From ANCPR News (h/t Jon Lane, via email) comes word that Father’s Rights Advocate Kevin Thompson’s recently released Exposing the Corruption in the Massachusetts Family Courts has been banned. What follows is a portion of Mr Thompson’s email noting the ban, posted on the ANCPR site:
Today by mail, I received notice that my recently released book, “Exposing the Corruption in the Massachusetts Family Courts†was officially banned. I received an Order of Impoundment and a Temporary Restraining Order. My
custody case and a DSS report, which substantiate the crimes that I have experienced, was impounded until 2021.Manzi’s rationale is that “impoundment is necessary to protect the best interests including the privacy interests of the parties’ minor child.
Comment: What privacy interests of my son have been compromised and whose interests are being protected other than the self-serving interests of Judge Manzi, Judge Digangi, and the three judges in appeals court who don’t want their crimes to be exposed?
Manzi’s second argument is that “no harm will be caused to the community interest by impounding this file.â€Â
Comment: No community interest is harmed other than the community’s right to scrutinize the judiciary, hold it accountable, and prevent from happening the concealed crimes committed against fathers and children every day in family court for profit.
The other day, I shared the testimony that I was able to communicate in court.
Below is the prepared testimony that I DID NOT get to communicate after Manzi sustained the Mother’s objection. It begins with the last paragraph that I WAS able to communicate.
The fact is that most cases involving two fit parents should end immediately with one simple question, “Do either of you intend to prove that the other parent is unfit?†If the answer to that question is “no†from both parents, then 50/50 joint physical custody should be ordered without exceptions.
Of course, if this were the rule in family court, billable litigation would be significantly reduced, the domestic violence industry would lose customers that it currently gets with the incentive for mothers to make up false allegations, the child support services department would need to be
downsized, and the state would lose federal dollars that it currently receives every time the child support guidelines are applied.Since every legitimate statistic and study confirms that it is in the best interests of children to have both parents significantly involved in their lives, it is clearly all about the money to be made off of fathers and absolutely nothing to do with the interests of the children.
If I can bring an end to the corruption in family court by exposing this hidden agenda and generating the outrage needed to force changes, then those efforts will ultimately benefit every male in this state… including my son.
Just as the benefits of 50/50 shared parenting far outweigh the trivial inconvenience of a child having two homes… exposing betrayals of public trust by government officials who have sworn to uphold the rights of its citizens far outweigh the minor inconvenience of exposing the Mother’s crimes in the process.
My son and I are two real-life “flesh and blood†victims of the corruption described and substantiated in my book. The picture of us on the back cover puts a face to that injustice.
Only in family court are fathers treated like criminals without a criminal’s rights to due process, equal protection, and a jury of their peers.
Only in family court is the burden of proof, a burden placed on every other accuser in this country, waived for mothers who choose to manufacture vile claims of abuse as a court strategy.
Only in family court are there no consequences for mothers who are found guilty of making false allegations and violating court orders.
Only in family court can judges ignore constitutional laws that forbid the creation of second-class citizens.
Only in family court are the best interests of a child interpreted to mean removing loving fathers from the lives of their children and replacing them with visitation hours and cash payments.
Only in family court are the actual facts of the case irrelevant so that the court can believe everything alleged by the mother as fact and ignore everything expressed by the father.
Only in family court can you not find a single “employee†who supports shared parenting—an opinion supported by 85% of the population outside the walls of this court house.
And, most importantly, only in family court are mothers guaranteed sole custody by simply choosing to be hostile and uncooperative with the child’s father.
Family courts repeat the same rhetoric over and over and then defy it behind closed doors. As Hitler put it, “Society will tolerate almost any injustice so long as you tell them it is for the children.â€Â
In family court, “no fault†divorce means “man-fault†divorce.
The “best interests of the children†mean the “best interests of the mothers and racketeers†who profit off “man-fault†divorce.
And the court’s assertion that the law looks to both parents as being equal is defied behind closed doors by judges with an agenda-driven interpretation of those same laws.
The bottom line is that my book is long overdue and should be required reading for every legislator, judge, and concerned citizen in the state.
Interesting that the “banning” of the book is tied to privacy rights of a child—you don’t, for instance (and perhaps this is a bad analogy) see such concerns evident in movie of the week versions of little girls in Utah who are abducted and later found with bearded crazies in Utah—so one aspect of this story I’d like to ask about (particularly those with experience either in law or in the family courts) is does this injunction make legal sense?
Secondly, I’m interested to hear some of your responses to Mr Thompson’s arguments. I must say, I was immediately struck by this:
The fact is that most cases involving two fit parents should end immediately with one simple question, “Do either of you intend to prove that the other parent is unfit?†If the answer to that question is “no†from both parents, then 50/50 joint physical custody should be ordered without exceptions.
My first response was to note how appropriate such a remedy sounded. But my second response was to then note that were this in fact the way the law worked, would we see an marked uptick in charges of one of both parents being unfit—which would expand litigation hours even more, it seems to me.
At any rate, Thompson makes a number of points here that I think are worth addressing. Again, I ask those of you with a bias against self-styled “Father’s Rights” advocates to put those aside for a moment and consider the arguments as if they were coming from someone who you did not perceive to have an anti-woman agenda.
****
A related post from Rob Port of Say Anything here.
WTF? Banning books?
We may as well implement Sharia law.
he should publish it in bits on the Web, and we’ll all take copies and spread it.
no wonder all my muslim friends think we’re hypocrites.
What about the children? Will some please think of the children??
You really can’t tell from what he’s written. We’d need to see the order at least, and probably the briefs that went into the temporary restraining order.
As somebody once tangentially involved in the family law business, it’s really a whole other world. Essentially, the aggrieved parent (either male or female) understandably universalizes their experience. I wouldn’t be surprised if his entire book was simply a insanely detailed recounting of his own case, rather than a study of the Massachusetts family court system as a whole.
I personally am not familiar with the psychological studies as to effect of shared parenting vs. joint custody on children. The MRA websites that dominate that Google search are comparing apples and oranges with respect to the statistical evidence (i.e. not distinguishing between who had only one parent since birth vs. children separated from one parent at a later time for what could be a very valid reason).
If the child is under 10, then the presumption generally will go to the primary caregiver, or the person with whom the child has done the most bonding (barring any psychological dysfunction). Thereafter, the child’s preference gets some weight.
As for your privacy aside, Jeff, the girls in Utah were missing, and then their parents consented to selling their life stories off. I’m guessing that the mother in the above case didn’t consent to having the psychological evaluation or social study of her child published in a book.
I’ve always favored the Solomonic solution.
Its Amazon page has reviews that imply it’s not just about his own case.
Flat-out censorship. This is bad.
Regardless of whether or not his book was “insanely written”, the ruling smacks of one that’s contestible on free speech grounds. Since when is a published book grounds for withholding one’s First Amendment rights? I can understand if the father actively denounced his wife, was openly sexually promiscuous in both act and language, but a book?
What
The
Fuck
?
Well, I’m even less familiar with Ye Olde Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ Writes of Impoundement. Usually a court order is the best evidence of the legal rationale. Assuming the three first-time reviewers have actually gotten a copy of the book, I don’t know whether the first 13 chapters are a collection of anecdotes, a statistical study, or an amateur legal analysis of Massachusetts family law statutes.
I know a lot of people here and elsewhere know the joy of having a child, and can themselves imagine what they’d do/how hard they’d fight if they got to see a whole lot less of that child. Which is why it’s good to proceed cautiously when you’re evaluating the claims of an aggrieved parent, male or female.
