Fathers’ rights are still vulnerable
The ’90s were a bad time to be a father in California.
The O.J. Simpson case helped usher in draconian domestic violence policies that have victimized many innocent men. State-mandated mandatory/presumptory arrest policies exhort police to make arrests on domestic violence calls, and “primary aggressor” policies pressure officers to view men as the instigators of domestic violence incidents. As a result, many men have been arrested on flimsy evidence, or when they were acting to defend themselves against attacks by their female partners.
Nearly 250,000 domestic violence restraining orders are currently active in California. The State Bar Association’s Family Law Section complained that the orders are “used in family law cases to help one side jockey for an advantage in child custody,” and that they are “almost routinely issued by the court in family law proceedings even when there is relatively meager evidence and usually without notice to the restrained person.”
When an order is issued, the man is booted out of his own home and can even be jailed if he tries to contact his children. His first chance to defend himself against the charges is usually two weeks later, at the hearing to make the order permanent. The due process they afford the men can be gauged by the state of California’s advice for men contesting restraining orders:
“Do not take more than three minutes to say what you disagree with. You can bring witnesses or documents that support your case, but the judge may not have enough time to talk to the witnesses.”
Under a 1999 California law, these farcical orders can be used to deny these so-called “batterers” joint custody of their children.
In 1998, then-Los Angeles County District Attorney Gil Garcetti declared a “get tough” campaign against so-called “deadbeat dads,” sending out thousands of summonses.
Many of the summonses targeted the wrong men, and many never reached the intended parties. Eighty percent of Garcetti’s paternity judgments were made by default, locking men into 18 years of support. Many took DNA tests proving they were not the fathers of the children they now had to take second jobs to support. Others were assigned huge support arrearages by mistake.
Garcetti later acknowledged that many of the men had been mistakenly targeted but refused to relent, instead blaming the men for not responding within the 30-day limit.
In 1992, the California Legislature dramatically increased the financial burdens shouldered by fathers. Many child support orders doubled and tripled overnight, quickly placing California among the five states with the highest child support guidelines.
The legacy of this legislation is a permanent underclass of fathers buried under crushing debts. According to an Urban Institute study of California child support, the average arrears owed is $3,000 higher than the median annual earnings of employed child support debtors. Those in the poorest category have a child support debt amounting to their full net income for 7½ years.
In the 1996 Burgess ruling, the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of a custodial mother who sought to move her children 40 miles away from their father. The ruling was interpreted by California courts as a bright line rule mandating that courts permit moves of hundreds or thousands of miles. Under Burgess, many children were needlessly moved far away from loving fathers.
Today, however, things have improved, due to some legislative victories, common sense and the increased societal realization that kids need their dads. Child support enforcement abuses have been tempered by a 2004 law and the Navarro decision, both of which make it easier for falsely named fathers to vacate default judgments.
Burgess was declawed by the California Supreme Court’s 2004 LaMusga decision, which stressed that children’s best interests and their relationship with the noncustodial parent must be given substantial weight in relocation cases. Nevertheless, the family law system remains stacked against fathers. Most importantly, California law still does not do nearly enough to protect fathers’ relationships with their children.
Glenn Sacks is a columnist who writes on men’s and fathers’ issues. His Web site is www.GlennSacks.com. Jeffery M. Leving is a family law attorney. His Web site is www.dadsrights.com.
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June 19th, 2006 at 10:36 am
The Family Law Uncertainty Principal in California
What kind of Tijuana is this?
http://www.gndzerosrv.com/Web%20Pages/fl_uncertainty.htm
Jim Untershine, GZS of LB, 04-15-06
“In the sharp formulation of the law of causality – ‘if we know the present exactly, we can calculate the future’ – it is not the conclusion that is wrong but the premise.†(Heisenberg, in uncertainty principle paper, 1927)
There is a distinction between a guideline and a rule, a process and a racket, or a system and a railroad. When it comes to social policy, there must be a thorough understanding of the dynamics of a problem before a solution can be intelligently proposed. Social policy that is implemented based on an erroneous premise may not only result in ineffectiveness – it may just start a revolution.
The U.S. Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) reported child support arrearages of $84 billion across all states in 2000. The State of California leads the nation reporting arrearages of $15.8 billion, with Texas ($7.9 billion) and Michigan ($6.3 billion) trailing the national leader in ineffectiveness by less than half. The ineptitude of the CSE agency operating in California has been the focus of much consternation by those attempting to balance the State’s budget every year.
· 2000 – Federal law (USC 42 658a) is enacted by Congress, which specifies the state incentive calculations (USC 42 658 repealed). The new method allows States to double the collections that must be distributed last, which includes TANF, Foster Care, and ‘support obligations not required to be assigned’.
