The writer of this letter is a father who has recently experienced the shock of modern day divorce, custody and child support laws.  He correctly sees that in a divorce, the state assumes the role of caretaker of the children, and then assigns that duty to one or the other parent, and charging the ncp with child support.  It does this both for economic, as well as social reasons.  Child support is evil.  It harms children, in that it alienates them from their fathers (about 85% or 90% of the time, fathers lose custody to mothers).

It is interesting, also, that one commentator to this letter upbraided the author saying that it was the father’s duty to pay child support.  Men who take this attitude are one of the reasons that these unjust laws are perpetuated.  They are the problem.

What does it mean to be designated a “deadbeat parent” “Deadbeat parents want free lawyers,” Nation/World news, Wednesday? It can mean you have lost your role and responsibility to be a parent — often because of an uncontestable divorce — withoutt any legitimate cause or reason.Once a parent, now a payee, the noncustodial is faced with the most egregious legal act: the discharging of his duty to his own family, his children.

The basis for such an egregious act is a federal child-support enforcement program — a program that matches the state’s child-support enforcement collections with funds from Social Security that go to the general state budget. In effect, those legal representatives are motivated by financial gain for their purses and for the state’s purse. These representatives are part of a larger program that is systematically destroying parental rights while fleecing the family.

As wards of the state, children are treated as marital property. A price is placed on the children’s heads — which is imputed to the noncustodial — in accordance with guidelines and current or expected family income. Those representatives claiming to act in the best interest of the children are, in fact, acting in their own interest and that of the state.H. Kirk Rainer

via YOUR VIEW: States motivated on child-support enforcement by financial gain | al.com.

Here’s one comment:

bhamliberal March 27, 2011 at 7:56AM

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I have no idea what your point is but when I divorced many years ago, I got hit with some steep child support. Although I was non-custodial, it was my duty as a parent to pay…..and pay I did. Its called responsibility.

The problem with this article, and with all these so called joint custody bills is this provision for exceptions in the case of domestic violence.  This would be fine if it weren’t so easy to lie and create a domestic violence allegation that is treated as if it were true.  It is a weapon that is commonly used in many divorces in order to obviate any chance at joint custody.

“We want to make sure we understand all the nuance, so that in the bill we clarify as many of those things as possible to avoid additional conflict for divorcing couples.”

One key concern is domestic violence, which the bill addresses head-on. “Every bill we’ve introduced makes domestic abuse an exception,” Olson has said numerous times. “No, you don’t qualify for shared parenting in that case.”

via Backer sees hope at last for joint-custody legislation | StarTribune.com.

A FATHERS’ rights campaigner planned a gunpowder plot to gain publicity for his cause, a court heard yesterday.

Matthew Lloyd Starmore, 31, of Berthon Road, Little Mill, was arrested on October 30, 2009, after police found ammunition and gunpowder at the Newport guest house where he was living, Cardiff Crown Court was told.

They also found a notebook in Starmore’s room, which talked about the start of a nation-wide campaign which would see “the most dramatic and climactic and most hard-hitting series of events to hit Wales since World War Two.”

The book also talked about “shutting down some of the city’ most fundamental necessities, pulling emergency services and police tactile units from far and further afield,” and contained references to Newport’s Transporter Bridge, Father’s For Justice and reforms about how fathers get access to their children.

Starmore denies three counts of possessing explosives and ammunition including gunpowder, 24 rounds, and 108 bullet heads. He also denies dishonestly receiving these items knowing or believing they had been stolen.

Richard Griffiths, prosecuting, said police went to the Corporation Road guest house to arrest Starmore’s co-defendant David Hodge for dishonesty offences when they found the explosive material in Hodge’s room.

read full source article

Some very good points made in this article by Dr. Stephen Baskerville:

Considerable nonsense has been written by some opponents of same-sex marriage, while some critical truths are not being heard. Confronting the facts can enable us to win not only this battle but several even more important ones involving family decline and the social anomie it produces.