You are truly pathetic. This is the best you can come up with when faced with prior restraint of a book on a significant social/legal issue? What if the book was all about a super secret government spy program? What would you say then?
Hmmm.
I had no idea “Freedom of Speech” was actually “Freedom of Speech if a judge doesn’t give a fuck about it”.
While I rolled my eyes at the “domestic violence industry” line (yes by golly, my DA office gets RICH off of prosecuting spousal abuse! don’t mind the document jammed hallways and 25 year old office furniture..just a facade) I’m MORE concerned with what appears to be actual judicial misconduct in censoring a book.
How DARE they!
Let the info out and let this book fly or fall on its merits.
ThomasD: Prior restraint?
Do you have any idea how close you’re pushing this whole thread towards becoming a Big Lebowski quote-fest?
Incidentally, your comment is rather incomprehensible. I can’t even tell which side of the issue you’re coming down on.
Regardless of the rationale various commenters and pundits will employ to either justify or condemn this ruling, one thing is clear: Judicial tyranny is especially likely in jury-less and largely lawless American family law, an arena that is almost as out of touch with constitutional and civil rights as a third world regime or former Soviet state.
I don’t speak rhetorically. I’d encourage readers to investigate this area to see just how unjust American family “law”-for-profit can be.
What happens in family court is a travesty of constitutional justice and it’s all “for the children”, in much the same way that FC’s ruling a parent in jailable contempt gets around anti-servitude laws and FC’s ruling a innocent parent a potential harm without due process or equal representation gets around their former right to own and hold property. And that’s before the legalized kidnapping starts.
A single parent has basically no essential constitutional rights standing in family court. Again, this is not rhetoric.
I’d caution commenters from justifying any such censorship in tacit defense of any of FC’s tyrannical, un-constitutional actions. They are chronic and they are otherwise legally unaddressable—when it’s over it’s over. For this reason suits against nearly all 50 states have been presented and many parent’s rights advocates forsee a day in the not so distant future when a parent’s rights case will make the SCOTUS. The recent Michigan father’s case was a test for this same basic topic: Social ruin by government without regard to half a dozen basic constitutional rights.
Anti-family, anti-father bias is rampant in court and it is so because of special interest (women’s and legal lobbies) have found a way to make a lot of profit from divorcing parents—the more acrimonious the former partners the better; the more complex and expensive the case, the better. That a judge finally crossed the line and censored free speech is not nearly as shocking when it’s weighed in the context of the vast inequality and breach of justice these tyrants exhibit every day of the workweek.
Federal courts have recognized narrow privacy exceptions. I’d like to see how they were handled. If it is the privacy issue at play, my first guess is that the order would allow publication of the part of the significant social/legal commentary that didn’t talk about the private parts in his own case.
Sometimes cases have parts that are sealed so that they do not become public records, and you’re not supposed to talk about them. Specially if litigation is ongoing. There are lots of details that I’d like to see that this rant doesn’t include.
Even without knowing all the specifics, I have a feeling the judges banning the book have overstepped the line by a wide margin. I can’t even imagine the form of the order that would ban a book but I have almost no doubt that if appealed, it would be struck down.
Though it is Massachusets…
Darleen, you use a lot of rhetoric to obfuscate the simple fact that the feds kickback 66% of every “child support” dollar to the states. It’s called Title IV-D. And that overzealous AG’s and DA’s (like AG Mike Cox of Michigan) have made anti-single parent crusades a massive PR engine for whatever they want, be it money, reelections, political favors.
I’m sorry you don’t have a nice new Aeron chair. What someone in your office likely has is a quota … while the DHHS is a $15,000,000,000 boondoggle designed—intentionally or not—to make single parenting attractive at every single level possible. Yes, follow the money.
You’d better believe it’s an industry. Just as welfare is. Family law employs hundreds of thousands with every incentive to support consequences they probably never imagined, much less intended. Why you think Big Brother can’t exist here when it exists just about everyplace else is a mystery.
BECAUSE OF THE PATRIARCHY
From what I understand, the judge that issued the order is featured in the book since he/she was the trial judge. If true, this seems a case of judicial misconduct.
The order is also self defeating for both the ex-wife and the judge. The order will mean much, much more press and publicity for the book and the author than otherwise. How many copies would a book of this type normally sell? 100?
Not so coincidentally, the largest and most active single-parent’s rights organization is located in Massachusetts.
A national group is located in Washington, DC. They run campaigns for parent’s rights in major national papers as well as on Joe Biden’s route to work. Biden developed the onerous VAWA.
From an ad:
actuse croaks:
actuse, if that irony obviously escapes you, at least go to work and let us know what’s going on over there in Boston and DC, okay? Call it a class project.
6Gun
Far be it from me to introduce conflicting facts into your True Faith, obviously you have issues.
States are allowed to recover actual costs from the Federal government in collection of outstanding child support. So, take that “kickback” nonsense and ….
Did you know that when we (criminal DA office) have to bring someone in the state prison system to court and prosecute them, we get a KICKBACK from the state?
Oh, I mean, we (county) get to bill the state for the costs of the prosecution.
But yes, Family courts 100% across the country are all in on the anti-father conspiracy … cuz of The MATRIARCHY.
The assimilation of Actus has begun, right on schedule.
Resistance is futile.
Since when is banning a book acceptable? I must have missed the memo from VRWCHQ.
You’re not really worth responding to, Darleen, as I have definite “issues” with anti-constitutional socialist injustice, but that’s just me. Your apparent problem is a habitual refusal to address the difference between your implied unassailable local protections and Washington’s corrupt assault on parents—intentional and otherwise, and it sure as hell is both.
I say you have a damn clear vested interest that blinds you even in the face of a mountain of evidence. How you parse and redefine that evidence is your problem.
How you characteristically twist out of any grasp on the reality of overdone nanny family government while staying neatly inside the bounds of libertarian thought elsewhere isn’t a testament to my frame of mind.
I just presented you the cold hard facts. I even used the voices of others far more experienced and equipped to do so, at least in part. Maybe you should just take that conflicted, self-annointed, nannyist hypocrisy and…
6Gun
Fer crissakes, your first point in your cut-n-paste is an argument for a return to DIVORCE WITH FAULT. IE, PROVING in a court of law that either the man or woman has ‘wronged’ the other, say by committing adultery.
Good lord, for whatever problems no-fault divorce has had through unintended consequences (like tossing women and children into poverty) going BACK to the days of having to prove grounds for divorce would be BETTER? And it would stop court battles and the attendent hiring of PI’s and lawyers HOW?
Family courts are not MONOLITH. They are run at either county or State level. In CA the child support system is NOT RUN BY THE DA. You keep accusing ME of having some sort of vested interest in it.
When we criminally prosecute FAMILY VIOLENCE we do it no differently than prosecuting petty theft, DUI or assault between non-family members. Same consideration for evidence and witness credibility.
Whoops, guess what, more men are prosecuted for DV than women..but then that’s because more men commit it THAN women. Not no women commit it or no women are prosecuted for it just that they commit it at a LESSER RATE and a LESSER DEGREE.
You have claimed before that police are FORCED to ALWAYS ARREST someone whenever they roll on a DV call.
NOT IN MY JURISDICTION. The vast majority of non-felony DV reports referred to my office are just that… OUT OF CUSTODY reports. No arrest. Most times not even a citation with a promised court date.
And we turndown filing a significant number of cases due to mutual combat.
