Posted on 05/26/2002 2:17:07 PM PDT by RogerFGay
A Knight Defending Fatherhood
May 26, 2002
By Roger F. Gay
You can tell this is an election year because politicians, bureaucrats, and TV "talking heads" are bashing fathers. In the mid 1970s Congress decided to get the federal government involved in domestic relations law. Ever since, the war against dads has driven gender politics, expansion of the welfare system, and increased spending. By the early 1990s it seemed commonly accepted that battering women and abandoning wives and children to welfare was a character flaw genetically fixed by every Y-chromosome.
Enter Stephen Baskerville -- a knight defending fatherhood. Baskerville might not be what many people imagine as "one of those fathers' rights guys." A political scientist at Howard University, Dr. Baskerville's files are filled with scholarly articles with lots of citations to other scholarly articles, a growing number of which he has written. In his appearances on television and radio however, as well as in the articles he has written for the general public, one might occasionally sense a certain irritation with mis-educated public remarks about fathers.
In an article in this month's Liberty Magazine entitled "The Myth of Deadbeat Dads," Baskerville offers to educate the rich and famous. He reports that TV host Bill O'Reilly recently declared that "There is an epidemic of child abandonment in America, mainly by fathers." "Sen. Evan Bayh has attacked 'irresponsible' fathers in several speeches. Campaigning for president, Al Gore promised harsher measures against 'deadbeat dads,' including sending more to jail. The Clinton administration implemented numerous child-support 'crackdowns,' including the ominously named Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act." In response, Republicans "want to send the strongest possible message that parents cannot walk away from their children."
"Special interest groups demonized fathers," says Baskerville. "They called them 'deadbeat dads' and criminalized them. The result is a system that traces newly hired employees, shifts the burden of proof to the accused, and throws fathers in jail for losing their jobs." He is not alone in that opinion. His article sports 46 citations from a mixture of sources, including books and academic journals, the popular press, and even relevant Web sites.
"The system of collecting child support is no longer one of requiring men to take responsibility for their offspring, as most people believe. The combination of 'no fault' divorce and the new enforcement law has created a system that pays mothers to divorce their husbands and remove children from fathers."
Baskerville presents a convincing argument, well supported by research and other commentary. Quoting an article entitled "The Strange Politics of Child Support"; "By allowing a faithless wife to keep her children and a sizable portion of her former spouse's income, current child-support laws have combined with no fault jurisprudence to convert wedlock into a snare for many guiltless men." (Bryce Christensen, Society, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Nov.-Dec. 2001, p. 65)).
Baskerville adds, "This 'snare' can easily amount to a prison sentence without trial."
His work and commentary have captured the attention of the fathers rights movement. Dave Usher has been a leading activist since 1987 and served for nine years on the exectutive boards of the two largest fathers rights groups in America. He knows that political opinion has been influenced by false information and how difficult it has been to report serious problems with policies that effect fathers. Too few "researchers" who have witten about fathers and fatherhood actually did any research. "We need a few dozen more Baskervilles," he says. "He is a solid researcher."
Although there are many wrongs yet to be righted, the fathers rights movement does not face the extreme prejudice that it once did. Hundreds of organizations and conferences, loads of scholarship, and countless Web sites have sprung up over the past few years focused on issues of concern to fathers. Dr. Baskerville organized one of the first fatherhood conferences three years ago at Howard University. Conferences on fathers issues and fatherhood have been organized and supported by the Ford Foundation, the U.S. Department of Labor, the state of California, and other well established institutions.
Ironically, the Democratic Party -- the party that started the war against fathers in the mid 1970s is out to capture the male vote. Before they finalize their strategy someone should conduct a poll to see how many males age 25-50 want to be their own worst political enemies. With fatherhood knights like Stephen Baskerville around, father-bashing will not be as easy to get away with as it used to be.
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Roger F. Gay is the leader and lead researcher of Project for the Improvement of Child Support Litigation Technology, an R&D project focusing on the science, engineering, and application of child support guidelines.
That "premise" appears to be an artifact of some process which occurs in your mind. It does not appear in the article, or in my mind when I read it.
Such a premise would rely on the men being irrational, since women their own age are not in a position to change the laws to which the men object. Blackmailing twenty-something women would seem to be an odd way to effect legislative change about anything. It is legislators and judges, not people typically 20 to 30 years old, who will act to change these things, if in fact they change at all.
Perhaps things are merely as the article states: that a growing number of young men see the family court system as draconian and anti-male, and they are taking what steps they can to stay out of its gunsights.
Your own premise would seem to be that the 20-something women are in favor of these laws, and they are the power which keeps them in force. Otherwise you would not see emotional blackmail directed at 20-year-old women as a useful tactic either, and the thought would not have occurred to you. I think you might be on a different planet from these people. Check your star charts.