First: Marriage exists primarily to cement the father to the family. This fact is politically incorrect but undeniable. The breakdown of marriage produces widespread fatherlessness, not motherlessness. As Margaret Mead pointed out long ago—yes, leftist Margaret Mead was correct about this—motherhood is a biological certainty whereas fatherhood is socially constructed. The father is the weakest link in the family bond, and without the institution of marriage he is easily discarded.

The consequences of failing to link men to their offspring are apparent the world over. From our inner cities and Native American reservations to the north of England, the banlieues of Paris, and much of Africa, fatherlessness—not poverty or race—is the leading predictor of virtually every social pathology among the young. Without fathers, adolescents run wild, and society descends into chaos.

The notion that marriage exists for love or “to express and safeguard an emotional union of adults,” as one proponent puts it, is cant. Many loving and emotional human relationships do not involve marriage. Even the conservative argument that marriage exists to rear children is too imprecise: marriage creates fatherhood. No marriage, no fathers.

Once this principle is recognized, same-sex marriage makes no sense. Judge Walker’s “finding of fact” that “gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage” is rendered preposterous. Marriage between two men or two women simply mocks the purpose of the institution. Homosexual parenting only further distances biological fathers (and some mothers too) from their children, since at least some homosexual parents must acquire their children from someone else—usually through heterosexual divorce.

Here is the second unpleasant truth: homosexuals did not destroy marriage, heterosexuals did. The demand for same-sex marriage is a symptom, not a cause, of the deterioration of marriage. By far the most direct threat to the family is heterosexual divorce. “Commentators miss the point when they oppose homosexual marriage on the grounds that it would undermine traditional understandings of marriage,” writes family scholar Bryce Christensen. “It is only because traditional understandings of marriage have already been severely undermined that homosexuals are now laying claim to it.”

Though gay activists cite their desire to marry as evidence that their lifestyle is not inherently promiscuous, they readily admit that marriage is no longer the barrier against promiscuity that it once was. If the standards of marriage have already been lowered, they ask, why shouldn’t homosexuals be admitted to the institution?

“The world of no-strings heterosexual hookups and 50% divorce rates preceded gay marriage,” Andrew Sullivan points out. “All homosexuals are saying C9 is that, under the current definition, there’s no reason to exclude us. If you want to return straight marriage to the 1950s, go ahead. But until you do, the exclusion of gays is simply an anomaly—and a denial of basic civil equality.”

Feminist Stephanie Coontz echoes the point: “Gays and lesbians simply looked at the revolution heterosexuals had wrought and noticed that, with its new norms, marriage could work for them, too.”

Thus the third inconvenient fact: divorce is a political problem. It is not a private matter, and it does not come from impersonal forces of moral and cultural decay. It is driven by complex and lucrative government machinery operating in our names and funded by our taxes. It is imposed upon unwilling people, whose children, homes, and property may be confiscated. It generates the social ills that rationalize almost all domestic government spending. And it is promoted ideologically by the same sexual radicals who now champion same-sex marriage. Homosexuals may be correct that heterosexuals destroyed marriage, but the heterosexuals were their fellow sexual ideologues.

Conservatives have completely misunderstood the significance of the divorce revolution. While they lament mass divorce, they refuse to confront its politics. Maggie Gallagher attributes this silence to “political cowardice”: “Opposing gay marriage or gays in the military is for Republicans an easy, juicy, risk-free issue,” she wrote in 1996. “The message [is] that at all costs we should keep divorce off the political agenda.”

No American politician of national stature has seriously challenged unilateral divorce. “Democrats did not want to anger their large constituency among women who saw easy divorce as a hard-won freedom and prerogative,” writes Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. “Republicans did not want to alienate their upscale constituents or their libertarian wing, both of whom tended to favor easy divorce, nor did they want to call attention to the divorces among their own leadership.”