And if either parent defies VISITATION orders, the family court can (and does) refer that to us for CRIMINAL prosecution. Ditto failure to support. And we even have a special unit set up to handle exclusively family child abduction cases.
I have no clue on the Family court in MA, which is why I find this censorship UNACCEPTABLE. But get off the high horse of believing every FC in the country, or even every criminal court in the country ACTS THE SAME WAY.
STFU about me. You do NOT have clue one on CA law or how the criminal DA office operates.
Jeff, about this:
The prevalent view among family court observers dramatically contrasts common practices found throughout the family legal system with basic constitutional rights. Family court operates, quite literally, from it’s-for-the-children rhetoric, an ideology without much basis in law or the freedoms and rights taken for granted elsewhere. This P.C. is not just wordplay.
-In this case, potentially illegal censorship is justified by the “child’s best interest” precedent, a tacit strategy used to legitimize just about anything;
-Custody and property ownership, along with “child support” (monies taken by legal force many times without representation or even established parentage) is allocated without due process of law;
-Gender discrimination is clearly evident in custody ruling statistics (as reported by by the federal government) in apparent violation of equal protection under the law;
-The most basic rights to be free from servitude or unlawful imprisonment and loss of property are routinely circumvented by “contempt” citations and jury-less custody rulings;
-Darleen’s selective outraged protestations notwithstanding, mandatory-arrest laws exist for domestic violence calls in many areas, the outcomes of which are fertile ground for opportunistic parents to then move the court for custody and property—dad (or mom) can’t argue a favorable prior custodial status if they’re in jail.
The family law industry has erected a whole menu of conveniences that allow the most basic rights to be trumped. Judicial censorship is the tip of the iceberg.
Well, at least 6Gun is backpeddling on the mandatory arrest in DV rolls. Now it’s just in “many” areas.
Hmmm… disparate statistics as primia facia evidence of discrimination.
Where have I heard that charge before?
arrest? or prosecution?
Um, speaking as one who used to head up the DV division of a suburban county in IL (450,000 people) in 2000-2001, I’d have to say that a majority of the criminal complaints for inteference w/ visitation were vs women. The majority of violence cases were men commiting against women.
I got to see a wide variety of really bad stuff done by men and women. I don’t ever want to think about some of the childrens’ cases again. Ever. And I thought I saw bad stuff in war…
6gun – I would not include many criminal prosecutors offices in your characterizations of the Family Courts. They are very different animals, with very different motivations. I utterly despised the few times the lawyers would try to bring their family court matters into my realm. I let them have both barrels and made sure they stayed the heck away from trying that. I was no different than any of my colleagues in Chicago or other offices. We were all busy enough without crap cases filling up the docket.
I find it unacceptable too, but it’s part of a tyranny you’d be foolish to think stopped at the MA state borders or with this one issue. And you do “have no clue” about MA family law or obviously, the federal system and federal mandates. Thanks for that admission.
Sorry, but they (family courts) do to a large degree, and there’s every reason for that to be. A hundred local parent’s groups speak with an identical tongue, Darleen, chill a little and then you tell them why this is, especially in light if the very federal titles and amendments I cited above, along with the federal Uniform Child Custody Code. And federal welfare and the DHHS, both of which are all over custody and support legislation all day long.
Then pipe down before you lead the discussion with inanities like the following. Although DA’s oversee child support assessment and collections, I didn’t blend criminal and family divisions:
Finally,
Did I say it was universal? I know about as much as you do how prevalent this outrage is. I implied it was encroaching, as in, it didn’t used to exist and now it’s so common it’s on-the-ground strategy for attorneys advising their clients. And “women’s rights” groups operate from taxpaid property in some locales just in order to expressly offer aid to any woman who wants to lodge a complaint, legitimate or otherwise.
Call it what you will but the underlying ethic in family court is that women make better parents, even with an epidemic of false DV accusations and completely competent but kicked-to-the-curb dads, all the while women’s lobbies effectively create highly subjective family law legislation that also ties both sides of the bench together in a fraternity of local legal associations.
So again, you tell me. But yeah, there’s money involved…
It is mandatory reporting. Not mandatory arrest, nor mandatory prosecution. No more – “take a walk around the block to cool off, pal.” or taking the guy behind the squad and giving him a couple of shots with an extra large flashlight. A report must be made. If too many cases get let go without arrest – it can be confirmed. If there is a dispute about what happened, at least a report has been filed, even if no PC for an arrest exists, or our old pal mutual combat has jumped up.
Arrest, actus. “You call, we haul, that’s all.” DV call; somebody must go downtown. I’ve seen it where dad phoned in a legitimate call and due to a lack of gross physical evidence, he was hauled off. If Major John’s experience to the contrary speaks for all municipalities I’d like a correction, but I know what I’ve seen.
Nor am I, Major John. I’m pointing out that criminal DA’s offices have child support divisions, that they decide who to prosecute for what, and that they eventually exert a ton of local family law pressure at the behest of federal rules. If there’s conflict of interest and co-mingling between hauling dads downtown and simultaneously serving them support orders while the court rules them on the street is unknown to me. But I do know I don’t always trust my government…
Major John
OJ bedazzled members of the LAPD who came out on DV calls when he roughed up Nicole. There’s record of rolls in the call logs.
No problem officer. We were just having a disagreement. Yes sir, I lost my temper but I’m calm now.
Nicole felt it necessary to make a picture record of her own bruises.
Sure helped her and her kids that no reports were taken.
or because the men don’t want to admit that a woman kicked their collective arses
Major John
And I know what you mean about the child cases. Those tear my officers up so bad.
Last December we had a really bad one (well, they are ALL bad) and after comforting one of my officers I wrote this on their behalf.
This is a topic dear to your soul, Darleen, we all get that. But since we’re all interested in gender equality maybe I should ask Jeff if he wants you and I to go toe to toe with dv stories about both genders.
Let me save us all the time and bandwidth. DV is damn near gender neutral—the feds (by their standards) show an approximate 60/40 ratio against men, as I recall, while the the most comprehensive private sector compilation of studies shows it dead even at 50/50. Meanwhile women commit 60%+ of all abuse against children.
Which, as many now believe, is one reason why the federal and private studies on DV differ—the NOW has a long and colorful history of influencing Washington…
Anyway, them’s the facts. How this impacts family court tyranny is up to you to discuss and decide, I have to get some other things done.
I am married to a man (and wonderful father) who was victimized by the family court system for years and years. In 1990, his initial divorce granted “joint” custody with no provisions for visitation. He believed his ex-wife when she told the judge in court that due to his sometimes varying work schedule, he could basically see the kids whenever he wanted and was convenient for her and the kids. What that translated into was “you better do exactly what I say or you won’t see the kids.” While he was paying close to $1500 per month in support, at one time she HID the children from him for a seven-week period. He would go to pick the kids up, and they just simply would not be there. The police would look at the initial divorce decree and just tell him he needed to go back to court. I was married to him at the time and can attest to the viscious and manipulative lengths this woman would go to to maintain absolute control of the situation.
He began filing the papers and the “mediation” process to rectify the situation. What a joke!! Mediators have absolutely no standing in court and can only make recommendations based on whatever “truth” they take out of the sessions. After SEVERAL years of this monkey business, (court date postponed, now she wants a tax deduction, etc) he at least got his divorce decree altered to grant every other weekend, one night during the week, holidays, the standard fare.
