Posted on 04/05/2006 8:14:34 AM PDT by FreeManDC
Laws that protect the fairer sex from rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment all rest on a simple assumption: women who claim to be victims are almost always telling the truth. Maybe its time to revisit that belief.
Three weeks ago the National Center for Men filed a lawsuit on behalf of Matt Dubay, 25, who claims his girlfriend repeatedly assured him that she was unable to get pregnant. When she later bore a child, the state of Michigan went after Mr. Dubay for child support.
Thats what people used to call entrapment.
But chivalrous pundits rose to defend the honor of this damsel in distress, dubbing Mr. Dubay a sexual predator, deadbeat dad, and horrors! -- a weasel. And if you happen to believe that men should be shouldered with the responsibilities and women enjoy all the rights, their criticisms certainly ring true.
Recently That's Life! magazine polled 5,000 women and asked them if they would lie to get pregnant. Two-fifths of the women 42% to be exact said yes, according to NCMs Kingsley Morse.
Yikes!
But that was just a hypothetical survey. Women would never stick it to a man they actually knew. Or would they?
Consider the paternity scam. Heres how it works:
Find any dim-witted man to get you pregnant. Then look up the name of some unsuspecting Joe whos got a steady job it doesnt matter that you never met the poor bloke. Put his name on the babys birth certificate.
Now cross your fingers and hope the man is out of town when the sheriff delivers the papers. In California, such default judgments account for 70% of paternity decisions, according to a 2003 study by the Urban Institute.
Or defraud one of your previous boyfriends, assuming hes a good breadwinner, of course. Thats what happened to Carnell Smith of Georgia, who willingly assumed financial responsibility for a child, shelling out more than $40,000 in child support over an 11-year period. But when the mother went to court to up the payments, Smith requested genetic testing. Thats when he learned, to his great surprise, that he wasnt the girls father.
Stung by the injustice, Mr. Smith founded Citizens Against Paternity Fraud, [http://paternityfraud.com/pf_fight_back.html] a group that works to protect men from being cheated by these modern-day Welfare Queens.
Last year Michael Gilding, sociology professor at Swinburne University in Australia, reviewed studies from around the world, and concluded that 1-3% of children were fathered by someone other than the man who believes hes the daddy.
Lets run the math. Four million children are born in the United States each year. Using the mid-range 2% figure, that means 80,000 men become victims of paternity fraud.
Yikes again!
Ready for the next scam?
This one involves false allegations of domestic violence. Each year, one million restraining orders are issued that serve to evict a person usually a man -- from his own home.
Restraining orders have become so commonplace that family lawyers refer to them as silver bullets, slam-dunks, or simply, divorce planning. It has been estimated that one-third of those orders are requested as a legal ploy in the middle of a divorce proceeding. Not only are the orders easy to get, in many states a restraining order automatically bans a father from gaining joint custody of his children. [www.mediaradar.org/docs/VAWA-Threat-to-Families.pdf]
So the restraining order granted on the flimsy grounds that he caused emotional distress becomes the womans meal ticket to many years of child support payments. Prosecutors never go after persons who commit perjury, anyway.
And state welfare agencies dont get upset either, because the federal Office for Child Support Enforcement reimburses 66% of the costs of states child support enforcement activities. Think of it as a bounty payment for deleting daddies.
So lets see . . . 42% of women admit they would lie to get pregnant. Each year 80,000 non-biological fathers become victims of paternity fraud. And about 300,000 restraining orders are issued in the middle of a divorce.
Assume a father so defrauded finds himself on the hook for $250 a month for each of his children. Over an 18-year period, that comes out to a cushy $54,000, all legally-enforceable, tax-free, and no strings attached.
In the past the American legal system was guided by the rule, No person shall benefit from their own wrong-doing. But now, hundreds of thousands of women replace that dictum with the self-indulgent excuse: Get while the getting is good.
I'm not arguing the value of marriage. I'm arguing the idea that marriage is designed so men can have a steady POA and women can have the bills paid.
Maybe for some people, that's the motivation. But certainly not all people.
In an actual divorce, the custodial parent (aka the woman) usually gets to stay in the house they had, courtesy of dear old dad. (At least that's the way it works around here.)
And that's in addition to the child support. Also, dad pays 100% for health care and 50% min for schooling.
And once again, the guy's contribution is supposed to represent half (not 100%) of the kids support. So $250/mo from dad plus $250 from mom (she IS kicking in, isn't she?) = $500 / month.
If your kid is in the public school system, living in your house and eating dinner at home, then Yes, I'm saying $500 month is ridiculous.
Instead, its probably no more than $250/mo... which means its ALL being payed by dad.
But that's not what they claim when they lay out the figures.
Lastly, $250/mo is really low for support. Must been poor people (therefore not living in the Ritz to begin with).
Around here (N.E. Ohio) these days, its $100 - $150 / wk /kid for a middle class wage. They might give you a quantity discount though if there are lots of kids.
For instance here is a California case that shows a man paying for 8 years and losing multiple appeals where the attitude of the court is "it doesn't matter" that the kids not his. Note too that the corrupt recalled ex-Gov of California vetoed a law that would have corrected this sort of injustice, and the Dem. controlled legislature did not overturn the veto.
