The month of June when we observe Father's Day is a good time to review some of the injustices committed against fathers
by family courts. Family courts routinely deprive divorced fathers not
only of their own children, but even many constitutional rights.
For
example, do you think judges should have the power to decide to which
religion your children must belong and which churches they may be
prohibited from attending? In December 2009 a Chicago judge did exactly
that.
Cook County Circuit Judge Edward Jordan issued a
restraining order to prohibit Joseph Reyes from taking his
three-year-old daughter to any non-Jewish religious activities because
his ex-wife argued that would contribute to "the emotional detriment of
the child." Mrs. Rebecca Reyes wants to raise her daughter in the
Jewish religion, and the judge sided with the mother. Joseph Reyes'
divorce attorney, Joel Brodsky, when he saw the judge's restraining
order, said, "I almost fell off my chair. I thought maybe we were in
Afghanistan and this was the Taliban."
Mr. Reyes took
his daughter to church anyway and let the Chicago media know about it.
Soon he was back in court to be prosecuted for contempt in violating
the family court order. The good news is that Reyes, fortunately, drew
another Cook County judge, Renee Goldfarb, who ruled on April 13, 2010
that Reyes can take his daughter to "church services during his
visitation time if he so chooses." Judge Goldfarb said her decision to
let Reyes take his daughter to church was based on "the best interest
of the child," but then criticized Reyes for going public with his
case.
This case is a good illustration of the
dictatorial power of the family courts. Both judges purported to decide
what church a child can attend based on the judge's personal opinion
about what is "the best interest of the child." The choice of a church
should be none of the government's business, even if the parents are
divorced, and "best interest" should be decided by parents, not judges.
Not
only did the family court try to take away a father's parental rights
and his freedom of religion rights, but also his First Amendment
free-speech rights. The second judge severely criticized Reyes for
telling the media about his case. But publicity was the reason the
family court backtracked from sending Reyes to jail for violating the
restraining order. It's important to shine the light of publicity on the
outrageous denial of parental rights by the family courts.
In
another divorce case last year, a family court in New Hampshire (where
the state motto is "Live Free or Die") ordered ten-year-old Amanda
Kurowski to quit being homeschooled by her mother and instead to attend
fifth grade in the local public school. Judge Lucinda V. Sadler
approved the court-appointed expert's view that Amanda "appeared to
reflect her mother's rigidity on questions of faith" and that Amanda
"would be best served by exposure to multiple points of view."
Where
did family court judges get the power to decide what church and what
school the children of divorced parents must attend? Family court
judges have amassed this extraordinary power by co-opting and changing
the definition of a time-honored concept: "the best interest of the child."
This
rule originally came from English common law as compiled by William
Blackstone in 1765, and meant that parents are presumed to act in their
own children's best interest. For centuries, English and American
courts honored parents' rights by recognizing the legal presumption that
the best interest of a child is whatever a fit parent says it is, and
should not be second-guessed by a judge.
However, when
U.S. state legislatures revised their family-law statutes in the
1970s, the "best interest of the child" became disconnected from
parents' decisions. Family courts assumed the discretion to decide the
best interest of children of divorced and unmarried parents, and enforce
their opinions by using their power to send fathers to jail and to
tell them how they must spend their money.
The notion
that persons other than parents should decide what is in a child's best
interest is illustrated by the slogan "it takes a village to raise a
child." Those who use that slogan understand "village" to mean
government officials and employees of the courts, the public schools,
and the departments of children and family services.
The "best
interest" rule is totally subjective; it's a matter of individual
opinion. Parents make thousands of decisions about their children, and
should have the right to make their decisions even if they contravene
so-called experts. Whether the decision is big (such as where to go to
church or school), or small (such as playing baseball or soccer), there
is no objective way to say which is "best."
Since
judges are supposed to base their decisions on evidence presented in
open court, and there is no objective basis for deciding thousands of
questions involved in raising a child, judges often call on the
testimony of expert witnesses. A big industry has grown up of
psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, custody evaluators, and
counselors who are eager to collect fees for giving their opinions.
Having opinions produced by persons with academic degrees is a way to
make subjective and arbitrary judgments appear objective. With the
volume of cases coming through family courts, judges can evade
responsibility for controversial decisions by rubber-stamping opinions
of these court-appointed experts.