Meanwhile the kids were getting older. They would come for a visit and tell him “Dad, we were home last night when you called and Mom wouldn’t let us answer the phone!!” As a family, we agreed we would go back to court so they could spend more time with their Dad. In 1998, after another year and a half, a guardian ad-litem, lawyers fees, etc, he was granted 49% custody, and his ex-wife granted 51%. Guess what that meant? Basically, we got the kids half the time but still paid full support. After court, the guardian ad-litem looked my husband in the eye and told him “if you want anything more than that, you can write me a check for $5000 right now.”
As it was never about the money, we just took the 1/2 time visitation and were happy with the improvement of the ex not meddling into every aspect of our life.
UP
Yes, they have also recognized the government’s need to keep some degree of secrecy. Competing interests do exist, that was the point.
It’s not the specifics of the case that I find bothersome, it’s your knee-jerk response that automatically falls in favor of a narrow interest over the First Amendment. I never knew you were such the statist.
Bottom line – I tell every man I know who is getting a divorce to NEVER EVER settle for anything less than a 50/50 split. It will take you YEARS to fix it after the fact!!!
TW: Because – – that’s the truth!
Stats show that in assault cases men are most likely to be victims of men
Women are most likely to be victims of men
Certainly women initiate and commit assault. They just don’t have the physical power to beat the crap out of a man, so there are more misdemeanor DV prosecutions of women than felonies.
Now, assault can include shoving, slapping, and restraining. So DV assault uses the same criteria as simple assault. And DV cases (in CA) including dating relationships, former dating relationships, cohabitation, former cohabitation and is NOT gender specific (we prosecute DV cases against gays and lesbians, too). So trying to pin down just exactly what it meant by 50/50 split of DV when it includes everything from ripping the phone out of the wall to blacking someone’s eyes can be a bit misleading.
However, women are more likely to be MURDERED by their boyfriend/husband than the reverse.
I don’t think we need quibble over the definition of murder.
He should appeal to the Supreme Court of Mass. State supreme courts will and do hear cases out of family courts and overturn the decisions fairly often (at least, here in New Hampshire they do)–which maybe accounts for the fact that SCOTUS hasn’t been hearing a lot of custody cases: they get resolved in appeal at the state level.
My amature opinion of what’s wrong with family court and law:
1} It’s not held to the same standard as criminal law. In criminal court if I accuse someone of a crime, I have to be able to prove the charge I make–the defendant’s innocence is presumed. However, in family court if I accuse someone of some sort of wrong-doing (abuse, drug use, etc), it’s up to the defendant to prove that they are innocent–innocence isn’t truly presumed with the practical effect of women all too often playing the victim card, whether they are really a victim or not.
2} There is no right to an attorney as there is in criminal court. If you don’t have lots of money or a good understanding of the law, you most likely won’t come out well after a visit to family court. This works against both men and women.
3}There is no trial by jury–so one bad/prejudiced judge/master (see #4, below) can result in a very bad and very binding decision.
4} Family court in some (most? all?) states has “marital masters”, who aren’t really judges and aren’t trained in jurisprudence to the same standard as a judge. So going to family court is often like buying a ticket to a major leage game only to see little league take the field.
You know 6Gun
I don’t like ANYONE beating the crap out of anyone else…and I feel there is a special level of hell for people who beat kill or neglect their children.
The horse I got in this race is what I see cross my desk everyday and wanting justice for all those black eyes, broken bones, and dead bodies.
You want to put a MATRIARCHAL CONSPIRACY spin on it? Go right ahead.
And those of us in the actual trenches trying to get families into safe houses, and perps in jail with no bail will just keep slogging on …
Getting back to the particulars of this case, does anyone know if the child has been provided an Ad-Litem? It would seem appropriate at this point. And would the decision be any more palatable if it was decided by a different (hopefully non-conflicted) judge?
kimbbr
I count myself lucky that my husband and his ex have a working divorce. He’s never defaulted (or whined) about paying child support and they always work out great summer/winter visitation schedules (they are 1000 miles from us) so my stepson can spend oodles of time with his dad.
It takes two to cooperate and only one to be a complete asshole.
ThomasD: I don’t know for sure in this case, but I’ll guess that yes there was (it’s fairly routine as far as I know, but I won’t claim special knowledge of Mass. law).
The problem with ad litmes is that they aren’t always objective as they’re supposed to be, and there seems to be no objective standard of training they go through (again, I’m not claiming expertise, only experience).
Seth
The problems with Family Court are the same ones that exist in Juvenile Court. Both were set up to help minors and families avoid the trauma and scandal that a full blown open jury trial would expose them to.
In family court, at least its open to the public. Juvenile Court is completely closed.
And the biggest problem facing ALL court systems is sheer overload. There is no way at all that every case coming through can be handled through the trial process… so mediation, conferences, plea agreements … all efforts are geared to settling things by agreement and getting the case out of the courthouse.
I’m in So Cal but NOT Los Angeles County. My DA office (county wide) enters almost 1000 cases a WEEK into our system. Vast majority of felonies are pled out at the preliminary hearing stage. Vast majority of misdemeanors are settled either by plea directly to the court at arraignment or at pre-trial stage.
If this didn’t happen, the court system would shut down. Immediately.
I assume that the Family Court is similar in that they will not even hear a case until after it goes through mandatory mediation (with a hopeful mutual agreement.) Not every FC case could ever hope for a jury trial.
My response was that we really can’t tell whether the order makes legal sense, and that we need to find out more about it. That’s not ‘knee jerk,’ jerk.
Darleen: I think–but am not entirely sure–that not every state requires mediation. NH certainly doesn’t, which is where my personal experience sadly lies.
Insofar as jury trials goes, I understand that it would be a logistical hell…I was posting what I think is the problem, but make no claim to having the solution–short of making marriage and divorce both more difficult, and that idea is probably stillborn.
In the context of divorce and child custody, family courts have broad authority to issue equitable relief such as injunctions to carry out its rulings and to effect the best interests of the child. There would be circumstances where the interests of the child clearly outweigh a parent’s free speech rights. It’s a case by case matter requiring judicial discretion. Here, if the father’s book is a personal and slanderous screed about an evil mother and evil courts conspiring to destroy dad and the kid, I can see how the court could determine that it could undermine the mother’s authority, and subject the child and mother to unwarranted public harassment, etc. But, if it’s a measured and generally applicable indictment of the Massachusetts family courts, that would greatly weigh in favor of first amendment protection. Apparently the court has determined that, given all the circumstances, the publication of the book would do sufficient harm to the child to warrant a publication delay until the court loses jurisdiction when the child turns 18.
The 50/50 joint custody presumption is actually in effect in many states, but it’s often not consistent with the child’s best interests, even if both parents are fit. Other states have no such presumption, but simply require that the custody award be in the child’s best interests. Many legitimate factors could contribute to make joint custody unworkable or unhealthy for the child, e.g., if the parents live long distances apart, or if the child chooses to live with one parent over the other, or if one parent, though not unfit, has difficulty maintaining employment or housing. These are eminently situations where judicial discretion is called for to settle delicate disputes. Black and white legislative mandates that “50/50 joint physical custody should be ordered without exceptions” is just too blunt a tool.
Perhaps so, but it could be a baseline that the exceptions adapt to, rather than the other way around.
Are you comfortable with the way custody and support breaks down now, ss? I ask in good faith.
As for the injunction, someone mentioned above that the Amazon reviews suggest the book, while it dealt with his case, was also a general indictment of the Mass system, and included other cases. But I have never read the book, so I can’t speak to that.