In his famous denunciation of single parenthood, Vice President Dan Quayle was careful to make clear, “I am not talking about a situation where there is a divorce.” A lengthy article in the current Political Science Quarterly is devoted to the fact—at which the author expresses astonishment—that self-described “pro-family” Christian groups devote almost no effort to reforming divorce laws.

This failure has seriously undermined the moral credibility of the campaign against same-sex marriage. “People who won’t censure divorce carry no special weight as defenders of marriage,” writes columnist Froma Harrop. “Moral authority doesn’t come cheap.”

Just as marriage creates fatherhood, so divorce today should be understood as a system for destroying it. It is no accident that divorce court has become largely a method for plundering and criminalizing fathers. With such a regime arrayed against them, men are powerfully incentivized against marrying and starting a family. No amount of scolding by armchair moralists is going to persuade men into marriages that can mean the loss of their children, expropriation, and incarceration.

The fourth point is perhaps the most difficult to grasp: marriage is not entirely a public institution that government may legitimately define and regulate. It certainly serves important public functions. But marriage also creates a sphere of life beyond official control—what Supreme Court Justice Byron White called a “realm of family life which the state cannot enter.” This does not mean that anything can be declared a marriage. On the contrary, it means that marriage creates a singular zone of privacy for one purpose above all: it is the bond within which parents may raise their children without government interference.

Parenthood, after all, is politically unique. It is the one relationship in which people may exercise coercive authority over others. It is the one exception to state’s monopoly of force, which is why government is constantly trying to undermine and invade it. Without parental and especially paternal authority, legitimized by the bonds of marriage, government’s reach is total. This is already evident in those communities where marriage and fathers have disappeared and government has moved in to replace them with welfare, child-support enforcement, public education, and tax-subsidized healthcare.

Marriage is paradoxical in a way that is critical to our political problems—and that causes considerable confusion among conservatives and libertarians. Marriage must be recognized by the state precisely because it creates a sphere of parental authority from which the state must then withdraw. Government today can no longer be counted upon to exercise this restraint voluntarily. We must all constantly demand that it do so. Marriage—lifelong and protected by a legally enforceable contract—gives us the legal authority and the moral high ground from which to resist encroachments by the state.

Prohibitions on homosexual marriage will not save the institution. As Robert Seidenberg writes in the Washington Times, “Even if Republicans were to succeed in constitutionally defining marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman, some judge somewhere would soon discover a novel meaning for ‘man’ or ‘woman’ or ‘between’ or ‘relationship’ or any of the other dozen words that might appear in the amendment.”

This is already happening. Britain’s Gender Recognition Act allows transsexuals to falsify their birth certificates retroactively to indicate they were born the gender of their choice. “The practical effect C9 will inevitably be same-sex ‘marriage’,” writes Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail. “Marriage as a union between a man and a woman will be destroyed, because ‘man’ and ‘woman’ will no longer mean anything other than whether someone feels like a man or a woman.”

So what is the solution? A measure already before Congress may show the way. Though not intended primarily to save marriage, the proposed Parental Rights Amendment is the first substantial step in the right direction. It protects “the liberty of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children.” How does this strengthen marriage?

Reaffirming the rights of parents—married parents particularly—to raise their own children would weaken government interference in the family. Especially if worded so as to protect the bond between children and their married fathers, such a measure could undermine both the divorce regime and same-sex marriage by establishing marriage as a permanent contract conferring parental rights that must be respected by the state. Within the bonds of marriage, it would preserve the rights of fathers, parents of both sexes, and spouses generally, and it would render same-sex marriage largely pointless. Marriages producing children would be effectively indissoluble, and there would be fewer fatherless children for homosexuals to adopt. Men would come to understand that to have full rights as fathers they must marry before conceiving children, and they would thus have an interest in ensuring the institution’s permanence.

This is not a small undertaking. It would mean confronting the radical sexual establishment in its entirety—not only homosexuals but their allies among feminists, bar associations, psychotherapists, social workers, and pubic schools. It would raise the stakes significantly—or rather it would highlight how high the stakes already are. It would also focus public attention on the interconnectedness of these threats to the family and freedom. It would foster a coalition of parents with a vested personal interest in marriage and parental rights.

