Received this from Stephen Baskerville:
Mike McManus has written a column featuring my forthcoming book, Taken Into Custody (see below). MIke is a prominent columnist and founder of the highly respected Marriage Savers, which is devoted to (and successful at) rescuing marriages from the horrors of the divorce industry. Yet I cannot find that a single newspaper has printed the column. (Something similar happened last year when Mike wrote a column on John Murtari’s arrest and incarceration.)
Mike McManus is, along with Phyllis Schlafly, the most eminent figure to publicly align himself with the cause of shared parenting and against the injustices of family courts by actively writing about it. We must encourage him and other respected public figures to enlist themselves with us by showing that their effort is not in vain.
If you have contacts with newspaper editors, please urge them to publish this column. You should call the Op Ed or Editorial Page editor and say why the column should be published before sending it. If interested the editor should call Mike at 301 469-5870.
Stephen
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http://www.ethicsandreligion.com/redesignedcolumns/C1347.htm
June 20, 2007
Column #1,347
“Taken Into Custody”
by Mike McManus
Father’s Day was not joyful for millions of fathers who had a divorce forced upon them, whose children were “taken into custody” by the mother who filed for the divorce.
Indeed, Stephen Baskerville is a father who feels “taken into custody,” since he can’t see his children, when it’s not authorized. For example, Father’s Day fell on a weekend when he did not have custody. Fortunately, one daughter had a piano recital, and he was able to attend and chat with her and her sister for a few minutes afterward. That was his Father’s Day.
Baskerville has written an important book not yet released by Cumberland House, “Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fatherhood, Marriage and the Family.”
He purposely does not tell his own story, because he doesn’t want to be dismissed as an angry father. However, as the President of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, he has a national perspective on what happens to perhaps 700,000 fathers a year, 7 million in a decade, when their wives file for divorce.
Very few fathers file for divorce Why? Consider Massachusetts, where custody is granted to the father in only 2.5 percent of cases, but the mother gets it 93.4 percent of the time, and joint custody is permitted in only 4 percent. In a divorce, fathers lose regular access to their children.
However, even if the mother is an adulterer, who moved in with a boy friend, fathers lose their kids thanks to “No Fault” divorce laws in which the court won’t consider who is at fault. Why not? Surely, in this case, the father would be the better parent. “No matter how faithless,” writes Bryce Christensen, “a wife who files for divorce can count on the state as an ally.”
The court says it is acting in “the best interest of the child.” What rot. The best interest of the child would be served by the court telling the couple to work out their differences, leaving the child with a married mother and father.
That virtually never happens. Whoever files for divorce always gets it. There is no defense. The U.S. Bill of Rights supposedly protects citizens against being “deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.”
Where is “due process” if a divorce is always granted?
“The advent of No Fault divorce in the early 1970s…has left fathers with no protection against the confiscation of their children,” writes Baskerville. As this column has argued, No Fault should be called Unilateral Divorce, because what was entered into by two people is typically ended when one spouse calls a lawyer.
“The result effectively ended marriage as a legal contract. Today it is not possible to form a binding agreement to create a family,” argues Baskerville.
Children need the protection of that law for at least 20 years.
Children of divorce are three times as likely to be expelled from school or to get pregnant as a child from intact parents, and are five times as apt to live in poverty.
Arguably, the whole of Western civilization is built upon the enforcability of contract law. “A society without contracts lives in mud huts, except for dictators. A contract is needed for people to cooperate to build something larger than themselves,” says attorney John Crouch.
But when a spouse’s feelings change, the solemn oath “till death us do part,” is worthless. What’s more, the law takes the side of the miscreants and punishes their victims.
A typical father sees his kids every other weekend. He must move from his own house, rent another, and often pay confiscatory child support. Baskerville paid 65 percent of his $38,000 income as a Howard University professor. He still pays for day care for children, aged 10 and 14, who don’t go.
If he doesn’t pay, he can be jailed, without a trial.
Why not ask the court to lift the day care charge? “It would cost me $10,000 to go back to court. And going back to court is risky. It could take away my right to see my children.”