However, I think the decision to issue the injunction might have been handed off to a judge not attached to Thompson’s case.
At least, those are my preliminary thoughts. More info would certainly be helpful, but you go to blog with the info you have, not the info you want…
Darleen sez:
There’s another really, really common unintended consequence which is that children have their fathers practically eliminated from their lives by women who would rather not ahve to carry that historical baggage onto their new relationships. Fatherhood becomes a battle, which helps no one and is only intended to discourage the relationship between father and child as a matter of the mother’s convenience. “Dad” becomes little more than both and ATM and a nuisance. The easy solution is to have the government make the withdrawls for you and to just ignore the nuisance.
When is someone going to begin caring about that? Ever? When will a woman be held to account for failing to abide by a visitation order?
And when is the State of California going to go after Amber Frey for her horrific treatment of her “not the baby’s Daddy”?
Jeff
However, I think the decision to issue the injunction might have been handed off to a judge not attached to Thompson’s case.
Bingo. This is why I think there is at, minimum, an appearance of judicial misconduct.
CA Family Code
I agree that a default position by the court of a 50/50 split is the best place to start.
Pablo
Ok. What criminal statute is Amber going to be charged under?
She was scummy, no doubt, for not immediately having a dna test on her baby when it was born and just assuming that one of the guys she was sleeping with was the dad.
But, again. What do we charge her with?
This looks to be a civil case for the guy to recover the past child support, either from Frey or the real dad.
Howza ‘bout fraud?
And perjury, if she ever swore to it.
You saw that part, right?
If she thought he was the father…she still wanted to prevent them from having a relationship.
This is an absolutely awful thing to do to a person, and she apparently couldn’t care less that she did it.
The important thing is that she’s a victim. This guy…who she slept with on the first date…lied to her. And she’s pretty, so what are ya gonna do?
Strike up the pity party for the pretty girl….
Anthony Flores? Who’s that?
:::sigh:::
I am NOT excusing Frey. But if she didn’t have a dna test on the baby prior to the one that DID prove paternity (and then it was her attorney that made the motion set aside the cs order), tell me how a DA is going to prove FRAUD against her? To prove fraud a DA would have to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Frey KNEW Flores wasn’t the father. Without prior a test, there is no proof.
Flores states Frey made “it difficult” for visitation and/or relationship. Ok. I’ll accept that at face value. Did he ever report it to the court? CA Family court will actually give custody to the parent it believes will be more likely to obey court orders for frequent nd regular visitation with the non-custodial parent.
Infact, he STILL actually has standing with the court, if he wanted to sue, for joint or sole custody of the child since he has an established parental relationship with the child, regardless of the dna test.
Has he done that?
As I said, at this point Flores’ best option is probably civil court.
What was Amber’s burden of proof in putting him in this situation?
Are you actually going to argue that a woman honestly named the wrong guy? If you’re sleeping with so many people that it’s not certain, you know that, don’t you?
But I understand. There’s really nothing we can do about it but buck up, and keep moving on.
For the Childrenâ„¢.
Darleen, a compromise has come to mind.
How about making establishing paternity a requirement for unmmaried women to get a support award?
As it stands, the woman’s word is the standard of proof. If we know that’s imperfect, let’s just use what we know to be far more accurate: DNA testing.
Darleen – as for the Simpson case and mandatory reporting: OJ’s abuse was pre-required reporting era; I can only speak to those jurisdictions I know, and those, I believe that take certain federal funds.
My county has a varied response by each police department – most pretty good, a couple could use some work. But it gets better all the time. Heck, we didn’t even have a DV statute until the late 1980s, and no serious enforcement until the late 1990s.
Heck, I ended up putting people in jail for man vs man, woman vs woman, woman vs man and man vs woman. I even had a couple of, uh, TG types get into a fight. But that one had to go by the wayside – mutual combat if I ever saw it. Besides, the one that was the bigger asshole got a pretty decent stab wound.
This isn’t something that can be made good. And the risks of attempting to make the system marginally better are that you could easily make it marginally worse. Custody and support outcomes are disasterous because divorce is disasterous. When divorced couples get along and can agree on custody and support, things usually work out swimmingly, nobody complains (much), and we never hear about what a smashing success the family courts are.
If the ex-couple think it’s important the kid have a mom and dad, they’ll adopt a 50/50 plan themselves and work hard to abide by it. But when parties are bitter and mistrustful, (like, maybe they don’t get along and just got divorced or something), it won’t be pretty, whatever happens. Sure, there might be some cases where a forced 50/50 custody split would give kids access to mom and dad and all is well. If the judge thinks mom and dad are mature and responsible and that shared parenting is appropriate, he should be free to order that. But again, divorced parents are real people who often don’t like or trust their ex-spouse, and probably already resent the state for meddling. If one angry parent doesn’t comply with “shared parenting” to the satisfaction of the other angry parent, they’re back in court with contempt motions and motions to modify custody. Endlessly. These tug of wars must be gut-wrenching for kids, and none too pleasant for the parents.
Picking one parent over the other, despite its drawback of giving one parent the shaft, has the advantage of finality and stability. In contentious cases, and considering all the circumstances, this may be marginally better for kids than shared-parenting. It also allows parents to get on with their lives without spending their entire span of procreative years battling their “insane” spouse in family court.
I’m sure, in the aggregate, there’s a lingering bias against dads (especially with younger children), but most often that’s due to the fact that dad was the breadwinner and just handled nightly babysitter duty, while mom was the undisputed primary caregiver. Yes, that’s unfair to dads and leads to disproportionate number of fatherless kids. But often, societal demography concerns aside, the alternative is to put the particular kids at issue into a nasty custodial warzone for the next 5-10-15 years, or to give the kids solely to a father who has not yet demonstrated an ability to be more than his kids’ “buddy.”
I guess I’m saying these things necessarily have to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. I’m not sure where the presumption should be, as I find drawbacks to all options.
Which, if you’re the mother, fucking rocks.
A woman’s right to choose must be guaranteed, after all…
Pablo
In CA to enforce a cs order paternity does have to be established …
unless the dad admits being the dad up front.
Obviously Frey was able to convince Flores he was “the only one” and for whatever reason he accepted it rather than requesting, as is his right, to have a paternity test.
Something must have made him suspicious after 4 years.
I feel sorry for Flores and even more so for the child.
Pablo
Did you even read ss’s post or did a little cherry picking just satisfy you like a yummy bowl of creamy tomato soup?
In any couple it only takes one asshat to screw with everyone. And it can be either mom or dad. I’ve seen it both ways.
I’m not sure how often it happens (I can only speak anecdotally from the family law attorneys I know) but sometimes the court WILL strip custody from the parent that is clearly abusing the court process and give sole custody to the other. Indeed, a lot of judges give that warning at the beginning of the whole custody/divorce/property division hearings.
Might be nice if they did it more often.
Some follow-up:
-Everything Seth Williams said is spot-on;
-Darleen’s inadequate coverage slanders the reality of this situation. Her special interest may color her ability to realize that family law is probably the number one injustice facing the American family from its government. Unfortunately Darleen’s moving the goalposts, loading anti-father snark, and reframing the discussion. Quite interesting how an expert in one field can then profess ignorance about everything from arrest laws to “mandatory mediation” to family court itself in order to avoide the debate.
