About California NOW's Family Court Report

June 27, 2002

The California chapter of the National Organization for Women released a new report alleging that the California family court system is biased against women.

It is difficult to know how to follow that statement. Most readers have probably already reacted to it. You are laughing, pulling your hair out by the roots, or throwing your hands in the air and shaking your heads. It's something like a school of sharks complaining about the ocean because they might have to swim a mile to satisfy their feeding frenzy. Even with that effort, not every shark gets fat.

It should not come as a surprise that NOW's "research" fails to prove their central thesis: that the family courts are systematically biased against women. Nowhere in the report, in which they complain that women do not always get custody and children are allowed to spend time with their fathers, do they ever provide any research results. According to a Los Angeles Daily News article, over a three year period the CA chapter of NOW was able to get 300 women to their web site to complain.

"In response to this crisis the CA NOW Family Law Taskforce has proposed a Legislative, Judicial, Executive and Grassroots strategies to reform the Family Law Courts." Perhaps we should declare a national emergency and shut down the government because it rained somewhere.

"After significant research," the report begins, "CA NOW finds the present family court system in California to be crippled, incompetent, and corrupt." The media chose to deliver this message from an organization that has no credibility. We should not however falsely conclude that family courts across the country are not crippled and have not been acting in a way that indicates incompetence and corruption.

CA NOW complains:

The bias in the system results in pathologizing, punishing, and discriminating against women. The system leaves decisions which should be made on facts in a courtroom to extrajudicial public and private personnel. The system precludes the parties, particularly the mother, from her rights to due process, ... Mothers are coerced into stipulations through the rubber stamping of definitive evaluations and reports which become the court’s ruling. The present family law system in California exists to enrich attorneys and allied mental health and mental health professionals.

Substitute "non-custodial parents" (usually the father) in place of "women" and "mothers" and substitute "custodial parents" (usually the mother) in place of "mental health professionals." Do not bother localizing the problem to California. The revised result is well supported by objective research, thousands of pages of credible reports, testimony, and commentary; and will agree with the observations of millions of non-custodial parents throughout the country – men and women - over the past decade. In an illustrative case, Michigan lawyer Michael Tindall spent $750,000 and three years of his life getting preprepared court orders declared unconstitutional. He was stimulated to action after being tossed in jail for failing to pay an increased amount of child support even though he was never notified that the amount had been changed.

The system NOW is complaining about is one they helped to build. Statistically, women profit and men suffer in the new system because women most often get custody. That was the point. Following the no-fault divorce revolution that started in California when Ronald Reagan was governor, feminists started rumors that their economic suffering was much worse than men's following divorce. Never mind that it wasn't always true and overall not nearly so bad as they said. Men got hurt in divorce back then too. Their initial goal was to obtain guaranteed alimony for women regardless of the length of a marriage or any other mitigating factor. Those in economically sufficient relationships would then be able to live in the manner to which they would like to grow accustomed without having to bother with a husband. Failing to get public support they turned to the question of making child support profitable. You know: "It's for the children."

In 1975, Congress passed a new law creating the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement. Representatives from NOW and future presidential candidate Ronald Reagan were the only people who testified in favor of the legislation. Supporting arguments, that mothers were typically awarded amounts of child support that were too low, that non-payment of child support is a principle cause poverty, that men typically abandon their children to welfare, and that forcing fathers to pay would lead to billions in savings for taxpayers, all turned out to be untrue.

Nonetheless, with the help of NOW nearly an exact copy of Soviet Russian law ("The Wisconsin Welfare Model") became a center-piece for the national child support and welfare reform movement. The government system grew to a $4 billion a year bureaucratic Goliath with more than 60,000 employees. The reforms certainly did suggest an end to welfare as we knew it, replacing it with a grand scheme for intense and arbitrary en masse management of the details of personal economics and family life of mostly middle-class Americans. Accompanying this radical transition was a breakdown in the separation of power between branches of government, the elimination of the right of due process, and implementation of a system of financial rewards that encouraged state legislatures, local prosecutors, and judges among others to accept arbitrary and unconstitutional central authority.

Although the exact phrasing of NOW's complaints are biased beyond credibility, they do complain about the lack of due process in the system today. They also provide interesting insight into the corrupt financial arrangements that have affected federal and state laws and reduced the role of the judiciary to commune-style administration, unquestioningly subordinate to central political control. It is a bit disappointing however that the Pictorial Systems Map of Family Court Funding in their report excludes the feedback loop with NOW's multi-million dollar campaign contributions and their regular political work in support of the Democratic Party. It must be just that experience that provided the insight needed to explain how it works.

One wishes that the women of NOW could learn an important lesson about equality from their "research." Instead they complain that the system is not yet biased enough in favor of divorced and never married mothers, undermining the important case that needs to be made. A just society requires due process and equal treatment under law. Not all women get custody and those who don't tend to support the fathers' rights organizations that NOW spends five pages of their report complaining about. Since some men remarry there's another group of women who stand against NOW. It's beginning to look a lot like NOW does not represent all women everywhere and we are pretty sure that they do not represent most men.

Even if the women of NOW cannot learn the old lessons, the rest of us should mark the occasion. NOW gave birth to a vast experiment of hatred and selfishness intent on causing harm to the other gender. It has been enshrined in a thousand laws written by state and federal legislators, caused a collapse of our Constitutional system, and given rise to a state of corruption rarely paralleled in our nation's history. They are finally discovering that the adverse effects are also detrimental to women, an entirely predictable outcome. We are destined to see this cycle repeated endlessly unless we do just one thing. We must reinstate the Constitution as the fundamental basis of our rule of law. It is time for us to return to western civilization.

Roger F. Gay