Following ten years of welfare reform that was supposed to discourage unmarried childbearing and encourage marriage and two-parent families, these reports are perplexing news, indeed. Whatever the budgetary savings, welfare reform has failed from the standpoint of the family. The figures “clearly show that the impact of welfare reform is now virtually zero,” says Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, “and we are going back to the way things were before welfare reform” (qtd. in Wetzstein 2006).

It has been well known since at least the Moynihan report in 1965 that welfare serves as a disincentive to marriage and an incentive to divorce and unwed childbearing. Yet no explanation has been forthcoming for why cutting back on welfare has failed to reverse the trend. In fact, this failure raises far-reaching questions about our entire approach to what has become known as “family policy.”

As implemented thus far, welfare reform is unlikely to make a large difference and remains a step behind the problem. The continued rise in out-of-wedlock births no longer proceeds only from low-income teenagers. Indeed, in terms of this target population, welfare reform does appear to have had some impact. The NCHS reports that the birth rate among girls ages ten to seventeen dropped in 2005 to the lowest level on record. Births to unwed women in their late twenties, thirties, and forties, however, have risen and account for the now-record numbers. Inspired perhaps by books such as Rosanna Hertz’s Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice: How Women Are Choosing Parenthood Without Marriage and Creating the New American Family (2006) and Peggy Drexler’s Raising Boys Without Men (2005), or at least the subject of these books, these women are joining their low-income counterparts in moving beyond divorce to dispense with marriage altogether. Yet the children of divorce still almost double the 1.5 million out-of-wedlock births annually in the continued growth of single-parent homes. Given 4.1 million total births annually, this problem now touches virtually every family in America.

Because of these trends, the perception has become widespread that this seemingly intractable problem proceeds primarily from “culture” and that policy remedies are therefore pointless until the culture changes. James Q. Wilson throws up his hands and expresses the frustration and paralysis: “If you believe, as I do, in the power of culture, you will realize that there is very little one can do” (2002). Given such a response, the initiative will likely pass to congressional liberals who hope to roll back welfare reform altogether.

The George W. Bush administration’s approach seems to be predicated on this same cultural assumption. Programs to encourage “healthy marriage” by building “relationship skills” and inculcating methods of “conflict resolution” and “child behavior management” are largely continuations of programs conceived during the Clinton administration to “promote responsible fatherhood.” So far there is little evidence that these programs have any measurable effect on marriage or out-of-wedlock birth rates, and some observers question the wisdom of the federal government’s operating family therapy (but see Birch et al. 2004). Financed by a small portion of welfare funds, these programs arguably serve, like welfare itself, as a form of political patronage, increasing the client population on the public payroll.

Although the role of culture should certainly not be discounted, the problem is also driven by federal policies and funding that welfare reform did not remedy and may even have exacerbated. Once again we are faced with a question of incentives created by spending. Yet the problem has grown more complex than simply disincentives to work and family formation created by public assistance. Ignored thus far is how expanding welfare-originated entitlement programs have extended the subsidy on single-parent homes to the affluent. Moreover, the perverse incentives create perverse behaviors not only among the population, but also by governments.

[End excerpt]

Published in The Independent Review, vol. 12, no 3 (Winter 2008). To read the entire 22-page article, download the PDF here.

And yet I cannot, in good conscience, urge young men to marry today. For many men (and some women), marriage has become nothing less than a one-way ticket to jail. Even the New York Times has reported on how easily “the divorce court leads to a jail cell,” mostly for men. In fact, if I have one urgent piece of practical advice for young men today it is this: Do not marry and do not have children.

Spreading this message may also, in the long run, be the most effective method of saving marriage as an institution. For until we understand that the principal threat to marriage today is not cultural but political, and that it comes not from homosexuals but from heterosexuals, we will never reverse the decline of marriage. The main destroyer of marriage, it should be obvious, is divorce. Michael McManus of Marriage Savers points out that “divorce is a far more grievous blow to marriage than today’s challenge by gays.” The central problem is the divorce laws.

