Another Man Down in the War Against Fathers

FatherMag.com ^ | August 22, 2002 | Roger F. Gay

[RogerFGay]

Another Man Down in the War Against Fathers

August 22, 2002
By Roger F. Gay

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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

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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.

[almostheaven aka MrsDrumbo]

Do you have any other specific/binding proposals you'd like to proffer?

Quite a lot, but it would take awhile to express them all. There is one NCP I mostly agreed with, to the point that I put his proposal on my own old CS site (Proposal submitted by Paleryder of alt.child-support). I submitted that same proposal to MAFIA Doc who posted many points against it at his own site (MAFIA Analysis). Would you be surprised in that I didn't agree with most of his analysis?

[almostheaven aka MrsDrumbo]

Such familiarity! Does Mr. Drumbo know of your obvious infatutation with Roger?

The names Mr. Drumbo has used in private for Roger's type are, dare I say, more personal and much more colorful. ;-)

[almostheaven aka MrsDrumbo]

That's the problem with no-fault divorce. These injustices must enter a custody equation. No-fault may work just fine where there are no children involved.

Exactly! I see ppl who want to bring back fault-based divorce exclusively and I can't abide by that one either. I don't think ppl should be forced to stay together absent fault. But it should be available for anyone who thinks they have enough proof of wrongdoing to have it considered in their divorce.

[Right To Life]

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FATHERS BILL OF RIGHTS

We hold these truths to be self-evident. That ALL parents are created equal. We declare that fathers have these inalienable rights:

I. To have equal decision making in every facet of the child's life, including religious training, health, schooling, and social activities;

II. To not be wrongfully stereotyped, due to our marital status, as "deadbeat dads", and treated like criminals;

III. To not have custody/visitation rights jeopardized by false and/or unproven allegations of abuse, a tactic which women's groups such as N.O.W. openly endorse;

IV. To have the opportunity to spend just as much physical time with our children as the mothers;

V. To participate in all major events in the child's life, including birthdays, holidays, schooling, and social activities;

VI. To choose 50/50 joint custody as an alternative to paying child support;

 

 And in situations where child support is to be paid, VII. To pay fair and reasonable amounts, taking ALL pertinent factors into consideration, and not solely based on a percentage of real or theoretical income;

VIII. To have the option of having child support issues decided by a jury, in conjunction with our Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial.

IX. To not be forced into poverty or have second families impoverished;

X. To have equal input in decisions regarding the manner in which the money is spent, and to have every penny of the child support money accounted for by the mother.

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Make a difference! CLICK HERE to enter Father's Rights!

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DISCLAIMER 

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[Home By Dark]

=>IX. To not be forced into poverty or have second families impoverished;


So, you want to go back to the past when men could create multiple sets of children, and just conveniently forget the earlier begetings, and concentrate on the current crop?

This is an indication of a caring parent?

[Right To Life]

... just conveniently forget the earlier begetings...

Hardly. The father should have "earlier" children live with him half of the time, and pay half of their bills. Ditto for his ex. He should not contribute to the standard of living of his ex; nor should he have his contributions to his children's financial needs determined by what income he could make.

[Home By Dark]

=>... just conveniently forget the earlier begetings...
Hardly. The father should have "earlier" children live with him half of the time, and pay half of their bills. Ditto for his ex. He should not contribute to the standard of living of his ex; nor should he have his contributions to his children's financial needs determined by what income he could make.

Let's say he has four families trailing behind him, and at least three kids at each stop...maybe a few illegitimate ones floating around the fringes. How would you handle this?

[GoLightly]

Good Lord, accountabilty is to be to the penny? How bout it being to the button or noodle?

I don't know how your family shops, but even your proposed joint account isn't going to give you "accountability".

Let me explain. A check is written on the support account at the grocers. Who's going to monitor to make sure that all of the food purchased with that money is eaten by the kids? Do we have the food in the fridge & cupboard marked? Does meal preperation include keeping the kid food seperate from other people living in the house? Do the kids get a different color toilet paper, does the household get a different bottle of laudry detergent for them, requiring their clothes get washed seperately. Since we need to account to the penny, can't divide utilities just by using a percentage of the cost of the household, can we?

Another check is written to a department store & several items of clothing are purchased. I can see people seperating their purchases into two piles, the kids & the other items pile, with each of them paid out of seperate accounts. Still, the wiley CP looking to beat the system can sneak some of their own personal items into that kid pile, so looks like you'd need to be given all of the receipts to go through, to get a "fair" accounting to the penny & even then, are you sure that each pair of jeans & shoes on that reciept was for the kids?

Looks like no McDonalds for these kids, as they don't take checks. Rummage sale items? Not for those kids, cuz they usually don't take checks either. Yes, there was a time when my husband & I were poor enough that the majority of our children's clothes were bought at rummage sales.

What if the parents disagree about items purchased? Say, (s)he paid $150 for one pair of shoes for the kid. Mind you, the kid needs shoes, but $150 for a pair? They don't *need* shoes that expensive (there are some teens that would argue against that position). Is there to be any recourse for an expenditure like that, which went beyond true need, but went to the child none the less? Do we get the court involved to resolve this difference?

Accountabilty in the manner you seem to want would give the right to micro manage much of the life of one parent to the other parent. It's not a fix. It's just adding another layer & I think divorce lawyers would just love it.

[Right To Life]

Same way. Joint residential custody and half the financial obligations with regards to all of the children that he fathered.

[Right To Life]

You know, if custody is joint, it is only major bills which are to be split anyway. Parents would pay for all of the ordinary items that you mention, out of their own pocket with no need to account for such to the other parent, whenever the kids were with them. Major items, such as medical/school bills, would be what would come out of a joint CS account; those things are large, and easily trackable.

[Right To Life]

The alternative, which would be for the government to decree how many children a person may have based upon their socioeconomic status, is unacceptably fascist.

[Right To Life]

The current lack of accountability allows CS to serve as backdoor alimony, which in turn is the cornerstone of the current corrupt system. How would you remediate that legislatively?

[GoLightly]

What about cases where one of the parents stipulates full placement to the other parent?

[Right To Life]

Any parent who doesn't want to raise their own children is a loser and unworthy of discussion.

[Right To Life]

Any parent who doesn't want to raise their own children is a loser and unworthy of discussion.

[Right To Life]

Any parent who doesn't want to raise their own children is a loser and unworthy of discussion.

[Right To Life]

Any parent who doesn't want to raise their own children is a loser and unworthy of discussion.

[Right To Life]

Hmmm...a post so nice it appeared four times?

[Right To Life]

So would you disrupt the continuity of care pattern that a child was used to if it meant primary-time custody to the father, in conflict with your presumption of maternal superiority?

[Right To Life]

How would this nation, families, and the social fabric be different if childraising was primarily done by fathers in nearly all cases?