[jurisdog]

My whole concern with this issue is that I do not believe that a society that estranges a significant fraction of its adult male citizens from their children is stable.

I guess I'm still confused about which conclusion you are really pushing. I mean, can we agree on a list of factors involved in this topic?

1. When people divorce, and cant agree on custody arrangements, they have a right to go before a family law judge.

2. When they do, the judge ends up making a divorce/custody decree.

3. No matter what happens, since the parents arent gonna be living together anymore, there is no perfect solution for custody. Even a "joint custody" arrangement of 50/50 time sharing still sucks.

4. Every state has different laws. While there are common themese, family law is clearly a states law issue.

5. In cases where things like adulters can be proven, or unfitness to be a parent, or etc etc etc, the judge may give custody to one parent over the other, regardless of that parents gender.

6. Historically, there has been a bias towards awarding primary custody to mothers. This is because of the fact that for young children, the mosther plays a more physical role, and a more primary role in the raising of that child.

It seems to me, that what you mean to say is something like this...

In cases of divorce, where both parents want full custody (minimal visitation rights for the other parent, i.e., weekends and holidays etc), and both parents are equally able to parent the child in terms of time/money/employment/character, etc etc ~ meaning, in a perfect example situation, when ALL other factors involved in the judges custody order are taken into account, there is a tendancy for courts to favor the mother.

Isn't that what your point really boils down to? Because if not, there really isnt much point arguing all the rest. There are just too many holes in the arguemnts to make them worth the time. BUT, that point, as Ive phrased it, crystallizes the issue in such a way that its at least arguable.

All factors being equal, should a mother get primary custody over a father, in a situation where the parents wont agree to 50/50 custody, just because she's female?

Well sorry to say, but there's a lot of people out there who would say yes, because of the simple fact that in terms of parenting young children, mothers play a more primary role, at least physically, and according to some experts, in other ways as well.

The bias that exists in life is more pro-mother than anti-father. There's reasons for that, both emotional and factual.

But there's another wrinkle to what youre really complaining about ~ and that's this. IF all factors really were equal, then a judge would be a LOT more likely to order joint (50/50) custody.

[SauronOfMordor]

But there's another wrinkle to what youre really complaining about ~ and that's this. IF all factors really were equal, then a judge would be a LOT more likely to order joint (50/50) custody.

The main issue is that judges and the people who appoint them, despite all pretenses to the contrary, are political beasties.

The facts of life are that men may get angry over their treatment, but they don't DO ANYTHING about it, for the most part. Women, on the other hand, are more likely to protest and create heat for any judge perceived to be "biased against women". Judges who want to be promoted are well aware of this, and the people who appoint judges are unlikely to install a Family Court judge who does not follow the "Party Line"

The problem, as Nick's pointed out, is that the men are starting to get really angry with the system. I've had two friends who've been shafted like Nick's brother-in-law (wifey decides she needs somebody more "exciting", starts affair, decides to get divorce, and rapes the husband in the process).

The problem for these biased judges is that eventually they're going to encounter husbands who "ain't gonna take it any more". And I'm not sure if the judges realize that the guards who they rely upon to protect them are men who see how judges treat men

[Nick Danger]

I know you are trying to sound reasonable, but you are talking about treating half the people in the country as sub-human animals, and on a subject that is as close to Nature and the Meaning of Life as exists.

You are attempting to justify this in various nice-sounding ways, and trying to be patient in explaining to me that some people just really are sub-human animals and not very important after all, and that's just the way it is. But I am not going to let you get away with that, because it is bigoted bullsh*t that has no place among civilized people. I salute you for phrasing it nicely, and for trying to dress it up in black robes, but it is crap.

One of the things that mature adults should to be able to do is make sensible tradeoffs between short- and long-term consequences. Obviously we can structure rhetoric to produce a case-by-case analysis that appears to justify a policy that women be presumed the "preferred" custodians of children in the event of divorce. However, it is in no one's interest that this go on to the point that the average well-meaning young man can no longer reasonably approach "marriage and family" except as a game of Russian Roulette with half of the cylinders loaded.

That is yer basic undesireable long-term consequence of continually looking only at short term consequences in after-the-fact cases. Adults are supposed to be able to recognize these situations and put the brakes on before the Long Term Bad News arrives. We're not doing a very good job of that.

It is also not in anyone's interest that a sizable fraction of the male population develops a sense that life is pointless unless Things Really Change, which is a reasonable thing to expect from human beings whose children have been taken away from them for reasons that make no sense, except that it is "standard policy" that males are to be treated as non-humans by the family court system.

Policies can change. Sauron's #31 will undoubtedly be misinterpreted by some as a not-so-thinly-velied threat of violence to judges, but it is better taken metaphorically.

Men are not especially vocal about their difficulties. They are socialized not to be. They are trained from birth to take things like being treated like an animal with a stiff upper lip. They will therefore take this for some period of time without appearing to be too pissed off about it.

This should not be taken for passive acceptance. There is a lot of anger over this policy out there. Much of it is restrained by men's own sense that talking about their difficulties is not cool. But more and more, it is being restrained by governmental force. Therefore what could be a nice easy adjustment that everyone could agree to is likely to be more of a tectonic phenomena, with some huge built-up force spending itself in a short period of time, probably very destructively.

The long- and short-term tradeoff that I see is between adjusting this policy now, so that it is does not produce a huge overhang of disillusioned and very angry men that is large enough to be explosive, or pretending that everything is just fine and that men as a class will continue to accept this almost inhuman violation of basic dignity from their government.

To tell the truth, I really don't care what happens in short-term contexts in after-the-fact cases. We're past the point where focusing on that makes sense. The bigger danger now is to the society at large from the accumulated detritus of all these little short-term fixes we've been making... and continue to make.

Here is what I would do. I would replace the family court system's custody decisions with a flip of a coin. This is actually no more unreasonable than Nature itself, which for many millenia used to remove one parent or another by the pseudo-random actions of predatory beasts. We can therefore be assured that human children know how to cope with this, since they had to cope with it for so much of our history.

I predict that this system will produce not a fifty-fifty split in custody decisions, but a precipitous drop in the divorce rate. One of the things that made it easy for my ex sister-to-law to give in to her passions for the professor was the certain knowledge that she could take the children with her. Had she been faced with a 50-50 chance that she might lose them, that divorce would never have happened. Her passions would have cooled, life would have gone on, and the truth is that except for her temporary chemical imbalance, even she would tell you that she had a good marriage with that man.

Her advance knowledge that custody of the children would be awarded purely on the basis of sexist bigotry, in her favor, made it too damned easy for her to give in to something that --in another era -- would never have happened. A man's life was destroyed, the childrens' relationship with their father was destroyed, all at her whim... which itself was being driven by a hormone attack. How can anyone possibly defend a policy that produces these kind of results? And not rarely, but regularly.

It really would be better to just flip a coin.