It is well known that half of all marriages end in divorce. But widespread misconceptions lead many to believe it cannot happen to them. Many conscientious people think they will never be divorced because they do not believe in it. In fact, it is likely to happen to you whether you wish it or not.

First, you do not have to agree to the divorce or commit any legal transgression. Under “no-fault” divorce laws, your spouse can divorce you unilaterally without giving any reasons. The judge will then grant the divorce automatically without any questions.

But further, not only does your spouse incur no penalty for breaking faith; she can actually profit enormously. Simply by filing for divorce, your spouse can take everything you have, also without giving any reasons. First, she will almost certainly get automatic and sole custody of your children and exclude you from them, without having to show that you have done anything wrong. Then any unauthorized contact with your children is a crime. Yes, for seeing your own children you will be subject to arrest.

There is no burden of proof on the court to justify why they are seizing control of your children and allowing your spouse to forcibly keep you from them. The burden of proof (and the financial burden) is on you to show why you should be allowed to see your children.

The divorce industry thus makes it very attractive for your spouse to divorce you and take your children. (All this earns money for lawyers whose bar associations control the careers of judges.) While property divisions and spousal support certainly favor women, the largest windfall comes through the children. With custody, she can then demand “child support” that may amount to half, two-thirds, or more of your income. (The amount is set by committees consisting of feminists, lawyers, and enforcement agents – all of whom have a vested interest in setting the payments as high as possible.) She may spend it however she wishes. You pay the taxes on it, but she gets the tax deduction.

You could easily be left with monthly income of a few hundreds dollars and be forced to move in with relatives or sleep in your car. Once you have sold everything you own, borrowed from relatives, and maximized your credit cards, they then call you a “deadbeat dad” and take you away in handcuffs. You are told you have “abandoned” your children and incarcerated without trial.

Evidence indicates that, as men discover all this, they have already begun an impromptu marriage “strike”: refusing to marry or start families, knowing they can be criminalized if their wife files for divorce. “Have anti-father family court policies led to a men’s marriage strike?” ask Glenn Sacks and Dianna Thompson in the Philadelphia Enquirer. In Britain, fathers tour university campuses warning young men not to start families. In his book, From Courtship to Courtroom, Attorney Jed Abraham concludes that the only protection for men to avoid losing their children and everything else is not to start families in the first place.

Is it wise to disseminate such advice? If people stop marrying, what will become of the family and our civilization?

Marriage is already all but dead, legally speaking, and divorce is the principal reason. The fall in the Western birth rate is directly connected with divorce law.

It is also likely that same-sex marriage is being demanded only because of how heterosexuals have already debased marriage through divorce law. “The world of no-strings heterosexual hookups and 50% divorce rates preceded gay marriage,” advocate Andrew Sullivan points out. “All homosexuals are saying…is that, under the current definition, there’s no reason to exclude us. If you want to return straight marriage to the 1950s, go ahead. But until you do, the exclusion of gays is simply an anomaly – and a denial of basic civil equality.”

We will not restore marriage by burying our heads in the sand; nor simply by preaching to young people to marry, as the Bush administration’s government therapy programs now do. The way to restore marriage as an institution in which young people can place their trust, their children, and their lives is to make it an enforceable contract. We urgently need a national debate about divorce, child custody, and the terms under which the government can forcibly sunder the bonds between parents and their children. We owe it to future generations, if there are to be any.

Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D., is assistant professor of government at Patrick Henry College and President of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children. His book, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family, has just been published by Cumberland House Publishing.

