The North Dakota Shared-Parenting Initiative: Trust Parents, Not the System
The weak arguments against North Dakota’s November shared-parenting ballot initiative offered up by HHS Executive Director Carol Olson and Grand Forks Herald columnist Lloyd Omdahl offer up the same misleading arguments we have heard for years: that divorce courts work perfectly, the “system†is all that citizens need, and social services has already saved the world.
They have proven only one thing: you cannot trust the social services apparatchik to do the right thing even where the need is intuitively obvious to everyone not bought by federal windfalls. If they had paid attention, 17,000 citizens in North Dakota would never have found reason to sign the shared-parenting ballot petition.
Carol Olson’s position is patently perverse: the only thing that matters is maximizing federal income to the state, even if it means senselessly destroying the lives of children and, indeed, fatherhood itself. She would replace good families and principles with an oppressive village bought by political payoffs. She cares only about maximizing federal revenues, pretending that decreases in state expenditures (and correspondingly federal entitlements) somehow represent a “loss†to the state.
In support of mass family gentrification, Omdahl pretends that replacing the destructive “one size fits all†approach, with a long-overdue legal standard requiring North Dakota courts to normally uphold parental rights in divorce, is somehow misguided.
A wall of writers and activists pinned the tail on this donkey. Dr. Stephen Baskerville, Don Mathis, John Maguire, Mitchell Sanderson, and Rob Port weighed in to prove the state sorely wrong.
While state laws often set forth a theoretical preference for “joint custody†when “parents cooperate”, the adversarial nature of the divorce process ensures this cannot happen in the substantive majority of cases. This inures to the financial benefit of trial lawyers and bureaucrats whose power and income magnify by customarily destroying one parent in divorce while leaving the custodial parent and children at the mercy of big government.
Every major study on the divorce proves that children who lack active paternal parenting and socialization do worse than their luckier counterparts. Problems such as teen pregnancy, truancy, suicide, gang involvement, and drug use substantively disappear when children have both parents actively and continuously involved in raising them.
States that order and enforce shared-parenting also benefit from the highest rates of natural child-support compliance: a fact that is anathema to bureaucrats stridently opposing the shared-parenting petition.
Women are often mislead into believing that sole custody provides the best financial outcome after divorce by maximizing the property settlement and child support. This illusion drives irresponsible divorce decisions in the first place and encourages the petitioner’s attorney to cause as much conflict as possible to assure the sole custody outcome.
Unfortunately, these traditional divorce court practices only ensure costly and painful litigation by good and responsible fathers who are astonished that the system would attempt to arbitrarily render them childless.
This perverse, traditional courtroom game conveniently maximizes fees for divorce lawyers, courtroom psychologists and “special advocatesâ€, maximizes federal funding to fix families broken by the system, leaves families deeply in debt, and destroys the possibility of cooperative parenting permanently. And, where this pre-scripted fight takes place behind closed doors, it is virtually invisible to everyone else.
With shared-parenting, mothers will no longer find themselves burdened with “doing it all†while begging for free child care and state assistance. Family financial resources will be optimized, children will be far less likely to be damaged, and child-support will finally be reasonably fair. Notably, these benefits are the precise reasons why social services agencies, lawyers, and anti-family politicians oppose the shared-parenting initiative.
The shared parenting initiative will do exactly what most of us non-bureaucrats know is best. It will protect children from bitter custody battles and ensure they do not take place unless a parent is truly unfit.
Assuring natural rights of children and parental rights in divorce will prevent the commonplace systemic wrongs which gave rise to the shared-parenting initiative.
Where history teaches that we cannot trust bureaucrats to reasonably protect parental rights, to shape a divorce system that does not customarily inject disagreement into divorce; and where shared-parenting is proven to assure the best outcomes for children, we must force the enactment of laws that trust parents in the substantial majority of family law cases.
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David R. Usher is Senior Policy Analyst for the True Equality Network, and President of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, Missouri Coalition
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Stumble It!
August 23rd, 2006 at 12:48 am
This is one of those situations where we are seeing a misuse of language.
North Dakota, or any state, elects not to do family law the federal government’s way. Thus
the federal government stops funding that state’s child support enforcement.
That is not a penalty, that is a PLUS!!!!
Fewer Treasury Notes we have to sell to the Saudi Royal Family. Less National Debt. Less federal spending. This is not a penalty!
With shared parenting a state no longer needs to commit the CRIME of Peonage against its noncustodial parents because they will no longer be noncustodial parents.
This business of calling a state’s decision to not accept federal funds by doing things its own way a “penalty†is a serious misuse of language. To wit:
If you quit your job at IBM, IBM quits paying you. Nobody every said that is a “penaltyâ€; it is the natural consequence of quitting a job. Everyone is free to quit their job under the 13th Amendment and the Antipeonage Act.
Likewise, every state is free to refuse federal funds.
To call such a “mandate†is to call it something it is not.
Everything child support enforcement does is a CRIME of Peonage anyway, 18 U.S.C. §1581, because such denies to the noncustodial parent the CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT to quit his job.
So why is the cessation of federal funding for a federal crime a penalty?
It is like calling the ocean land and calling land ocean.
The reason I keep bringing this up is passing the North Dakota initiative is only the first part of the battle. As long as the bastards and bitches retain their decision making positions, i.e. bar licenses, judges and commissioners, administrative law judges, state legislators, bureaucrats, county sheriffs, and so on, they will work to undermine any shared parenting law. It is their nature and it is what fills their rice bowls.
There is a reason the French Revolution used the guillotine.
Fortunately we have the Antipeonage Act.
The Shared Parenting Initiative offers a better deal for new divorces, and for preventing new divorces by leveling the playing field and causing some petitioners (most of whom are female) to reconsider.
But what about those who already have been fucked over by this insane system? How do we redress their injury?
By screaming for the enforcement of the Peonage Law. It’s a FELONY, stupid!!
Once we force, through the federal grand juries, the recognition that peonage is a CRIME, then restitution and the doctrine of unclean hands comes into play. You are not supposed to profit from your criminal behavior.
To get a fair hearing, we need to indict the bastards and the bitches who wear the black robes and clothed with the authority of the prosecutor’s office and the sheriff’s office for the CRIME of peonage. Those who replace them will hopefully not be clones with the same incentives as their predecessors, as they will recognize the Antipeonage Act is finally being understood by the public, including those who serve on federal grand and petit juries.
That is why we have to also scream for the enforcement of the Peonage Law.
Either we use the Peonage Law or we use the Second Amendment to obtain redress. Someone in Reno, Nevada has already used the Second Amendment against Judge Weller. I prefer the Peonage Law.
August 23rd, 2006 at 5:30 am
You know, the PETA folks and others are outraged by dog-fights, cock-fights, and the like. Well, divorce and child custody is essentially the same thing. Instead of back alley gamblers, we have government bureaucrats and Bar Associations cashing in by feeding at a similar trough using parents. They throw them in a ring, make them fight like hell over their children, then count the money they get from it. Just like the puppies or chicks losing parents to a sick greed, we have children in 21st century America suffering the same fate so as to not threaten the livelihood of these people.
The big difference between warring animals and warring parents is that, after the combatants are throughly bloodied, and the offspring are left to suffer the consequences, with parents they nearly always declare the female combatant the winner. They do this as a means to entice her into playing the game in the first place, because unlike dogs and cocks and fathers, women at least have choices.