Darleen:
What Darleen’s unaware of is the highly conditional legal application for such 50/50 custody, as well as the bolded clause. In my state, as in the majority, those conditions are carefully placed in the statutes, not surprisingly, by the high proportion of lawyers in the legislatures writing the laws and the women’s lobbies and legal associations influencing them. Occasionally family judges actually lobby their own legislatures in favor of burdensome, presumption-of-guilt custody and support law, a clear violation of the ethic of division of powers.
More Darleen:
Go back up into my previous comments to find the Bradley Amendment. Defrauded “child support” is virtually impossible to recover. Why? “Best interest of the child”. Have I experienced this? Yep; an associate lost $75,000 to illegally altered court orders and was told in open court it was for, you guessed it, the best interest of a child held by a willfully acrimonious ex-spouse. I’ve linked to Bradley here before;
-ss has the money question:
The key words are “best interest” and “fit”. Given the wholely subjective nature of one-judge family court, this is so up in the air it’s almost incomprehensible. Personal experience in just one FC district showed me that one judge’s religion had everything to do with his heavily gender-biased custody rulings, another’s attorney-contributed campaign funds dictated his rulings, and a third nobly stepped down after a DUI conviction. Subjective justice here because that’s the way FC is designed. It has no accountability outside of a state’s SC appeal. Regularly comb the national parent’s rights news to find that this it par for the course. Compare it to courts in general and to the trend for judicial legislation and then divide that justice by, say, 12 to know about what you’ll get in FC;
-Pablo gets it too:
Virtually never. It’s a federal felony to abduct a child and even those cases rarely ever return a guilty verdict, much less a penalty. Anything less just goes by the boards and fathers (being the huge majority of disenfranchised parents) know it. It’s why they give up in droves. FC and the divorce industry is molding society.
Following up on some of ss’s comments:
Statistically, this is maybe a 25% likelihood.
It cannot be overstated how much acrimony the current system hands walk-away parents. Induce the average Jane with $750/mo per kid, the house, and no more beer in the fridge and suddenly you’ve created grounds for divorce. I don’t say that the current system incentivizes divorce—highly acrimonious divorce—for no reason. It is changing society and again, the stats show this fairly easily.
The goal here shouldn’t be judicial allocation and management of the family. It should be that the system is obviously highly dysfunctional and restoring simple constitutional and civil rights is key to repairing it. Weigh loss of everything you have in one afternoon against a nebulous best interest clause and then against the research showing that universally kids do better in frequent contact with both parents and ask yourself if we have a problem-solving system or a problem-creating system.
Then ask yourself if you actually possess a half-dozen rights the Constitution says you do. I’m amazed that some of us here are simply asserting that those rights are outweighed by a shoddy, tyrannical system with massive special interest pressure to keep it’s statistical abuses intact. How is that reasonable?
He is. But will he? And by what reliable, legal, constitutional standard. This censorship judge obviously has his hands full defending himself; how about the fact that judges and lawyers constitute one of the highest statistics for alcoholism and suicide? How can not having 50/50 presumption laws—that honor a number of constitutional ethics—be such an issue?
The solution? Enforced 50/50 presumptions. Oh, is dad a reckless drunk? Is mom a streetwalker crack addict? Deal with re-allocating custody away from 50/50 after the fact, not just because and only because somebody—statistically mom—has a huge incentive to game the system with presumption of guilt and legalized theft.
Not in practice it doesn’t. Quite the opposite is true. This sounds fine but there’s entirely too much evidence from decades of walk-away no-fault to show otherwise. Create an incentive and people will find ways. And they have.
This gets into the tender years doctrine and has, ironically, been another thorn in the side of feminists who want it in place only as long as it pays dividends in money and power. Otherwise it’s both obsolete and flies in the face of reason, reason that shows quite convincingly that fathers are highly essential to developmental performance. And then there’s that whole prior-rights issue. Do you, being male, have a right to not have your children legally kidnapped?
As far as “lingering bias”, consider that of primary custody rulings, the male/female ratio is 15/85. Coincide that with a single other 15/85 ratio that parallels parenting skills and then I may listen to any further line of reasoning like this one.
Not only is this reasoning highly offensive to men and fathers, it’s flat wrong. And to my thinking, it’s damn unconstitutional. And forms the basis for the very gender discrimination some people in this thread apparently want you to believe doesn’t exist.
The short version of all this is that there’s a system in place, for fun, games, and profits, that allows abuse. Folks have figured out how to game it. Others have called enough, and laws are being rewritten and damages are being addressed. Automatic 50/50 presumption will create massive reform but it’s a long ways from universal.
tw: Single. Yeah, that’s happening too, thanks to kids seeing the minefield of family-by-government.
The story does not add up. The court has the power to impound its own files, so that the otherwise public documents are not released or available for review.
The only way a book could be restrained here would be if it contained copies of the already impounded documents which as a party he would have copies of… which is not what the book is purported to contain. So something is awry here.
I have practiced law in front of both Manzi (probate dispute) and DiGangi (ugly divorce for crazy client). DiGangi is an outstanding judge: very smart and very fair – let me represent crazy client effectively yet firmly put client in her place when the time came to do so. Manzi is less patient and more curt… if you have a weak, poorly reasoned argument she will cut you off and be done with you. Still, these judges know what they are doing and do not have a reputation for a bias.
6Gun:
you make an excellent summary of the arguments for shared custody. It is an experiment that ought to be tried someday. Really. As a practitioner I would assure you that even with such a regime it would be easy to undermine it with a few well placed allegations of abuse. I have seen public paid counsel allow their clients to do things that are truly shocking. They are the worst opponents, as they are often shameless and impossible to work with on a professional level. In Massachusetts, at least, they are a much bigger problem than the probate court judges, who on the whole are highly regarded by the bar.
In a divorce, both parents, if they are good parents, will consider the effects of the whole process on their children. The mothers, having the court advantage, must recognize the importance of the father’s presence (and influence!)in his children’s lives. The father needs to come to terms as to whether this battle is worth fighting, given the uphill struggle, vs. the effect a prolonged struggle will have on the kids. Most important, both sides need to see and acknowledge the other side doing these things.
The settlement will be quicker, the cost will be minimal, the children can start to heal a smaller wound with more time to do it.
I appreciate the comments, Tulkinghorn. You’ve peeled back another layer in the overall industry; that of public services, including social services, the psychological profession as it applies to mediation and child and parental assessment, DV offices, women’s shelters, etc.
Just as FC is autonomous to a very large degree, so too then are it’s minions. Ruin by these third parties isn’t uncommon either and ironically, happens because the first thing a divorce attorney tells you is true: FC is the last place you want to be if you’re trying to sift through the wreckage.
It cannot be overstated: FC is all about acrimony. Acrimony pays.
Flip the issue on it’s head and look at it this way: How much cash would be lost if, as Jeff rightly concludes, there were a presumption of joint custody affecting a burden of proof that both parties are legally competent, instead of the presumption-of-guilt, prove-your-innocence system we have today.
The answer is billions.
Who would it impact? Aside from parents no longer raised from children to count on FC as a combination of craps table/meal ticket, the feminist lobbies, the legal lobbies, and hundreds of thousands of staffers in everything from the child support divisions of DA’s offices to DV/social workers to the psychological industry and big pharma.
So, who wants kids torn from homes and who wants divorce to stay easy and profitable? It’s an easy answer.
One last way to view it: Would the net effect on society if public school and conventional wisdom taught that to parent is to be eternally responsible because there was no longer a guilt-free arena in which to take the kids and the property be positive or negative?
Would divorce rates drop? Would unintended pregnencies decrease? Would DV drop? Would kids grow up happier, healthier, and saner?