The alternative is to continue mouthing platitudes, in which case we will be dismissed as a chorus of scolds and moralizers—and yes, bigots. And we will lose.

Stephen Baskerville is associate professor of government at Patrick Henry College and author of Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family.

The American Conservative » Divorced From Reality.

These two cases were news because the fathers won custody.  At the end of the article there is a reference to statistics that show how few fathers are awarded sole custody, and astoundingly how many are not awarded even a minimum of access to their children.

The Nebraska Court of Appeals recently affirmed two Lincoln County divorce cases where judges gave primary custody of the couple’s children to the father after removing custody from the mothers.

In both cases Lincoln County District Judge Donald Rowlands found that permanent custody should be placed with the fathers in the best interests of the children.

Family law statistics show that sole custody for fathers is awarded less than ten percent of the time. The latest statistics indicate that forty percent of all child custody cases allowed no custody for fathers, barring them from both visitation and access rights.

via North Platte Nebraska’s favorite newspaper – The North Platte Bulletin.

NEW YORK — The American Psychiatric Association has a hot potato on its hands as it updates its catalog of mental disorders — whether to include parental alienation, a disputed term conveying how a child’s relationship with one estranged parent can be poisoned by the other.

There’s broad agreement that this sometimes occurs, usually triggered by a divorce and child-custody dispute. But there’s bitter debate over whether the phenomenon should be formally classified as a mental health syndrome — a question now before the psychiatric association as it prepares the first complete revision since 1994 of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

“We’re gotten an enormous amount of mail — more than any other issue,” said Dr. Darrel Regier, vice chair of the task force drafting the manual. “The passions on both sides of this are exceptional.”

On one side of the debate, which has raged since the 1980s, are feminists, advocates for battered women and others who consider “parental alienation syndrome” to be an unproven and potentially dangerous concept useful to men trying to deflect attention from their abusive behavior.

“This is a fabricated notion — there’s no science to support it,” said Joan Meier, a professor at the George Washington University Law School who has written extensively on domestic violence and child custody.

On the other side are legions of firm believers in the existence of a syndrome, including hundreds gathering for a conference on the topic this weekend in New York. They say that recognition of parental alienation in the psychiatrists’ manual would lead to fairer outcomes in family courts and enable more children of divorce to get treatment so they could reconcile with an estranged parent.

“This is a problem that causes horrible outcomes for children. … All the arguments I’ve heard against it are trivial,” said Dr. William Bernet, a psychiatry professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

via The Associated Press: Psychiatric experts assess parental alienation.

This is up in Canada.  The only problem is the proviso that is always present “absent abuse”.  There is no question that abuse is intolerable. However it is unfortunate that allegations of abuse sky rocket when it becomes evident that child support received will be affected by a shared parenting order. This has become a real problem everywhere.

The people for whom this issue matters most — people whose lives have been negatively impacted by the current iniquitous system — are united and organized. The Equal Parenting Coalition (EPC) is now an international social movement focused on averting the tragedies that result for children when a parent is legally disenfranchised from his or her children’s lives.

I say “his or her,” but in reality, the iniquities of the system overwhelmingly target fathers. What are most fathers asking for? According to the EPC, the clearly stated primary goal would appear to be equal physical parenting. Advocacy in the equal parenting movement has moved well beyond fathers’ rights groups, and is now a broad-based coalition of both mothers and fathers. More and more women realize that excluding fathers from their children’s lives is unethical and psychologically counter-productive for everyone involved. Fathers want more input than just offering suggestions that their ex-wives can ignore. They want to truly share in parenting, including all its responsibilities

Indeed, the current president of the Canadian Equal Parenting Council is a woman. Kris Titus took up the EP cause when she saw how much her children suffered from the absence of their father after their divorce. She became an activist in the family law reform movement when she actually had to fight with a judge to change his award of sole custody to shared parenting, a move that benefited everyone in her family.

via Give fathers their rights back.