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Family law reformers must labor to create 50 campaigns to enact shared parenting in 50 state legislatures. But we labor in vain until we confront the federal funding. In essence, the federal government pays states to collect child support. How this works is complex, and the formula seems to change constantly (perhaps to prevent us from understanding it?). I have described the process in a paper just published by the Institute for Policy Innovation. But the essence is this:

• The more child support collected, the more money the state receives from federal taxpayers.
• The more children are forcibly separated from their fathers, the more money the state receives from federal taxpayers.
• The more mothers divorce their husbands or bear children out of wedlock, the more money the state receives from federal taxpayers.
• The more sole custody awards are granted, the more money the state receives from federal taxpayers.
• The more onerous the child support levels, the more money the state receives from federal taxpayers.
• The more money is squeezed out of every parent (or even any non-parent available), the more money the state receives from federal taxpayers.

Conversely, the argument goes (not entirely accurately), stable two-parent families and shared parenting mean a loss in revenue for the state. The government has created a machine for destroying families, an engine for generating fatherless children and making a profit in the process at taxpayers’ expense.

The result was seen starkly during the last election in the North Dakota Shared Parenting Ballot Initiative. Mitch Sanderson and the North Dakota Coalition for Families and Children toiled valiantly to collect signatures and successfully put the measure on the ballot. They received overwhelming support and little opposition, and the measure looked set to pass easily.

Then the federal government stuck its nose in. In an action that was certainly improper and probably illegal, HHS regional administrator Thomas Sullivan issued what amounted to an ultimatum to North Dakota. Threatening an ” immediate suspension of all Federal payments for the State’s child support enforcement program,” Sullivan explicitly pressured a state senator to take “whatever steps are necessary to ensure that initiated measures are not enacted.” A federal bureaucrat not only took sides
in a matter of state politics but marshaled the weight of his multi-billion dollar agency to intimidate voters.

The threat was hollow and little more than a scare tactic, but it worked. Bar associations and the media uncritically (and falsely) announced that the state would
lose $70 million. No one raised the issue of what permits federal officials to intervene in a state’s internal affairs and use its citizens’ own tax dollars to twist their arms.

Tackling this federal funding is more than just some nuisance that must be taken care of before we can approach state legislatures to pass shared parenting laws. It offers a huge opportunity. Right now we are fighting 50+ battles in 50+ jurisdictions. Addressing the federal funding will create what we need more than anything in this country: a national debate about child custody and child support. In Britain, Australia, and Canada, national debates have taken place on the front pages because they have national laws. In the US, we are fragmented into 50 states and are lucky to get an article inside the local news section. No one advocates federalizing family law. But we must confront
federal family policy and funding in such a way as to get the issues debated in a national dialogue on the causes of fatherlessness.

This is what RADAR are achieving with federal domestic violence funding. They have created a campaign focused specifically on the Violence Against Women Act – a destructive and unconstitutional law that federalizes and politicizes law enforcement, bypasses due process of law, and pays feminists to create a machinery for destroying families and separating children from their fathers.

We need a similar campaign to confront federal child support funding. Dedicated researchers like Molly Olson, Jason Bottomley, and Lary Holland have spent years investigating this system in depth. Now Dr. Michael Ross of the Family Rights Coalition of Michigan (info@frcmi.org) has begun a grassroots political campaign to gain the attention of that state’s legislators. Ross wants leaders in other states to create similar campaigns and link them up into a national movement.

Here in Washington, the American Coalition for Fathers and Children has organized a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt, endorsed by the leaders
of 14 prominent national organizations, including Phyllis Schlafly, Susan Carleson, and Grover Norquist (and more are expected). The signatories represent both pro-family advocates concerned about the continued erosion of marriage and taxpayer watchdog groups who object to the escalating costs of subsidizing single-parent homes.

Again, this is not an additional political burden. It is an avenue to make your group part of a national campaign. It is also an opportunity to create a coalition not only with “pro-family” groups but also with taxpayer groups, who can be very influential both locally and nationally. The only way to defeat the divorce machinery is to create coalitions with allied interests. An abuse that hits all Americans in their pocketbooks is one that can gain attention.

Stephen Baskerville is president of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children (www.acfc.org) and author of the paper, “Welfare and the ‘Road to Serfdom,’” just published by the Institute for Policy Innovation. His book, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family will be published in August by Cumberland House Publishing.

