From Stephen Baskerville:
My Chronicles magazine article, “The Failure of ‘Family Policy’,” published in the January 2008 issue, is now online:
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=477. Chronicles is a very prestigious magazine of politics and opinion, with a very well educated and influential readership. The article has already elicited some 32 comments, none of which seem to come from fathers’ activists. One participant says:
“This is an excellent thread and the comments illustrate why Chronicles is one of the few publications worth reading these days. As a state district judge who has raked in the criminal and family-law muck for years, I concur with Mr. Baskerville and Mr Wilson.”
An excerpt on Vox Nova, an influential Catholic site, has also initiated a lively discussion:
http://vox-nova.com/2008/01/14/the-failure-of-family-policy/. It is described as “a wonderful article dealing with divorce and the Republicans.”
This is mainstream coverage. Some of you may want to join these discussions.
Taken Into Custody is now up to 36 reviews on Amazon.com — all 5 stars (and two more on the UK site). Most if not all the reviews use very strong and superlative language to convey the seriousness of what this book describes.
Stephen
************************************************
Stephen Baskerville, PhD
Assistant Professor of Government
Patrick Henry College
1 Patrick Henry Circle
Purcellville, Virginia 20132
Now Available from Cumberland House Publishing:
Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family STEPHEN BASKERVILLE, PhD
“This book is a tremendous and much-needed report on how family courts and government policies are harming children.” – Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum
Order today at Amazon’s special price of $19.56 (regular price $24.95).
For more than 80 articles and studies in mainstream publications on the abuses of the divorce industry, see www.stephenbaskerville.net.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Merck // Jan 15, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Don’t get me wrong, I love Stephen Baskerville, and think he does an excellent job of meticulously describing the injustice in remarkable detail and clarity. However, what’s conspicuously lacking in most of his writings is a solution to the problem.
It’s perfectly clear that the Legal Profession, States, Local Governments, and the Family Courts are in collusion to reap the windfall of “federal dollars” for the collection of the coveted child support. (At least for those of us unfortunate enough to be caught in their tentacles.)
Let’s fix the problem.
Everyone seems to be focused on the price that fathers and children are paying for this corruption, but what seems to escape most people is that the *lion’s share* of the financial burden is on the taxpayer.
Please bear with me:
The national child support debt is 112,000,000,000 (Billion) dollars and growing. Carol Rhodes (a former “upper echelon” Michigan child support collection agent with twenty years experience) is quoted saying that they collected upward of $50 for every $1 collected in child support. If that number is correct on a nationwide basis, (please indulge me) then the total *eventual cost* to the taxpayer would be 5,600,000,000,000. (5 Trillion 600 Billion)
Keeping that in mind; then account for all the salaries of judges, lawyers, caseworkers, psychologists, CPS personnel, enforcement agents and all the other associated parasites who make their living from kidnapping and exploiting our children. All of these salaries are paid by taxpayers.
Then take into account the need to expand infrastructure like courts, county jails, prisons, police, county sheriffs and all the associated maintenance and support personnel. Think of the fleet of vehicles needed for transportation and the maintenance involved.
I could probably keep going, but I’m starting to get carpel tunnel. The point is that every nickel comes from taxpayers, not just fathers separated from their children. The vast majority of these expenses are paid by everyone who pays taxes. If we can show the actual cost to the taxpayer, in a factual manner, we will be making progress.
The point I’m trying to make is that few people are prompted to act unless they are directly affected by the injustice. If we can show the public what it’s costing them then maybe we can make this a nationally important issue.
This is basically an “extortion racket” unprecedented in American History. The public needs to be made aware of the magnitude of this corruption. Most people think this nonsense is saving them money, but in reality it’s bankrupting our nation, destroying our future, our children, and our heritage.
Let’s just forget about what it’s costing fathers and their children long enough to make the public aware of just how much it’s costing them.
Kevin Merck
2 Dhouse // Feb 14, 2008 at 4:16 am
Wait a minute, here…
Don’t you know the real, perpetual problem?
Men have other things to do once they get done being savaged by the Federal, State, and County court systems for Family Court issues. Once they finally get to some point of “stability” — whether that’s 50% access, the mother’s completely failing the children, no access because Mom and the State won, or having the children full-time because the kids hated the deal they were forced into by some biased, ignorant judge — they focus on working, earning a living for those precious ones, digging out of the debt caused by these egregious institutions, and being the best Dads they can be.
We fathers that have had years of our lives ripped apart by these courts have counted the minutes without our children: not just months or weeks, but the minutes!
When we look at the unrecoverable time denied us by some clearly biased legal yoyo listening to a VAWA-driven evaluator, most of us that earn less than a literal ton of dollars a year only want to reclaim our lives, and the chance to be with our children as many hours in a week as possible. If we had the money, we could — as Kevin says above — have the opportunity to waste it on a system so broken.
Why would we want to waste our time on a federal, state, and local system that is so amazingly dysfunctional unless we happened to be a Professor of Political Science, having the tools, the platform, potentially the skills to make a difference on a larger basis?
It’s why 90% of the helping websites built by well-meaning, frustrated fathers are dormant, no longer a high enough priority for those dads to keep flogging dead horses…
Our lives, our children, the compromises we have to swallow or fashion take over. All of these intellectual rants do not pay for vacations, footballs, violins, college, or even Disneyland. At some point, choices are made.
If you have the dollars to fight, don’t. Find a way to buy peace: it’s much cheaper when your governmental “partner” is only interested in the continuation of the legal violence in the family.
And they give Bush a bad time for Iraq?
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