Baskerville makes a case that the “divorce industry” of lawyers, court-appointed psychologists, and judges who depend on them for campaign contributions and state legislators who are often divorce attorneys - will never reform itself.
The only hope is if religious leaders fight for change. The Catholic bishops have been considering the marriage issue for two years, but are not calling for divorce reform. They are issuing TV spots endorsing marriage.
How lovely and how irrelevant.
Copyright © 2007 Michael J. McManus
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Stephen Baskerville, PhD
President
American Coalition for Fathers & Children
1718 M Street, NW, Suite 187
Washington, DC 20036
www.acfc.org
Coming this summer from Cumberland House Publishing:
Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fatherhood, Marriage, and the Family
STEPHEN BASKERVILLE, PhD
For more than 70 articles and studies in mainstream publications on the abuses of the divorce industry, see www.stephenbaskerville.net.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Merck // Jul 7, 2007 at 6:09 am
I usually agree with just about everything Baskerville has to say with few exceptions.
___“Baskerville makes a case that the “divorce industry” of lawyers, court-appointed psychologists, and judges who depend on them for campaign contributions and state legislators who are often divorce attorneys - will never reform itself.”
___“The only hope is if religious leaders fight for change. The Catholic bishops have been considering the marriage issue for two years, but are not calling for divorce reform. They are issuing TV spots endorsing marriage.”
I know McManus wrote this, but apparently Baskerville said it. He’s got the first part right, but the second paragraph is a hopeless notion.
Religious leaders follow the herd like most everyone else. They seldom buck the system unless there’s popular support. Most religious leaders probably see the divorce crisis in this country as a meltdown of the feminist-leaning, abortion-supporting, leftwing-Democrats and they are right. They are probably content to let it take its course.
My guess is most Christians and other church goers are people who generally stay married. I don’t know what the statistics are on this aspect, but maybe we need to find out.
It only makes sense to me that people who believe in abortion and all of the other leftwing abominations are not going to give marriage any respect. Marriage/divorce has become a way for them to force the rest of their agenda down our throats.
Why would a person who thinks it’s OK to murder an unborn child care about what happens to you or your children? Why would people who care more about gay rights, than father’s rights, care about what happens to you or your children?
If you are a father who supports the feminist movement and their attorney supporters then you are getting your just dessert.
No Stephen, the religious leaders are not going to be our salvation, we will have to save ourselves. Stop paying the extortion Mr. Baskerville, and encourage others to do the same.
Kevin Merck
2 Merck // Jul 8, 2007 at 9:32 am
-mass incarcerations without trial or charge
-forced confessions
-children forcibly separated from parents who are under no suspicion of legal wrongdoing and parents stripped of the care, custody, and companionship of their children without explanation
-government agents entering the homes, demanding and examining private papers and personal effects, and seizing the property of citizens who are under no suspicion of legal wrongdoing
-official court records, including hearing tapes and transcripts, doctored and falsified with the knowledge of court officials and evidence fabricated against the innocent
-defendants denied the constitutional right to face their accusers
-bureaucratic police authorized to issue subpoenas and arrest warrants against parents, with no hearing and contrary to due process of law
-special courts created specifically to process parents for political offenses
-forced labor facilities created specifically for parents
-children instructed to hate their parents with the backing of government officials
-children forced by government officials to act as informers against their parents
-children abused and killed with the backing of government officials
knowingly false allegations, for which no evidence is presented, accepted as fact without proof, overturning the presumption of innocence, and not punished when demonstrated to be untrue
-parents ordered by government officials to separate from their spouses, on pain of losing their children
-parents forced to pay the private fees of court officials they have not hired and whose services they have not sought or used, on pain of incarceration
-parents suspected of no legal wrongdoing punitively stripped of their property and income, sometimes at gunpoint, and reduced to penury
-government officials using the mass media to vilify private American citizens, and political leaders using their offices as platforms to verbally attack private American citizens, who have no right of reply or opportunity to defend themselves
-parents jailed without trial reportedly beaten, in at least one case fatally, and denied medical attention while in police custody.
Stephen Baskerville
March 2007
What’s it going to take?
Isn’t it about time we stopped giving these “mother fuckers” our money.
Kevin Merck
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