Oh, and the notion commonly floated that parental acrimony harms kids worse than losing one entirely has been debunked by the numbers. Kids do better in all ways in all circumstances that include both parents. The exceptions only occur in cases involving the worst case offenders in society. Parental alienation is a curse brought upon children that harms for life. FC does virtually nothing to deflect it while the extended family law industry actually aids is as likely as not.
You know for every vindictive mom that uses her kids by withhold visitation, there is a vindictive dad that uses money as a weapon.
And it is the kids that end up hurt.
Notice that stats on the custody are raw stats.. in the 85% of women custody includes custody of single women who were never married to the father, couples where the custody was agreed and stipulated to, custody awarded after the court considers all the facts presented and custody when dads don’t want a thing to do with their kids.
My husband agreed to give sole custody to his ex because she was going to be living with a 1 year old 1000 miles away and it made it legally easier to her to make medical/schooling decisions. So he counts in those stats being used to show “discrimination” when it was a mutually agreed upon decision. If/when my stepson reaches jr high and wants to come live with us, custody status will change with my husband having sole custody.
The older a child, the more the court weighs their wishes in the award of custody.
It is rather difficult to have a 50/50 custody NO EXCEPTIONS when parents live 50, 100, 1000 miles apart. 50/50 is a great default STARTING point, but there a lot of mitigating factors that may easily preclude a 50/50 NO EXCEPTION demand.
And since not all women receive child support and the average receipt of cs is under $300 a month, the claim that it is ALL ABOUT THE MONEY is ludicrous.
And I will again have to put out the disclaimer I’m only talking about what I know of California law from both experience, discussions with attorneys and observation of the cases referred to the criminal DA for followup. I have no clue how FC are run across the country. This is a state by state issue.
Oh one more thing
The percentage of DV cases that come across my desk that are tied to custody issues is so small I can’t recall the last time I saw one.
Vast majority of DV cases, in either direction, is due to out of control people, usually under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Next big demographic is stalking and/or assault by former spouses or dating partners…it ain’t about the kids(if any) but about jealously and control. And of course there is the demographic of couples who slap each other around but never leave each other.
What’s the toughest thing a DV DDA has to face in bringing a case to trial? The victim. We’ll have pics of bruising, x-rays of broken bones, testimony from neighbors about screaming and thuds… and the victim will recant, disappear, beg not to have the perp prosecuted “but [perp] really loves me! I just fell into a door! You jail [the perp] and I’ll be out on the street! You don’t drop the charges, [perp] will kill me!”
If all the “fake” DV due to custody issues disappeared tomorrow, it would be a small blip in my stats.
[on re-reading this, it seems like I’m hankering for a fight, 6gun. I don’t mean for that. You generally make good points, though I’m not sure how much room there is for improvement over the status quo.]
6gun, I see a fetish for standards, but you don’t want any judges getting their grubby hands involved in their application. If people disagree vehemently and can’t reach an amicable agreement, it requires a respected third party to settle matters. You seem to advocate taking decisions out of the hands of someone who actually heard both sides of the story, and giving the final word to a far-removed committee of politicians who knew nothing of your case when they passed the law. I’m not saying it’s perfect (or even very good), but in matters of my family’s dissolution, I think I’d sooner trust a judge to listen to my argument and rule on my unique case, rather than trust application of an as-yet undevised one-size-fits-all prescription for happiness.
Me:
6gun:
I just don’t see how enforced 50/50 shared parenting is the solution to the problem of parents’ unwillingness to civilly share parenting 50/50. If parents wanted to stay together for the sake of the children, they would have stayed together for the sake of the children.
Me:
6gun:
I’m talking an aggregate of individual cases, not generalizations, so there’s no constitutional issue. I’m talking about the facts on the ground before the judge in individual cases. I don’t think I’m engaging in gross hyperbole to observe that there are a disquieting number of infantalized fathers who, having been raised with no father of their own, seem to think male parenting essentially involves teaching kids to watch football, belch, and wear their ballcap backwards. (Incidentally, I think often women, also raised without fathers, can’t see why fathers are necessary and would just as soon save themselves and their children the hassle of “sharing.”)
Now, if it isn’t the case, and I’m engaged in mere misguided stereotyping, then what are the effects of generations of boys being raised fatherless, indoctrinated on the belief that men are humanity’s oppressors, discouraged from seeking higher education, and fed renditions of infantile, witless beer-obsessed men on TV? I agree that that these social circumstances have actual, real world effects, and that as a result, men today are generally poorer fathers and poorer models of capable masculinity than prior generations of men.
The quandry in family law then arises in individual cases when a judge, even while fully aware of the evils of fatherlessness, seeks to determine child custody between a college-educated mother (women being statistically far more likely to have college degrees), and her high-school-educated ex who calls his kid “dude.”
You’re still nibbling at the issue, Darleen:
Nonsense. There is no downside to mom (your choice of words because genderwise it technically cuts both ways) violating the visitation terms of custody. If there is a common complaint raised by parents of either gender against FC it is this one. Contempt of visitation by mom is just another strategy her own attorney tells her carries no real risk.
But there is a contempt citation and jail waiting for a parent (dad, to again use your terms) who does not pay child support. There’s the full weight of Washington’s laws on his shoulders and unless you’re ignoring the fact, you know Bradley makes it so—all part of Title IV-D.
But surely you know this and surely you’ve heard of the returning servicemen and destitute dads who get hit with tens and even hundreds of thousands in “child support” from actions they never knew existed.
Your claim simply flunks the reasonability test, legally, practically, statistically, and anecdotally.
What hurts kids, Darleen, is alienation and seperation anxiety. That evidence is enormous.
Or by that very same token, conceived their kids much as the Michigan case’s mom did, fraudulently and evidentally mindful of the financial windfall, at least in part. As I recall, you fought that one tooth and nail too…
Heh. Or where legions of dads simply walked away, knowing the odds…
More typically when the courts ruled for reasons none of us will ever know and by means beholden to legal and ethical standards you or I as voters would ever extend to any other court in the land…
Or, again, knew the ruin that awaited them if they did.
For every hypothetical—all of them valid—there exists an alternative. The point is that the final number remains and it exists absolutely by design: 15% fathers and 80% mothers.
That’s wonderful outcome, Darleen. Were it only more common.
This is obvious. But again there’s still another side to that coin: Move-aways (most famously exemplified by the California LaMusga case in 2003) are incentivized by child support and are sought by uncooperative parents despite the negative effects on children.
You’re saying it’s all about the money, Darleen, so that’s your strawman. I’m saying that were it not for that incentive (whatever it’s exact motivation in any one case) divorce and custody simply come with financial terms, and there are indeed countless examples of those terms having absolutely everything to do with divorce and the legal contest divorce commonly results in. Remove that arena and remove that incentive and you reduce divorce and childhood issues.
Where it’s all about the money is in the divorce industry.
It’s not a state by state issue as it’s effected by the host of federal mandates, rules, and incentives—lobby-induced as likely as not—I’ve partly indicated in this thread.
Fake DV doesn’t have to make it to the DA. The chain of events is that someone alleges getting a headache in daddy’s presence, runs to the women’s desk in the family court, fills out a claim, gets a TPO against daddy, and uses her new-found single status to move the court for custody and support.