Sometimes these
rulings are against women, but most decisions are against men,
especially fathers. It's time to call a halt to the practice of letting
family court judges make decisions that are rightfully the prerogative
of parents.
Putting Men in Debtors' Prisons
Did
you know that a family court can order a man to reimburse the
government for the welfare money, falsely called "child support," which
was paid to the mother of a child to whom he is not related? Did you
know that, if he doesn't pay, a judge can sentence him to debtor's
prison without ever letting him have a jury trial?
Did you know
that debtor's prisons (putting men in prison because they can't pay a
debt) were abolished in the United States even before we abolished
slavery, but that they exist today to punish men who are too poor to
pay what is falsely called "child support"?
Did you
know that when corporations can't pay their debts, they can take
bankruptcy, which means they pay off their debts for pennies on the
dollar, but a man can never get an alleged "child support" debt forgiven
or reduced, even if he is out of a job, penniless and homeless,
medically incapacitated, incarcerated (justly or unjustly), can't afford
a lawyer, serving in our Armed Forces overseas, or never owed the
money in the first place?
Did you know that when a
woman applying for welfare handouts lies about who is the father of her
child, she is never prosecuted for perjury? Did you know that judges
can refuse to accept DNA evidence showing that the man she accuses is
not the father? Did you know that alleged "child support" has nothing
to do with supporting a child because the mother has no obligation to
spend even one dollar of it on a child, and in many cases none of the
"support" money ever gets to a child because it goes to fatten the
payroll of the child-support bureaucracy? These are among the
injustices that the feminists, and their docile liberal male allies,
have inflicted on men.
Most of these family court injustices are caused by the Bradley Amendment,
named for its sponsor former Democratic Senator from New Jersey and
presidential candidate Bill Bradley. That 1986 federal law prohibits
retroactive reduction of alleged "child support" even in the
circumstances listed above. The Bradley law denies bankruptcy
protections, overrides all statutes of limitation, and forbids judicial
consideration of obvious inability to pay. Most Bradley-law victims
never come to national attention because, as Bernard Goldberg wrote in
his book Bias, mainstream media toe the feminist propaganda line,
denigrating men, especially fathers, and using the epithet "deadbeat
dads."
But one egregious case did make news in 2009. Frank Hatley
was in a Georgia jail for more than a year for failure to pay alleged
"child support" even though a DNA test nine years earlier, plus a
second one in 2009, proved that he is not the father. His ex-girlfriend
had lied and claimed he was. The August 21, 2001 court order, signed
by Judge Dane Perkins, acknowledged that Hatley is not the father, but
nevertheless ordered him to continue paying and never told him he could
have a court-appointed lawyer if he could not afford one.
Hatley
subsequently paid the government (not the mom or child) thousands of
dollars in "child support." Even after he was laid off from his job
unloading charcoal grills from shipping containers and reduced to living
in his car, he continued making payments out of his unemployment
benefits.
But he didn't pay enough to
satisfy the avaricious child-support bureaucrats, so Judge Perkins
ruled Hatley in contempt of court and sent him to jail without any jury
trial. With the help of a Legal Services lawyer, he was released
from jail and relieved from future assessments, but (because of the
Bradley Amendment) the government demanded that Hatley continue paying
at the rate of $250 a month until he paid off the $16,398 debt the
government claimed he accumulated earlier (even though the court then
knew he was not the father). He paid the debt down to $10,000 but was
jailed for six months in 2006 for falling behind on payments during a
period of unemployment. When he became unemployed and homeless in 2008,
he was jailed again.
Altogether, Hatley paid so-called "child
support" for 13 years and spent 13 months in jail because of a woman's
lie, the Bradley Amendment, the ruthless "child support" bureaucracy,
and the bias of the family court against fathers.
In
2009, the court relieved Hatley of any future child support payments
(probably because of press publicity about this case) but did not
restore his driver's license. This system is morally and
constitutionally wrong and the Bradley Amendment is particularly evil,
yet all authorities say the court orders were lawful.
Another
type of feminist indignity is the use in divorce cases of false
allegations of child sexual abuse in order to gain child custody and
the financial windfall that goes with it. Former Vancouver, Washington,
police Officer Ray Spencer
spent nearly 20 years in prison after being convicted of molesting his
two children who are now adults and say it never happened.