September 21, 2010 LifeSiteNews.com — According to Dr. Stephen Baskerville, professor of political science at Patrick Henry College and author of “Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family,” the government “is engaged in a direct assault on the family” that is causing its breakdown – which in turn allows government to reach into yet more areas of civil society under the pretext of solving the problems that the breakdown of the family creates

.LifeSiteNews: Last month, Governor David Paterson signed no-fault divorce into law in New York state; it was the last U.S. state to pass no-fault divorce laws. What are the effects of no-fault divorce on marriage?

Dr. Baskerville: No-fault divorce was deceptive from the beginning. Misleadingly, it was advertised as allowing divorce by mutual consent. What it in fact codified was unilateral and involuntary divorce. It not only allowed divorce to be imposed on an innocent spouse over his or her objections; it allowed the spouse breaking up the marriage and the court to force the innocent spouse to shoulder the burden of the consequences: The innocent spouse generally loses his children, his home and property, and his freedom for literally “no fault” of his own and for any failure to cooperate with the divorce. “No-fault” justice is a contradiction in terms and makes a mockery of the very concept of justice. For this reason, it has also seriously corrupted our judiciary.

LSN: How dangerous are lenient divorce laws compared to other threats to the family? Should people pay more attention to them than they currently do?

SB: Divorce is by far the greatest and most direct threat to the family, far more serious than same-sex marriage, which is a symptom of how debased marriage has already become, not a cause of it. Unlike cultural threats to the family, divorce is a government regime. It is not eroding the family; it is quite deliberately dismantling it. It is easily demonstrable that same-sex marriage would not even be an issue today were it not for the divorce revolution

.LSN: Are there any other often-ignored laws or cultural issues that work against the family?

via Full Interview with Dr. Baskerville: Government-Caused Family Breakdown Expands Government.

Received the following from ACFC concerning attempts to research how divorces resulted in custody and child support.  Very interesting how cagey judges are about this kind of research.

Out of Tennessee comes this interesting information forwarded by William Fain as a preliminary look at the work product of one family court judge.  As many of you are aware we spent a good deal of the first part of this year supporting our allies in colleagues in Tennessee as they worked diligently to get a parental equality in divorce law passed.  For the historical record on these battles, including testimony and news coverage click here.

The report is an analysis of 105 cases pulled at random from a Bradley county judge’s case load.  Read the report.

As an aside, ACFC spent three days in Charleston, West Virginia this past summer with three law school interns attempting to conduct similar analysis.  The information needed was not available via the court’s computer system.  The records supervisor suggested we ask the chief judge to grant us permission to review the full records.  We met with all the judges of the local family court during the lunch hour, explained to them what we were researching and requested their consent to review the files in depth.

Four times during the meeting consent to review was granted.  We indicated we were not interested in any personal litigant identifier information and would supply the court with a copy of our report.  The chief judge indicated he would send a written note up to the clerk instructing her to provide full case files.  On returning to the records office after lunch we provided the list of files we wished to examine.  The records supervisor told us the judges had changed their minds and permission to research the records was denied.   At this point, the interns have returned to school, we’ll see if access will be granted via a freedom of information act request.

Family court judges are divided, he said, with some thinking it recognises the increasingly important role of fathers, while others believe it is too disruptive for children.

“Shared residence orders are not a panacea,” he said, adding that court-imposed solutions “rarely satisfy anybody”.

“I remain of the view that the separated parent’s role in the lives of his or her children retains the same degree of importance as when the parents were living together, even if the opportunities to manifest the qualities which an absent parent can bring to his children may be limited.”

Craig Pickering, of Families Need Fathers, welcomed the speech, saying: “Generally speaking, children do better in every way if they have two parents in their lives, and the children of separated families are no exception.”

via Divorcing parents ‘damage children in legal war’ – Home News, UK – The Independent.