I've been married for twenty five years, so I know all about commitment. But, I tell ya', I know of a number of marriages where I think the woman is a saint to hang on. Mostly those are the marriages where the guy wants the woman to work, and do 90% of the housework, and 90% of the childrearing. And there's a heck of a lot more of those marriages than you care to admit. My own brother preferred a second income and expensive toys (boat, etc.) to the child my sister-in-law wanted to conceive. I suppose those would be chalked up as the woman's fault if she divorced.
Yeah, I know that there are a lot of women at fault, but your statistics are bogus. Statistics don't tell the whole story.
I have no idea what legislators and judges have to do with it. If people want change, they'll organize themselves into an effective force to effect change things. At least, that's how it has worked in the past in our own country, I don't know about Australia. Perhaps things are merely as the article states: that a growing number of young men see the family court system as draconian and anti-male, and they are taking what steps they can to stay out of its gunsights.
Or it could be that a new dynamic has formed from both sides in which marriage as we have known it is not attractive to either of them. Look, if people want to marry they'll figure out a way to do it. Obviously the non-marriage trend is a choice both are making. I don't think it is one sex or the other who is bottlenecking marriage. It's likely that both don't have the same incentives to marry they once did.
Your own premise would seem to be that the 20-something women are in favor of these laws, and they are the power which keeps them in force.
That is not my premis. However, to the extent that divorce laws keep people from marrying in the first place (and I'm not convinced they do) inequitable marriage and property laws kept women from marrying in earlier times. So, perhaps the pendulum has swung the other way.
In that case it would seem that inequitable laws may keep people from marrying, but the reason I'm not convinced is because people who are intent on marrying will anyway (and always have). Today they have the added option of setting their own terms and conditions (pre-nuptials, etc).
Also the author doesn't take note of the fact that divorce is no picnic, no matter what perks you might end up with. (And I don't think women consider having 100% responsiblity for the hands on care of kids as a perk ... it's hard work). Maybe people don't marry because they don't want to risk divorce. That would include women, who even according to the author, are having "relationships" with non-marriage inclined men, presumably not at gunpoint.
Also, he seems to be stereotyping women's motive for marriage as gold digging and men's motive in marriage as getting a iron-clad deal in which effort into the relationship in not required once the ink is dry on the paperwork. Overall, a pretty damned cynical marriage. The truth is even the best marriage takes lots of time, work and sacrifice, things for which few people these days have time or inclination.
Sweetiepie, trot down to your very own county recorder's office and take a look at the ownership of real property during "earlier" times. Notice how many names are female. Now, guess how much of this real property came to be in female hands (hint: it's one word, beginning with an "m" and ending with an "e" and has 8 letters). 
And lets not forget that divorce was NOT at all prevalent. IF they got property through marriage, it was usually after a death. You know, I'm sure it hasn't dawned on you, but some husbands actually WANT to provide for their wives after death.
sheesh
Basically there's two groups of people not paying their child support:
Group A - by far the oldest of the groups, they seriously pre-date the national guidlines, their scum and have deliberately and knowingly abandoned their children.
Group B - these are the men that have been cornered by a system gone mad.
I believe in helping group B, but anything that also helps group A is no good. Anything that denies the existence of group A is ignoring the truth of the situation. And the group B guys do have to keep in mind the effect their actions will have on the child. Kids don't understand money, they don't understand how much that check is, how much of a percentage of their father's income it is. What they do understand is that as long as that check keeps coming that means their father still loves them. What message is sent when the check stops coming. That's something that has to be considered by the father, it's not for the courts or you and I to decide, but it is something the father needs to think about.
I sympathize with the guys being forced to cough up the vast majority of their paychecks, but they aren't the whole story. And until you can aknowledge that you'll never make headway on the issue.
At that time there was NO enforcement of child support. None. It wasn't a crime punishable through any means. If you went to the courts the most they could do was send a letter reminding the person that they should be paying child support. The first support enforcement law we were aware of (working from faulty memory of childhood here) was in CA around 1985, but it didn't grandfather.
So when it comes to lessening the enforcement portion I'm mostly against you. Child support payment has to be enforced, there needs to be reasonable limitations, some sort of rollover period for unemployment (ala student loans, not applicable if you quit, doesn't cancel the debt just defers it, that kind of thing). They should definitely take a page from the IRS, deadbeats can't pay their child support from jail, garnishment is better than imprisonment.
Of course the guideline structure from the fed has got to go, not only is it not their jurisdiction but it punishes the wealthy. But to me these guidelines are only 1/3 of the issue, and not the important 1/3.
Why yes, death was the major reason for women to acquire property from marriage. The property was frequently split between the widow and the children with the widow getting the lion's share, and, get this, if a note was owing on the property, the bank could just go fly a kite; the property couldn't be taken to satisfy the note (in most cases). Men had a habit of dying much younger than their wives, so over several generations, women managed to hold a lot of real property.
It should be noted, at that time, land taxes owed couldn't be satisfied by taking the property; the title was placed in escrow and couldn't be sold until the taxes were paid but it could still be passed to inheritors.
Husbands didn't have to explicity provide for their widows in this way. It was without question that the widow and children inherited the property, not like to today. Having a hard time understanding your point.
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