The
son, who was 9 years old at the time, was questioned, alone, for
months until he said he had been abused in order to get the interrogator
to leave him alone. The daughter, who was then age 5, said she talked
to the interrogator after he gave her ice cream.
There
were many other violations of due process in Spencer's trial, such as
prosecutors withholding medical exams that showed no evidence of abuse,
and his court-appointed lawyer failing to prepare a defense, but the
judge nevertheless sentenced Spencer to two life terms in prison plus
14 years. Spencer was five times denied parole because he refused to
admit guilt, a customary parole practice that is maliciously designed
to save face for prosecutors who prosecute innocent men.
Depriving Men of Constitutional Rights
Family
courts routinely deprive men of their fundamental right to parent
their own children, by charging them with a wide variety of trivial
offenses. Family courts generally uphold feminists' demands to kick a
man out of his own home, and take control of their children and his
money, based on a woman's unsubstantiated allegations. The principal
tactics in this racket are domestic violence accusations and
court-issued restraining orders.
The Violence Against Women Act
(VAWA) was passed in 1994 as a payoff to the radical feminists for
helping to elect Bill Clinton President in 1992. Personal sponsorship of
this law was taken over by then-Senator Joe Biden.
VAWA
shows the hypocrisy of noisy feminist demands that we kowtow to their
ideology of gender neutrality, to their claim that there is no
difference between male and female, and to their opposition to
stereotyping and gender profiling. There is nothing sex neutral about
VAWA. It is based on the proposition that there are, indeed, innate
gender differences: men are naturally batterers and women are naturally
victims. VAWA is not designed to eliminate or punish violence, but to
punish only alleged violence against women. Most of the shelters financed by VAWA do not accept men as victims.
VAWA
has been known from the getgo as "feminist pork" because it puts $1
Billion a year of U.S. taxpayers' money into the hands of the radical
feminists. They have set up shop in domestic violence shelters where
they promote divorce, marriage breakup, hatred of men, and false
accusations, while rejecting marriage counseling, reconciliation,
drug-abuse treatment, and evidence of mutual-partner abuse. There is no
investigation or accountability for the taxpayers' money spent in these
shelters.
VAWA makes taxpayers' money
available to the feminists to lobby state legislators to pass feminist
laws, to train law enforcement personnel and judges in using the laws,
and to fund enforcement.
VAWA provides the woman with free
legal counsel to pursue her allegations, but not the man to defend
himself. He is on his own to find and pay a lawyer — or struggle
without one.
Feminists have changed state
laws in order to get family courts to operate on a loosey-goosey
definition of family violence. It doesn't have to be violent. It can
simply be what a man says or how he looks at a woman. It can even be
what a woman thinks he might do or say. Definitions of violence include
calling your partner a naughty word, raising your voice, causing
"annoyance" or "emotional distress," claiming to be "fearful," or just
not doing what your partner wants.
Feminists have persuaded most states to adopt mandatory arrest
laws. That means, when the police arrive at a disturbance and lack
good information on who is to blame, they are nevertheless legally
bound to arrest somebody. Three guesses who is usually arrested.
Feminists have lobbied most states into passing no-drop prosecution
laws. Those laws make the prosecutor legally bound to go forward with
prosecution even if the woman recants her charges or wants to drop
them. Studies show that women do recant or ask to drop the charges in
60% of criminal allegations, but the law requires prosecution against
the man to proceed regardless. Along with the loss of other
constitutional rights, the man thus loses his right to confront and
cross-examine his accuser.
VAWA has a built-in
incentive for the woman to make false charges of domestic violence
because she knows she will never be prosecuted for perjury. Charging
domestic violence practically guarantees she will get custody of the
children and sever forever the father's relationship with his children
even though the alleged violence had nothing whatever to do with any
abuse of the children. Judges are required to consider allegations of
domestic violence in awarding child custody, even though no evidence of
abuse was ever presented.
'Gamesmanship' of Restraining Orders
Family
court judges issue restraining orders virtually for the asking,
without any evidence of actual domestic violence or even threat of
violence. The Illinois Bar Journal (June 2005) explained how
women use court-issued restraining orders as a tool for the mother to
get sole child custody and to bar the father from visitation. In big
type, the Journal proclaimed: "Orders of protection are designed to
prevent domestic violence, but they can also become part of the gamesmanship of divorce."