· 2000 – Policy Studies Inc (PSI) is paid by California taxpayers to conduct the “California Child Support Guideline Review 2001â€. PSI recommends no changes to the State’s child support awards and recommends: “the results from the Urban Institute’s study on child support debt be considered when released. It may provide further insights on the ability to pay in these presumed income cases.â€
· 2001 – Policy Studies Inc is paid by California taxpayers to investigate the State’s CSE accounting with the outcome reported by the LA Times: “Glowing report comes on the two-year anniversary of the state agency that collects court-ordered payments, whose amounts doubled on average per case”.
· 2003 – The Urban Institute (UI) is paid by California taxpayers to conduct the “Collectability Study†entitled “Examining Child Support Arrears in Californiaâ€. UI recommends: ‘California should consider the interest charges on unpaid child support. We estimate that 27% of California’s child support arrears, or $3.9 billion, was interest in 2000’ and ‘as far as we know, there is no priori reason for charging interest before principal. We estimate that if California reversed this order, it would reduce its arrears balance by 6% over a 10 year period’.
· 2005 – Policy Studies Inc is paid by California taxpayers to conduct the “California Child Support Guideline Review 2005″. PSI acknowledged the UI perspective: ‘The Collectibility Study identified the following three reasons for arrears growth during the 1990s: (1) support order amounts that were too high for low-income obligors, (2) incomplete enforcement, and (3) assessment of interest on arrears.’ PSI recommends, however: ‘No abundance of compelling evidence suggests that the basic guideline formula needs to be changed.’
Federal law specifies how collections by state CSE agencies must be distributed (USC 42 657) and demands that child support principal that accrued while not receiving TANF must be paid to the custodial parent first. The ‘priori reason for charging interest before principal’ (that seemed to allude UI) is the same reason that compelled Gray Davis to veto paternity fraud legislation – California seeks to maximize Federal funding regardless of the collateral damage incurred on the parents and the children who are forced to be victimized by the State’s lawless ‘money machine’.
“I believe that the existence of the classical ‘path’ can be pregnantly formulated as follows: The ‘path’ comes into existence only when we observe it.“ (Heisenberg, in uncertainty principle paper, 1927)
California has chosen to use ‘the path less traveled’ (compared to the law abiding States) by driving parents attempting to support their children to unemployment, which forces the custodial parent and their children to TANF, which allows CSE to keep the debt growing by discouraging payment, which will allow ‘welfare to work’ to help leave the children home alone, which will allow Foster Care to herd the children to same-sex households, which will allow the financially stable Foster parents to take a $10,000 per year tax deduction for each child (or even more if they request siblings). Although the parent who is originally targeted for collection will be forced to foot the bill for all aspects of their family’s destruction – the practice of distributing interest first, results in the taxpayers rarely seeing a penny of reimbursement, and the targeted parent from slowing the growth of the debt.
As a control system designer, who became a victim of employer discrimination due to Family Law proceedings and judgments (USC 42 666 b6Di), I immediately recognized a broken control system that needed my help. It took 3,448 days to baseline the Family Law process from unemployment to final hostage release. I am currently supporting all the children involved, my driver’s license has been suspended for the last 1,560 days, there is a wage withholding order filed against my self-employment ($2,718 per month), there is a wage withholding order filed against my brother’s business ($1,479 per month), and I have a warrant for my arrest for failing to seek employment which may force me to serve the remaining 3 months of a 6 month sentence for ‘Failure to Provide’.
I am currently billed for almost $230,000, which includes $1,200 per month interest, which is due to an alleged $144,000 back child support principal. Using the interest first disbursement system contrived in California – if I paid $1,200 every month to CSE for the rest of my life, my bill would never change, my children’s mother would receive $14,400 per year tax-free, CSE would somehow be allowed to claim a $28,800 child support collection every year to entitle them to Federal incentives, and my children and the taxpayers would never be entitled to a dime.
At least when a Tijuana cop pulls you over while driving in Mexico, he will only take your drivers license, or your car, or put you in jail if you refuse to give him all your money. In California they will also take your kids, your house, and your business, to allow them to rip off their Country’s taxpayers.
Jim Untershine, 3321 E 7th St. #1, Long Beach, CA 90804, (562) 856-4616, gndzerosrv@pavenet.net, http://www.gndzerosrv.com
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Jim Untershine holds a BSEE from Mississippi State University and has 13 years experience in feedback control system design. Mr. Untershine is currently using the teachings of Werner Heisenberg and Henry David Thoreau to expose Family Law in California as the exploitation of children for money and the indentured servitude of heterosexual taxpayers who dare to raise children in this country.
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