Moreover, it is not called the welfare “state” for nothing. For unnoticed by reformers has been a startling development that is far more serious than even the devastating economic effects. This is the quiet metamorphosis of welfare from a simple system of public assistance into nothing less than a miniature penal apparatus, replete with its own system of courts, prosecutors, police, and jails: juvenile and “family” courts, “matrimonial” lawyers, child protective services, domestic violence units, child support enforcement agents, and more. This kafkaesque machinery operates by its own rules, largely outside the constitutional order, and represents the fulfillment of Friedrich von Hayek’s prophecy that socialism would eventually take us down a “road to serfdom.”

The first step in the mission creep transforming public assistance into bureaucratic tyranny was the extension of welfare operations beyond the needy. Having shut the front door to welfare abuse among low-income recipients, reformers have left the back door wide open, with welfare-originated programs quietly expanded to serve the middle class.

The prime example is child support enforcement, which grew directly out of welfare. Despite sanctimonious rhetoric about being “for the children,” the original aim was not to provide for children but to recover welfare costs; no other constitutional justification exists for this federal plainclothes police force. The program was begun exclusively for families on welfare and was to be applied to willfully absent parents who had abandoned their parental responsibilities to their children, leaving them dependent on public assistance to satisfy basic needs.

During the 1980s and 1990s – with no public debate, justification, or explanation – federal enforcement machinery conceived and created to address the minority of children in poverty was expanded (under bureaucratic and feminist pressure) to cover During the 1980s and 1990s – with no public debate, justification, or explanation – federal enforcement machinery conceived and created to address the minority of children in poverty was expanded (under bureaucratic and feminist pressure) to cover all child support cases, including the vast majority not receiving welfare. Unlike Temporary Assistance to Needy Families and virtually every other welfare program, child support enforcement is not means tested; indeed, there are no limitations or eligibility requirements at all.

This vastly expanded the size of the program and continues to do so by bringing in millions of middle-class divorce cases, for which the system was never intended. Unlike the welfare-related cases, where it is almost impossible to collect from impecunious young inner-city fathers, the divorced fathers have deeper pockets to mine. By padding their roles with millions of middle-class cases, states found they could collect a huge windfall of federal incentive payments at taxpayers’ expense. As Lary Holland and Jason Bottomley write:

The federal guidelines wanted the states to function as a collection agency…from parents who had willfully abandoned their parental responsibilities to their children. The result, however, was different from the intent and has caused the state welfare programs…to collect from willing parents that would ordinarily provide a loving environment for their children absent a court order limiting their involvement. Despite the original intent of the IV-D welfare program, it now provides an incentive for the states to use their courts to produce forcibly absent parents in order to increase the states’ IV-D welfare caseload.¹

The non-welfare cases now dwarf the welfare cases. Recent figures show that welfare cases, consisting mostly of unmarried parents, account for 17% of all child support cases, and the proportion is shrinking. The remaining 83% of non-welfare cases consist largely of previously married fathers who are usually divorced involuntarily and who generally can be counted on to pay. These non-welfare cases currently account for 92% of the money collected.²

Promoted as a program that would reduce government spending, federal child support enforcement has incurred a continuously increasing deficit. “The overall financial impact of the child support program on taxpayers is negative,” the House Ways and Means Committee reports. Taxpayers lost $2.7 billion in 2002.³

This money does not vanish. It ends up in state coffers, for whom it constitutes a lucrative source of revenue. “Most States make a profit on their child support program,” according to Ways and Means, which notes that “States are free to spend this profit in any manner the State sees fit.”⁴ Federal taxpayers subsidize state government operations through child support, and every fatherless child is an additional source of revenue for state governments.