The
"game" is that mothers can assert falsehoods or trivial complaints
against the father, in order to get a restraining order based on the
presumption that men are naturally abusers of women. Restraining orders
are in reality a tactical legal maneuver familiar to all family court
attorneys as a way to obtain an order of contempt and unfairly increase
the leverage of one side (typically the woman) in bargaining with the
other (typically the man).
The Fourth Amendment
guarantees U.S. citizens the right to be "secure in their persons,
house, papers, and effects." But each year, restraining orders are
issued against at least two million men without proof or even evidence,
forcing innocent men out of their homes. In 33 states, fathers can be
thrown in jail for even a technical violation of a restraining order,
such as sending a child a birthday card or telephoning a child on an
unapproved day.
Family courts have avoided facing up to
whether the restraining orders issued against fathers are
constitutional. Accused criminals enjoy a long list of constitutional
rights, but feminists have persuaded judges to issue orders that
restrain actions of non-criminal husbands and fathers, and punish them
based on flimsy, unproved accusations. Most states do not require proof
by a clear and convincing standard of evidence. Even though
these restraining orders are issued without the due process required
for criminal prosecutions, they carry the threat of a prison sentence
for anyone who violates them.
The New Jersey Law Journal
reported that an instructor taught judges to be merciless to husbands
and fathers, saying, "Throw him out on the street, give him the clothes
on his back, and tell him 'See ya' around.'" People have a better
chance to prove their innocence in traffic court than when subjected to
a restraining order.
Too often, the restraining order
serves no legitimate purpose, but is just an easy way for one spouse to
get revenge or the upper hand in a divorce or child custody dispute.
Once a restraining order is issued, it becomes nearly impossible for a
father to regain custody or even get to see his own children. That is
the result even though the alleged domestic violence (which doesn't
have to be physical or proven) did not involve the children at all.
Probably
two million restraining orders are issued each year in domestic
relationships. These restraining orders almost certainly increase
violence and harm, because studies show that the safest place for adults
and children is in a home with two parents, rather than one that is
broken by a restraining order. In 1999 there were 58,200 abductions of
children by non-family members, a crime typically the direct result of
inadequate adult supervision. When an adult is ordered out of a home
based on some allegation of domestic violence, the children in that home
are no longer supervised, and victimization by crime (and accidents)
necessarily increases.
There is no evidence that the
millions of restraining orders issued annually each year increase the
overall safety of the applicants or their children, and most likely the
opposite is true.
It is false to claim that because
domestic violence often occurs behind closed doors, it is somehow
difficult to prove. In fact, real domestic violence is easier to prove
than most crimes. Medical record and forensic evidence is clear and
convincing for real domestic violence, and the time and place of the
crime are easy to determine, and a restraining order may be
appropriate.
What is difficult is to disprove false allegations of non-serious domestic violence, so a higher standard of proof is essential to sift fact from fiction.
It
seems elementary that husband and fathers who are accused of crimes by
their wives or girl friends should have the same constitutional rights
accorded to any criminal, but they do not in family courts. They are
routinely denied equal treatment under law, the right to a fair trial,
the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, the right to confront
accusers, and a court-appointed lawyer when they can't afford to hire
an attorney.
It's time to restore basic constitutional rights to
husbands and fathers and repudiate the feminist agenda that treats men
as guilty unless proven innocent.
VAWA
will be coming up for reauthorization soon, and it must be reformed.
Reforming the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is today's basic civil
rights issue. Domestic violence must be redefined to mean violence.
State laws must be changed to repeal mandatory arrest laws and no-drop
prosecution laws. We must eliminate the incentives for false
accusations of domestic violence, which include using restraining
orders as the "gamesmanship" for divorce, child custody, money, or
ownership of the family home.
Persons
accused of domestic violence, man or woman, are entitled to have
fundamental constitutional rights, including due process and
presumption of innocence until proven guilty by clear and convincing
evidence in court.
http://www.eagleforum.org/psr/2010/june10/psrjune10.html
“A bad statistic,” says sociologist Joel Best, “is harder to kill than a vampire.” Bad statistics come from bad intellectual faith. And in no field does bad intellectual faith run more rampant than that of domestic violence.