A google search on the term "child support false paternity" will provide hundreds of stories from newpapers all around the country.
You stand corrected. Your welcome.
Thus you have the state acting essentially as a RICO entity in shaking down men.
__________________________________________________
July 14, 2004 On June 30, a California man being forced to pay child support for a child he had not fathered got his day in court when the Second District Court of Appeal of California overturned a paternity judgment against him.
Los Angeles County, which had imposed the judgment, knew that Manuel Navarro was not the father of the child in question because DNA testing had proved so. Yet under both federal and state child-support laws, the county was still able to demand Navarro pay child support.
The court's landmark decision in Navarro's favor may well become the controlling authority for contested paternity in California and a legal precedent nationwide.
Navarro's case is typical of the false paternity claims and child-support laws that prompt men's-rights activists to condemn the family-court system as being virulently unfair to men.
When an unwed mother applies for welfare in California, the Department of Child Support Services routinely requires her to name the father(s) of her children.
The information provided is often incomplete. Moreover, even though the mother signs a declaration under penalty of perjury, false declarations go unpunished.
In March 1996, Los Angeles County filed a complaint to establish the paternity and child-support obligations of a "Manuel Nava" who had been named as the father of two boys receiving public assistance.
Based on the information the mother provided, authorities determined that Navarro was the father in question and served him with a complaint.
The county says it made "substitute service" of its complaint by leaving a copy of the summons with "Jane Doe," who was identified as Navarro's "sister" and "co-tenant." Another copy was sent by first-class mail.
The complaint would have asked Navarro to file a written denial of paternity within 30 days, as mandated by federal law. Otherwise, fatherhood would be presumed.
Navarro did not respond to the complaint within the 30-day time period he claims he never received it.
In July 1996, a court judgment established Navarro's paternity and ordered $247 a month in child-support payments.
Penalties for evading child-support payments can include the inability to obtain a driver's license and other business or professional "licenses" such as teaching credentials.
Credit ratings can also be ruined and the State Department may refuse to issue the "deadbeat dad" a passport. Thus, even if the court-ordered support is not garnished from wages, falsely named fathers have powerful incentives to pay up.
In July 2001, Navarro filed a motion to set aside the court's judgment because a blood test proved he was not the boys' father. Although both the federal and state "challenge periods" had long passed, he argued that the mother had committed fraud by naming him.
He also claimed to have never received the original complaint or default judgment. The court denied the motion.
Navarro's case is not unique. For example, in California, in serving child-support judgments, "substitute service," rather than "personal service," is a common practice.
A March, 2003 study prepared at the request of DCSS, Examining Child Support Arrears in California, found that most complaints in California are delivered by substitute service, "which suggests that noncustodial parents may not know that they have been served."
"In Los Angeles County in 2000...79 percent of paternity judgments were decreed by default," father's-rights advocate Glenn Sacks explains. "Most of these men had no idea they were 'fathers' until their wages were garnished."
In an article entitled Injustice by Default: How the effort to catch 'deadbeat dads' ruins innocent men's lives, journalist Matt Welch asked California DCSS Assistant Director Leora Gerhenzon what would happen if a woman had named "Matt Welch" a white guy between 30 and 40 years old, who maybe lives in the Los Angeles area, as the father of her child.
Gerhenzon answered, "We run our search on him; if we come back with one Matt Welch who lives in L.A., whose birthday fits that 10-year range, and we have nobody else, we presume in general we have the person."
The argument could be made that current laws encourage false-paternity claims. To receive federal funds on child-support orders, states must name the fathers of the children on assistance. Since there is no federal requirement for DNA testing for paternity, there is no state requirement.
Indeed, father's-rights advocates argue that there is an incentive for states to bypass costly testing which might rule out fatherhood. In 2002, former California Gov. Gray Davis admitted that $40 million in federal funds could be jeopardized by widespread paternity challenges.
For this reason, among others, in 2002 Davis vetoed the California Paternity Justice Act, (AB 2240), which would have extended the challenge period and vacated judgments against falsely named "fathers." Women who knowingly signed false declarations of paternity would have been liable for criminal prosecution. (Another factor in Davis' veto was the political pressure of groups like the National Organization of Women, who successfully argued that passing the act would harm children who might lose support payments.)
In hearing Navarro's appeal, the Second District Court acknowledged that "by strict application of the law, appellant should be denied relief...Sometimes even more important policies than the finality of judgments are at stake, however."
The appeals court explained, "the County...should not enforce child-support judgments it knows to be unfounded. And in particular, it should not ask the courts to assist it in doing so. Despite the Legislature's clear directive that child-support agencies not pursue mistaken child-support actions, the County persists in asking that we do so. We will not sully our hands by participating in an unjust, and factually unfounded, result. We say no to the County, and we reverse."
How many falsely named "fathers" could this decision affect?
A study by the American Association of Blood Banks found that "the overall exclusion rate [of paternity on tested men] for 1999 was 28.2 percent for accredited labs."
