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.
No, the words you used where your own.You're now disowning your own words I quoted?
But Roger, use another human emblem. Say, a father who protested in front of a statehouse; one who organized a rally; one who successfully got pro-father legislation through a courthouse.Amen. He's so wrapped up in the father's rights mantra though that any story will do and it's why he's looked upon as just another fanatic.
Using a cop-shooter as an emblem is like using an abortion-mill-bomber as an emblem for the pro-life movement.
Yes, the family court system is sexist and needs to be completely, totally overhauled.I don't see the "system" as being sexist. Some of the individual judges are. Society as a whole still views mothers as primary caretakers. But the "system" is not written for or against sexes. Ppl are even screaming to change the terms (at taxpayer costs) from non-custodial and custodial because they're adversary. They're terms for crying out loud. The only adversary's are the combatants and the lawyers edging them on for the dough.
The judge says it goes way beyond "minor inequalities," being unconstitutional and unlawful...What is unconstitutional about having parents support their own kids? Being that child support is state related and the constitution is federal, I don't see how you keep referring to it as unconstitutional in any event. But let's run with that...exactly where does it become unconstitutional to force parents to support their own kids? If that is unconstitutional, does that mean the right to have the state raise your kids free of charge is a constitutional guarantee? Since when? And since I'm the state taxpayer, what about my constitutional rights? What if I don't want to support your kids?
"hang on to moral values."And you're willing to tell all these good folk where and when we met that you would know me so well?
roflmao... as if.
Then follow your own advice and just ignore him.I never have followed the orders of ppl who thought they ruled the world too well. Does that bother you?
Go get 'em, Mrs. Drumbo. I've been having a similar argument with the men's rights crew for several months. You see, they think the only difference between mother and father is biological. They refuse to ackowledge any meaningful distinction of parental roles based on sex. What I want to know is why they think they are conservatives.
The system is sexist by virtue of allowing judges to implement that view over the reality of any given situation. Which is why my proposal, for parenting time to be divided post-divorce between the parents in such a manner as to nearly as possible echo pre-divorce arrangements, needs to be legislatively implemented ASAP.
But the "system" is not written for or against sexes.
Not accurate. VAWA, federal law, conveys the view that wife beaters are 2:1 more likely to pursue child custody in divorce. A falsehood which VAWA has hundreds of millions of dollars to propagate.
Parental roles? Where the role of one is to be absent? That is just nonsensical.
The role of both the father and the mother in their childrens' lives is to be with their children.
I swear, the artificial caregiver-provider model of the industrial age is a terrible thing.
I see your point but I come from the perspective of being the child in such a situation. And of course my generation has many peers in this regard. I've heard some bad stories about absentee fathers. The resentment at the father who moved away and started a new life, the anger at the father who wasn't around for years at a time, the awkwardness of the birthday card as the only means of communication with ones father, etc. I know there are plenty of good fathers who are getting shafted but still I can't quite jump on the bandwagon knwoing the pain caused by the bad ones. I would like to say it is just a few bad apples but it appears more prevalent than that.
I do feel lucky in regards to my own father. He chose to stay very close to us, making sacrifices he did not have to in order to be a driving force in our lives not just a part of it.
Hmmm, don't be so sure I know nothing about this subject. And I do not paint too broadly. What I am saying is that there is a profound difference between between a mother and a father. Western culture has always accorded different roles to fathers and mothers; this was the case long before the advent of the industrial age.
Again with the compliments.
I expressly state that I can't help you, and your poor deluded mind perceived it as an offer of assitance.
How sad.
As a single tear cascades down Don Joe's cheek...violin playing in the background.
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