Posted on 08/22/2002 6:45:01 AM PDT by RogerFGay
Another Man Down in the War Against Fathers
August 22, 2002
By Roger F. Gay
America's Most Wanted put it like this:
Catalino Morales is wanted for the attempted homicide of five deputy sheriff’s in Allentown, Pennsylvania and for failure to pay back child support.On Saturday, morning, December 9, 2000, eight deputies in Lehigh county Pennsylvania broke into Catalino Morales' home to serve an arrest warrant charging him with failure to make child support payments. According to the deputies, Morales barricaded himself in a second-floor bedroom and fired two shots through a closed door. He then shot out a back window, jumped onto a flat roof, and onto the ground where it is alleged that he shot at a deputy. The deputy returned fire but no one was injured. Morales escaped the immediate area.
Police say Morales then entered a house in the neighborhood and held a family of four hostage for several hours. The standoff ended when one of the residents managed to wrestle the gun out of Morales’ hands and Morales fled the scene. A massive hunt ensued, including search dogs, helicopters, and Allentown police; to no avail.
On the night of June 20, 2001 a SWAT team in Hartford, Connecticut surrounded Morales in a housing complex and shots were fired. No policepersons were injured in the encounters. Morales was hit by three of 25 police bullets, permanently damaging his hand and his leg and endangering the lives of the nearby residents.
He is a father. He is a man. He is allegedly behind in making "child support" payments.
It is unlikely that the child support system will be put on trial in defense of Catalino Morales, but it should be. Under heavy influence from a profit-driven collection industry the process of determining the amount of child support ordered and enforcement practices have changed dramatically within the past fifteen years. Political corruption is rampant and obvious not only to those who have studied the system closely but to many fathers who have been forced into subjugation by it.
Millions of men are treated arbitrarily and unfairly to a degree that compromises or destroys their chance to maintain themselves, let alone get on with a normal life. Many cannot do what the system requires them to do. Add to that years of harassment and threats from a long list of strangers, including half-witted pimple-faced high school drop-outs trying to collect to make a commission and female bureaucrats, possibly former welfare mothers, who revel in the opportunity to emasculate men. There is no escape, no reason. Every politician says so. Men and women with more power than moral character constantly remind them that this is what fatherhood is all about.
Then other strangers arrive with guns and invade their homes with the intent of taking them prisoner. They are experiencing the horror of a dictatorial police state.
Catalino Morales is one of many canaries in the child support coal mines. Year after year we watch the canaries die yet the workers are not allowed to leave. Those among us who have the opportunity to communicate are morally obligated to pass the word. This system must be abandoned as quickly as possible whether the masters wish it or not.
In the early 1990s, millions of fathers first experienced the suspension of constitutional law in domestic relations courts and the transition to enforcement of arbitrary en masse central political decisions. The new system seems designed to ruin men's lives. Decisions are arbitrarily based on statistical projections that have no basis in reality. State governments are encouraged to take as much from fathers as possible in order to increase the amount of federal funds they receive. "Public-private partnerships" formed with private collection agencies that benefit from higher child support awards and greater debt. Industry representatives control much of the policy making process, including the design of most formulae used in setting child support amounts.
With so many people involved, there has been a predictable variation in reaction to the change. The early 1990s saw the rise of the fathers rights movement, class-action lawsuits, a surge in the number of appeals filed against child support orders, and new national conferences on fathers issues. State and federal politicians were lobbied constantly to fix or abandon the new laws. Members of the Washington State Legislature received thousands of pairs of baby shoes from fathers trying to make a point.
There were also reports of increases in suicide and violence. The early 1990s saw news reports of the first of the early morning raids on communities to round-up hundreds of dads to cart them off to jail. It saw shootings in courtrooms, lawyers and judges taken bloody to ambulances, and fathers barricaded in their homes surrounded by police.
In Dallas, a lawyer representing himself in a divorce case pulled a semi-automatic weapon from his briefcase and opened fire. While one father was barricaded in his home threatening suicide if police came too close, he was telephoned by a reporter who wanted to turn the conversation over to a police negotiator. Feminist groups protested, saying the government must not negotiate with terrorists. News coverage on such incidents ended. Billions of dollars were spent increasing security in courthouses.
Despite the best efforts of ordinary citizens, the system got worse. Fathers rights advocates were largely cut off from making their appeals through traditional media that continued an enormous propaganda effort against the so-called "deadbeat dads." By the mid-1990s politicians were confident that the public couldn't get enough. Child support was on the political agenda in every election year. Politicians in both parties continually promised to make life tougher for fathers and passed law after law to do so.
By the late 1990s life had become so desperate for a few divorced men (in more than one country) suffering psychologically from the loss of their children and constant harassment that they took guns into day-care centers and held children hostage. Do you now understand how it feels, they asked before being gunned down by police snipers.
Due to the enormous weight of one-sided reporting on the child support issue, many people are still quite unfamiliar with the problem. It is easy to find people who believe that errors can be corrected and orders adjusted to circumstances by a quick visit with a family court judge or through some simple administrative process. They have been brainwashed into believing that men generally avoid what are presumed to be fair and reasonable obligations to their children. It is difficult for them to understand that millions of ordinary citizens are fighting for their survival in the midst of a constitutional crisis.
