While I respect your work, and this a really worthwhile tribute to a great man, Stephen Baskerville, can you tell me why you have chosen to make your focus on child support instead of on a presumption of joint residential custody?. It seems to me that while child support is important, and your expertise thereupon is undeniable, it is an issue which tends to push presumptive joint residential custody into the background, or at least into second place.
Which in turn feeds the perception---I believe mis-perception---that fathers care more about protecting their own pocketbooks than they do about gaining equal time to spend with their children.
[To R.F.Gay: ] can you tell me why you have chosen to make your focus on child support instead of on a presumption of joint residential custody?... feeds the perception---I believe mis-perception---that fathers care more about protecting their own pocketbooks than they do about gaining equal time to spend with their children. I agree with that, and had it on my list to write something similar. In response to #46 ("This should help clear things up") I went to the site and started reading the pieces. My first thought was, "Oh, sh*t." They are appropriate for soc.men or some other audience that understands the material in the context of the multiple fronts on which this struggle must be waged. But there is an "inside baseball" quality to it that I thought would come off poorly among those who are new to these issues... perhaps even to many on Mens News Daily. Someone who goes over there expecting to find would-be deadbeat dads hiding from their responsibilties will come away from those pieces thinking they have found such people. There's a fair amount of learning that has to take place concerning the ludicrousness of some of these state "imputed income" rules that end up impoverishing the poor bastards who are on the light side of the median income (arithmetically, half of them must be, yet we will impute no less than the median to all), before someone can understand what those papers are about. To the skeptic, they just sound like guys with SUV's trying to buy a new stereo instead of shoes for the kid. As a result, I don't think those articles are well-suited to a general audience. The intricies of that stuff do not lend themselves to sound-bite argument, which is all one is going to get in a general-interest forum like this. |