That figure is undoubtedly higher than what would be found in a random sample of the general population, as men who request tests already have reason to question paternity.
No one knows the real number. What is clear is that courts across North America must follow the Second District Court's lead and exonerate men from false paternity claims.
I could care less if you believe it or not. It happened, and we paid the legal fees that were required to get it to stop. It's real. Don't believe me, have a child out of wedlock. You will get an education that you could not now believe.
Shafted would be the polite way of putting it. He hasn't worked a day or paid a penny in support since I divorced him 17 years ago.
Say what you will about the Muslims but they got their women under control. So under control that if he brings home wives number two and three none of them can get anywhere if they object. The general custom is that a man takes multiple wives only if he can support them.
The Muslim Sharia law is 100% on the man's side in a divorce. Here the women have the upper hand though it wasn't always like that. These days women initiate divorce. A few decades ago it was the man
The is a secondary problem with taking child support from someone prior to the establishment of paternity. States can consider child support payments as acknowledgement of paternity. So even if the DNA test comes back that the child isn't the man, the fact he's "paid" child support is considered acceptance of the responsibility and the man can be ordered to continue to pay.
California is notorious for doing this.
I stand corrected. Thanks for the info.
My own husband found about 4 years after his divorce from his first wife that his olders son was not his. Paternity test ordered 0% chance of his being the father. He was still ordered to pay support even after she acknowledge cheating on him during the marriage (obviously).
California is notorious for doing exactly what you are suggesting, picking a name out of a phone book, sending a court summons and establishing paternity without any testing done. Paternity by default. Do a quick websearch on this fact, you will be suprised.
I was like you for years, thinking that our CS system was fair, equitable, in the real best interest of the child. It wasn't until I researched the subject did I find out how bad our system really is.
Exactly the point I said I was arguing with:
I'm arguing the idea that marriage is designed so
You said "function" and I said "design". I was disagreeing with your "function of marriage" definition by stating that it may be someone's motivation to get married, but not all people think that way.
But I do appreciate your emotional judgmentalism.
A marriage with no emotion becomes little more than a business deal. Which by your definition is what it should be.
Man gets sex, woman gets support/protection. Sign the dotted line. ~sigh~
It's a shame, really. That loveless, business-like attitude has destroyed the idea of marriage more than feminism ever could.
Yes, that's correct... here in Texas. My husband's ex-wife TRIED to force him to pay HER child support for her daughter by a previous marriage.... that was AFTER she met a guy on the internet, packed up her things and her daughters things, and left him and their 3 young sons to move to Europe to be with this guy. My husband got custody of all three boys mainly because she didn't want them. That was 10 years ago. He's never received one cent of child support from her for the boys.
Another offshoot of what's happening here, and one that is infinitely more destructive than the mere financial angle of punitive child support amounts, is this: Whole generations of boys and girls are left with highly negative role models and expectations of men and fathers. Fathers are minimized in their childrens' lives. The extent of their roles as fathers, of their authority as fathers, is at the mercy of the mothers (primary custodial parents in at least 80 percent of divorces) and the courts.
Dads are usually reduced to being able to be dads (visitation) ONLY four to eight days a month plus some holidays. If the dad wants to discipline an unruly and direspectful boy but the mom thinks dad's punishment is too harsh ... guess who the courts will back-up? I even remember a case where the court forced the dad to apologize to his son, in a case where the son clearly should have been the one doing the penance! What the hell kind of example does that set!!!???!!!
Dad is an empty suit, a paper tiger, a figure whose primary purpose is to provide money while mom is the one who has the real authority. Dads are emasculated.
No wonder so much popular music today is filled with ugly, disrepectful words to desribe women. No wonder the suicide rate of male teens is so high. No wonder young men are becoming anti-marriage. No wonder girls are so promiscuous that large numbers start having sex in their early teens -- they've never had the chance to develop a truly loving and deep relationship with their dads, and so seek that male affection in inappropriate ways. They grow up with horrifically unrealistic expectations of men, and boys grow up confused and beaten-down as to expectations society has of them as fathers and men.
You are so right when you say that marrige is the ginel most important civilizing influence that we have.
I just don't get it. I go through withdrawals after one day of not seeing my children. They come home from college most weekends to keep me from turning into a complete basketcase.
By only making marriage about "love", then anything that is cast as love is subject to sanctification by marriage. Hence, our current troubles.
It is precisely a business deal. Why do you think you signed it and got a license for it? This society has attached many romantic notions to marriage, but ancient cultures (and even those in the world today) regularly "arranged" marriages. They recognized the importance of the social arrangement. It is so important, it wasn't to be trusted to the young. The association of romance with procreation is relatively new.
Unfortunately he can't. The woman took the child 3 states away after getting the state to garnish the officer's wages. The sad part is he probably would have been a great father for the child.
hahaha... none of the above... I just can make em laugh... which is a good thing, because if they aren't laughing before they see me nekkie they sure will be afterward.
Goes for the woman, too, wouldn't you say? Especially since the woman has the sole choice over the sex act.
People on this thread are whining about paying $54,000 in child support over 18 years.
They haven't a clue do they?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.