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.
I what capacity, and on which side?
,,, precisely. Judges turn the law over every day. The most important possession these days is an agenda.
Michigan has a 12 point written guide that is required to be used to determine "best interest of the children" vis-a-vis custody determination.
Remarkably, they still routinely grant custody to women.
I guess we can only conclude that this is evidence that women are by far the better parents, since as we all know, the state would never practice bias or tokenism.
Stick around. You'll see "conservatives" argue that the above is "better than having society pay the costs."
I don't know monday, but I can tell you it doesn't cost me anymore than it did when we were all together.
LOL! You go ahead, think whatever you want. You might want to consider, though, that no one rolls out the big guns when he's only shooting fish in a barrel
At the rate the pro-feminist side's argument is withering on the vine, it won't be long before all that us normal folks need to invoke in response will be the "Let the 'pun'ishment fit the crime" doctrine.
Oh dear, it appears that we just crossed that threshold...
You're quite welcome. I learned my mistakes the hard way. Twice. After the second divorce, I became a hermit for nearly a decade. Went "out for coffee with the boys" several times a week, worked at home (career change after nearly dying after getting rear-ended at an intersection), and resolved that I was "off the market" for good.
Then I met a nice, sane, lady -- a Christian, and a schoolteacher -- and we became good friends. About a year later, we became "more than good friends" and we've been married for several years now.
The secret IMO is not to "date", but to marry someone who has been a genuine friend for a long enough period of time that you know that you like each other for more than hormonal reasons.
The quotes around the word conservative is no doubt correct if anyone calling themselves a "conservative" (why do I feel like Dr. Evil) thinks such injustice has a place in society.
Minime, Minime, where are you?
Bingo. They masquerade as "conservatives", when their real philosophy boils down to it being OK to allow a travesty to occur, so long as it's "anybody but me" that pays the price.
But not you and not me and not millions of others. I've been through it too and like you I pride myself in staying current on child support.
Some don't show up for hearings and then cry like hell when they get bit hard. They don't correct the mistakes that may have been made by the court because of their absence. These guys/gals moan the loudest and then go underground, working for cash and losing contact with their kids. Child support is a temporary cost but can cause permanent damage to a parent/child relationship if the parents do not act responsibly. The horror stories usually only occur when the paying parent neglects repeated payments. They accumulate a large balance that is subject to compound interest. It's all downhill from there.
The rules were in place before we took our respective plunges into fatherhood and we knew the perils. Everybody did. We had choices, keep it zipped, have 'em snipped or take our chances. If you decide to take your chances whining about the outcome is not allowed.
As for the non-custodial parents who are driven over the edge. They need tough doses of reality, they are slackers. It looks to me like this thread is attempting to give license to those who would forsake their own kids interests so that they may portray themselves as victims.
Yup, absolutely!
Same thing goes for custodial mothers who piss and moan about how "hard it is" to make do without child support. They married the bastards, so now they get to pay the price. If they don't like it, then maybe they should have used the aspirin-as-birth-control technique. It really works. no one ever got pregnant while holding an aspirin between her knees.
She played, and now she can pay. It's not rocket science.
If she needs more money to get by, then she can go out and get another job. No reason to have sympathy for some lazy slacker who refuses to provide for her kids just because she can't get a handout from some man.
/shoe_on_other_foot
By the way, as you know by now, some will drag out the names "woman-haters" or "misogynists" ASAP in discussions like this. Those some want the targets of such names to quiver and melt and surrender.
I'm glad that you and others don't.
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