The Constitution of the United States and the constitutions of the states define a system of checks and balances. Unreasonable orders are to be corrected on appeal. Unconstitutional laws are to be overturned by the judiciary. These are necessary safeguards against harmful, intrusive, and corrupt government behavior. But during the past twelve years the system has not functioned as designed. Everyone in government connected with child support, including judges, receive financial rewards for maintaining the centrally planned system and courts and prosecutors have cooperated to an amazing degree. This has created a situation in which no legal remedy for arbitrary and oppressive orders and overly zealous enforcement measures exists.
Some orders are so high as to be life threatening. They do not leave the person who is ordered to pay with sufficient income to support himself. Lives have been lost. But to create the order is not enough. Once bound, the system constantly threatens and harasses fathers who are unable to meet their arbitrarily assigned "obligations." Just give the situation more than two seconds thought. If you do not think that the system caused Catalino Morales to fire a gun and run for his life you do not pass elementary applied probability. You do not understand humans.
Unless the corruption in the system is dealt with and those abusing power and influence arrested and jailed, there will be more gunfights and more men brought down in the war against fathers. Some will no longer have the compassion for life that Catalino Morales displayed. Their instinct to fight when threatened will win out over flight. They will aim at police before firing and not relinquish their weapons to hostages. We will all be guilty if we do not hold those responsible for the child support system as we know it today guilty of conspiracy.
Copyright © 2002 Roger F. Gay
Roger F. Gay is a professional analyst and director of Project for the Improvement of Child Support Litigation Technology. He has also been an intensive political observer for many years culminating in a well-developed sense of honest cynicism. Other articles by Roger F. Gay can be found at Fathering Magazine and Men's News Daily.
In the last century, they used the word "kulak". Stalin was more merciful, though. He simply had them killed, instead of sentencing them to life at hard labor.
So what you're saying basically is that instead of preventing the first problem, we should simply continue killing those it creates, i.e., the second problem.
Makes sense -- if you're a bounty hunter.
"Thank you, I do."
Having examined your traffic, I must say that I concur.
He answered your question in the only way it was possible to answer it in a rational manner.
Your question was tantamount to, "Where in the Constitution does it say that husbands can't beat their wives?"
When you realize you're dealing with someone who is having problems, you can't afford to lay down on the job. It was hard. He was having many, many problems, but I knew I didn't want my son to grow up without a father, warts and all. Child support didn't always come, and I had to freeze bank accounts and register with the Division of Child Support Enforcement. Had to get his attention a couple of times, and he has been out of the stockbrokering biz for a year now and working two part-time jobs to make ends meet.
I let him move in to the home I bought on my own after the divorce 9 months ago so he could keep body and soul together AND MAKE HIS SUPPORT PAYMENTS to our son. Our son is what's important here. I got another mouth to feed in him and another in his adorable 65-lb. Irish Setter. If someone had told me 35 years ago, I'd be living in sin, I'd have thought they were on the fifth ring of Saturn. Adults make good decisions for their children, and when one falls and can't, the other must. Son is doing well, Dad is on the mend, I hope, and me, well, you do what's right.
RGS tirelessly shot down every factual inaccuracy purported by ideologues who hate CPS and would use any vehicle they could get their hands on to shout their message. They chose poorly in the Christine case and had their innuendo, lies and misleaidng info shredded as only FR can do. The Christines did abuse their kids, got their day in court and lost both cases. The only joy he took was proving what liars many of the defenders were and that the Christine children were safe with their grandparents.
Now if you are in the camp that feels that it is preferable for children to be property of the parents as opposed to the state and that we must suffer child abuse as the price for having the liberty of raising children as a parent sees fit, I can sympathize but not agree with you.
But then again with this guy who shoots at cops and takes families hostage, I think you guys have another "champion" for the cause.
So in other words, when there is an ongoing rash of postal workers "going postal" -- so many in fact that the term grew legs and became a colloquialism -- it's sheer folly to try to examine why the Postal Service creates that many flipout cases?
I have a question for you. If you were ordered to pay a million dollars a month in child support could you? For some men $500 a month might as well be a million. They can't do it. They don't have the skills, the education, the work ethic etc.etc.
Instead they get cought in a cycle of falure that they can never escape. I agree that men should not have children if they are not prepared to support them but many do any way. If you corner a man and give him no hope of ever putting his head above water you can expect some less than desirable outcomes.
Its unfortunate but without hope human nature can create highly unstable people. It would actually be a kindness to lock them up and throw away the key.
But there are!
Women are told repeatedly that they should let the fathers visit with their children.
What exactly do you expect the courts to do? Surely you don't expect them to force women to do something they don't want to do!
I am sorry to hear the unbeleivible ordeal you have been put through. I love my parents but what my mother put my father through can only look good when compared to what my stepmother did.
So this is predictable and therefore partially justified?
Allow me to sum up the collective argument of all the left wing feminist "conservative" "men" who pollute these threads:
Shut up and take it. Shut up and pay. You play, you pay. A man has an obligation to support his kids. Stop whining and pay the damn money, you sick loser.
Oh, aren't we the droll one today, Lucy...
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