Clean as a whistle.
ss, we’ve been through all this and I’ll ask you the same question I did the last time you appeared to erect an arbitrary standard you apparently intend (or would allow) to form the framework for the State establishing parental rights after the fact:
Where did the State get the right (or where would it get the right) to upend a half dozen constitutional rights—not to mention the legal standard of literally dozens and dozens of state and federal SC precedents on the unalienable right to parent—in order to reallocate parenting rights in an arbitrary, subjective, sexist, presumption-of-guilt courtroom on the basis of, in your example, an education or male-bashing culture or environment?
It seems we have the onus pointing the wrong direction, don’t we? Joe Baseball wasn’t prevented fathering Junior; by what possible rationale will the State prevent him parenting him?
Unless I miss your point, you appear to have the causes and effects inverted … government may have every functional reason, by your example at least, to take over every single last human endeavor on earth, and all by the force of subjective reason and political logic. I assume we all know why that’s a very bad idea?
I’ll leave one last lengthy post on this subject. It’s an excerpt from Stephen Baskervilles masterful Is There Really A Fatherhood Crisis. The essay includes perhaps fifty or more references and includes a portion on family court and it’s environs which applies to Jeff’s topic:
Darleen:
Whoa, slow down there…first of all, can you back that up? Furthermore, women are “deadbeats” at a far greater rate than men, and the court does something about deadbeat moms at a far lower rate than for deadbeat dads.
You’re talking about a subset that you can’t quantify. There are a disquieting number of infantilzed mothers, women with the genetic Golden Ticket who exist to be satisfied by those around them by virtue of their specialness. How does this bear on a discussion of what the standard should be? It doesn’t. Women are just as capable as men of being emotionally disturbed, of being incompletely raised and of damaging their children with their pathologies.
This logic should make it that much more convenient to push Dad (the physical Dad, not the financial one) right out of the picture, since by and large men don’t have what it takes to prove they’re capable parents. It’s a lovely self-fulfilling prophecy. When do we examine the parenting capabilities of women?
But hey, as long as it’s only Dad whose rights are being trampled on, that’s OK because men simply aren’t an acceptable claas of victims. The important thing is that Mom has the government to help her in every phase of parenting, while Dad has them to provide him with room and board if he doesn’t do as he’s told.
The risks of fixing this warped state may be unknowable, but why take any risks when it involves The Childrenâ„¢ and/or their poor, put upon mothers?
Praise be to God, world without end, Amen.
Parental alienation can even kill. Not long ago an alienated child shot his father in the back through an automobile seat. The father died.
Malicious mothers are a substantial subset of divorcees.
The adage in family court circles is that attorneys are one another’s clients. There’s nodding and dealing and virtual winks across the courtroom.
Dad’s exist to involuntarily keep the financial gears well-oiled. And, as you say, nobody cares.
ss appears to point to the very Homer Simpsoning of the American male as its own cause to keep fathers in their gender feminist-approved role of outsider financier…
What? I keep saying the words “in individual cases” and “in the aggregate” and people keep reading me to suggest that I’m talking about some generalized “presumption of guilt” against fathers. I’m not advocating a presumption in favor or against anyone. The fact that our culture has created bad fathers doesn’t create a presumption against custody for men; it just creates bad fathers who, in many individual cases, should not get custody of their kids. Assuming for sake of argument that shared parenting won’t work, if 70% of women are (let’s assume, <objectively</i>
better parents than their husbands, then those women should get custody. I don’t think the legislature should be engaged in social engineering to ensure that an equal percentage of men as women get custody of their kids, regardless of parenting skills.
If you quibble with the “objectively” part, your running up against the limits of human perception. We have no better human mechanism for determining the “better” parent than a courtroom with advocates and a judge. Would shared parenting be better than shoving the marginally worse parent out of the kids’ lives? Yes, in many cases. But it’s not wise to simply gloss over the fact that the all-too-common vindictive parties to divorce have MASSIVE capacity to sabotage such arrangements. Could hateful, untrusting, broken families be forced at gunpoint to accept shared parenting? Doesn’t seem promising.
I don’t think you’re following the full perspective, ss. You don’t appear to have near enough data to argue in favor of not doing anything. As Reagan said, don’t look to government to solve the problem. Government is the problem.
If you can read the issue completely, there’s simply no way you can expect to leave the status quo intact by arguing that the families it breaks up or that break up to take advantage of it will remain statistically identical once it’s been reformed.
As I’ve said, we’ve been through this. It doesn’t appear that you understand the current framework. Without that, your comments will naturally be interpreted to mean that, as you keep saying, biased, arbitrary men without proper legal framework or oversight operating in an unadressable and unredressable for-profit system should remain empowered to violate essential rights because that’s the only option we have.
You may want to review Baskerville’s complete works. I just want you to justify the status quo instead of merely implying it’s the only available option, it’s lack of ethics and constitutionality conveniently left aside.
How we’ll drive around on that flat tire isn’t the question. How we’ll repair it is. The onus isn’t on the reformers, it’s on the violators.
I’m not sure how much room there is for improvement over the status quo.
How about this as a solution: that the child support that a parent pays be equal to the percentage of time that parent has custody. In a 50/50 custody, each parent would pay half. If the father had full custody, then he would assume 100% of the child support expenses; if the mother had full custody, then she would pay 100% of the child support expenses.
I think my solution would result in a lot more 50/50 custodies.
<objectively</i>
better parents than their husbands,</blockquote>
Not only is that not objective, it’s a fucking insult, and I would expect our host might find it particularly offensive as well.
But then, I said “fucking”, so I’m probably in no position to offer an opinion, what with my attitude and testicles and all…
OK, ss. Let’s go ahead and assume, just for the sake of argument, that 70% of women are “better parents” (by the way, that’s objectively measured how, exactly?) Then why should it be a problem for them to prove that they’re better parents by these objective standards and thus more deserving of greater custody rights? Just wondering.
Uh, Seth?
BECAUSE OF THE PATRIARCHY!!!
Ed Minchau sez:
Interesting. That would be the exact opposite of many support formulas, and it would create a dynamic in which each parent might have the time with their kid that they’re willing to pay for!
The only problem is, who are you paying? If you’re with and supporting the kid, who are you supposed to pay?
Oh, right…the patriarchy. Forgot about that.
Pablo, the money would go to things like rent, food, transportation, and so on; in other words, those things that directly benefit the children. It wouldn’t be one parent paying the other, which would remove a lot of the financial incentives that complicate and empower the divorce industry.
The fact that our culture has created bad fathers doesn’t create a presumption against custody for men; it just creates bad fathers
Uh … huh?
The “fact”? Since when is presumption a “fact”?
Who is making this determination, and based upon what criteria?
Just like so many of you self obsorbed pomous women, ss, you are a horses ass who cannot and will not take off your blinders to see the real world of fathers like myself who have put there own lives on hold to raise their children and give them the love and guidence they so richly deserve! There are millions of full time and single dads in our country now and the number grows more and more each year! As mothers choose to purse their careers, fathers choose to stay at home and raise their children. While you choose to look at only the bad eliment of neglectful fathers(primerily getto and trailer dwelling individuals)you might take note on the great(not)
job these mothers are doing ruining these childrens lives by either neglecting them or
violently abusing them after a drinking binge(where is social services now?) Oh yes, there chasing after dads who are acused of one thing or another by they spouses who are coincidely involved in a custody war! Anyway ss,it’s plain to see your warped vision of fairness is 85o;r women 15% for men. What else is new. By the way in the next 10-15 years the probability of full time dads being at close to 50% must urk you terribly. You women are no longer going to hold the upper end when it comes to our children.