑NATIONAL COALITION FOR MEN, ET AL. v. SELECTIVE SERVICE SYSTEM, ET AL,593U.S.(U.S.June 7, 2021)("The Court's longstanding deference to Congress on matters of national defense and military affairs").
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