In an up-to-date example of the phenomenon, we find the “World Soccer Abuse Nightmare” out of England, in which the British Home Office carelessly endorsed a bogus study put forward by England’s Association of Chief Police Officers, purporting to find that a full 30 per cent increase in domestic violence (DV) during the World Cup. A subsequent investigation by reliable scholars found the so-called study to be riddled with errors and corrupt methodology.
The
World Cup stats fiasco recalls the 1993 Super Bowl hoax, when it was
“reported” that DV escalated by 40 per cent during the game, a falsity
that tore through the media like wildfire, to the point that the Super
Bowl was hyped by NBC as the “abuse bowl.” Only a single Washington Post
reporter tracked the figure to its source in a casual remark at a
press conference by an irresponsible feminist activist. It was
completely bogus, but the pernicious rumour circulates every year,
despite 17 years of statistical tracking that reveals the same constant
message: There is no substantiation whatsoever to any sports-DV
linkage.Here in Quebec, we have our own equally persistent scandalous version of this hoax. In 1980, a false statistic was promoted by a supposedly scholarly study (Macleod et Cadieux, 1980, later conceded to be based on false statistics), to the effect that one Canadian woman in ten is beaten by her husband or live-in partner.
The unkillable “vampire” morphed into another false statistic circulated by the Minister of Social Affairs. Now, the message was that there are 300,000 victims of DV in Quebec each year. Anyone with common sense, thinking of the enormity of this charge, would realize this was an astronomical figure and highly suspect in a population of at most 8 million people – far less when you subtract the men, the very young and the elderly.
But strategically it made sense for political militants to fear-monger amongst Quebec women in order to pave the way for social changes feminists were demanding. In 2008, Quebec upped the ante in the fear-mongering game by flooding the province with print, radio and TV ads claiming that “one in three” Quebec women would be a victim of DV in her lifetime, another patent falsehood (it’s more like a lifetime risk of one in 14, which doesn’t take into account the obvious spread of the risk: A probable zero likelihood for most prudent women and the probable 90 per cent risk for prostitutes and drug addicts).
That one-in-three “statistic” was based not in research, but in an opinion poll asking women what their perception was of their risk for DV. Moreover, they included in their definition of DV such trivialities as insults, the way men looked at them and any number of subjective categories all supposedly part of a spectrum of abuse. No attempt whatsoever was made to gauge how much abuse is perpetrated against boys and men by women, even though the numbers of such sexual and physical assaults is significant.
How such a demonization of all males might affect actual boys and men psychologically, or how it might affect society’s perception of sons, brothers, fathers and husbands never came under consideration.
For an in-depth exploration of the phenomenon – that is, the whole phenomenon of the demonization of the male sex, of which false statistics are but the tip of a treacherous iceberg – I recommend a recently published anthology of essays, 300,000 Femmes Battues: y avez-vous cru? Full disclosure: I wrote the preface to it.
The book brings together Quebec’s leading researchers and “good faith” intellectuals on the subject of feminism’s crusade against men, each one expanding on the effects of radical feminism in his or her own field. The problem is approached from all sides: philosophical (François Brooks); juridical (Georges Dupuy); political (researchers Jean-Claude Boucher and Jean-Pierre Gagnon); familial (Lise Bilodeau); media (Bob Lérétik); and historic (Jean-Philippe Trottier).
Feminists in Quebec are far better organized for political action in Quebec, because women politicians, for historic reasons having to do with the Quiet Revolution, have been at their game longer and with greater focus than their sisters in the ROC. Their influence is widespread and deep and in many ways corrupt as a result of too much political power concentrated in the hands with those of a monolithic view of society that excludes men’s rights, and increasingly fewer scruples in whatever methods it takes to further the interests of women.
Meanwhile, boys are dropping out of school like flies, Quebec male suicide numbers are alarmingly high, and sexually abused boys and men have nowhere to turn for help. But escalating millions upon millions of public dollars are lavished on women’s problems, real and imagined.
The abandonment of boys and men in Quebec is an orphan topic that deserves a little more media gruel. This is the first credible book to gather all the topic’s important background and relevant information in one volume. It won’t get the attention it deserves, alas, but that it exists at all is a hopeful sign that intellectual good faith on this thorny subject may yet have its day in the court of public opinion, so long dominated by the feminist movement’s merchants of duplicity.
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