| I support a presumption of joint physical custody except where one parent can be proven unfit, defined as when a parent presents a danger of abuse or neglect.
This is an area of law where you have be really careful what you wish for, because there are ideologues and hungry lawyers standing by who will turn anything you do into more of what we have now. If that means a few hundred thousand more men are branded as child abusers so that we can continue to award sole custody to women, they could not care less. For the ideologues, this is all about hosing men out of spite and bigotry. For the lawyers, it's about keeping the system sufficiently biased toward women that they will continue to use the legal system as a club, which causes men to have to spend money on lawyers. If it ever came about that any legal struggle might be equitable instead of a slam dunk for the woman, women might decide to cool the jets on the lawyering. Both parties to the divorce would then spend less on it. The lawyers obviously don't want that. |
The key word in that proposal is "proven." For your proposal to work, "proven" has to mean "there was a trial, and the defendant was found guilty." The particular thing to be avoided is anything that would increase the now-epidemic tossing around of false allegations of domestic violence and child abuse. These are seen in so many divorce cases now that the judges know that most of them have to be B.S., but nothing is done about it. There just isn't time to check them out, so in accordance with policy, the man is presumed guilty.