In addition to penalties and interest on arrearages, states profit through incentive payments based on the amount collected, as well as receiving 66% of operating costs and 90% of computer costs.⁵ (When two states collaborate, both states qualify for the incentive payment as if each state had collected 100% of the money.) Federal outlays of almost $3.5 billion in 2002 allowed Ohio to collect $228 million and California to collect over $640 million.⁶ “There is a $200 million per year profit motive driving this system” in Michigan alone, attorney Michael Tindall points out. “It dances at the string of federal money.” ⁷

To collect these funds states must channel child support payments through their criminal enforcement machinery, criminalizing divorced parents and allowing the government to claim its perennial crackdowns are increasing collections despite the federal program operating at a consistent loss. In January 2000, HHS Secretary Donna Shalala announced that “the federal and state child support enforcement program broke new records in nationwide collections in fiscal year 1999, reaching $15.5 billion, nearly doubling the amount collected in 1992.” ⁸ Yet these figures are not what they appear.

In simple accounting terms, the General Accounting Office (GAO), which accepts at face value all the official HHS assumptions and data for what is “legally owed but unpaid,” found that as a percentage of what it claims is owed, child support collections actually decreased during this period. “In fiscal year 1996, collections represented 21% of the total amount due but dropped to 17% of the total due in fiscal year 2000,” writes GAO. “As a result, the amount owed at the end of the period is greater than the amount owed at the beginning of the period.” ⁹

Yet there is a more fundamental and much more consequential sense in which HHS’s claims of success are smoke-and-mirrors.

The ambiguity is “collections.” When we hear of collections through enforcement agencies we assume it involves arrearages or targets those who do not otherwise pay and whose compliance must be “enforced.” Yet in 1992 most child support was still being paid directly from one parent to the other, without accounting by the state. Criminal enforcement methods were limited mostly to the low-income welfare cases for which it was originally created. Increasingly since then, however, all child support payments – including current ones – have been routed through criminal enforcement programs by automatic wage withholding and other coercive measures which presume criminality. Low-income welfare-related cases (where collection is difficult) have remained steady, while non-welfare cases (where compliance is high) continue to increase.¹⁰ The “increase” in collections was achieved not by collecting the alleged arrearages built up by poor fathers already in the criminal collection system but by bringing more employed middle-class fathers, who faithfully pay, into it.¹¹

Federal auditors have pointed out that federal child support enforcement has been diverted from its original purpose of serving a welfare constituency to serve as a collection agency for the affluent, with “about 45% reported incomes exceeding 200% of the poverty level and 27% reported incomes exceeding 300%”: “The rate at which child support services are being subsidized appear inappropriate for a population that Congress may not have originally envisioned serving.”¹² Federal taxpayers are funding government collection machinery comprising some 100 public services – including wage-withholding, caseworkers, help desk workers, county attorneys, monthly invoicing, tracking debits and credits, asset seizure, free court costs, and a plethora of collection and enforcement services – not for public welfare cases but for what are supposed to be private civil divorce cases, where private remedies are available.¹³

One enforcement agency director openly acknowledged that the Clinton administration was twisting what had originally been a welfare-designed system to an entitlement serving the affluent in order to encourage profiteering by state governments. Testifying before Congress, Leslie Frye, Chief of California’s Office of Child Support, acknowledged that the administration moved “far beyond the Congressional intent” in developing an incentive system that “in fact encourages states to recruit middle-class families, never dependent on public assistance and never likely to be so, into their programs in order to maximize federal child support incentives.” Concerned that California could lose out under the new formula, Frye lays out the incentive structure with startling candor:

• …the proposal also changes the way collections are counted for incentive purposes in a manner that is contrary to the principles underlying the PRWORA and that will lead to financial pressures on states to expand their Child Support Enforcement Programs to encompass all cases in the state, including those families who have never had to interact with government in order to pay or receive child support. Indeed, those states which already have near-universal government programs for child support will receive huge windfalls of incentives under the proposal, while states which historically concentrated on poor and near-poor families will lose federal incentive revenue, compared to the current system.

In other words, the administration was stretching congressional intent (and already questionable constitutional authority) to allow profiteering by states. The changes pressured states to expand their programs: “By recruiting ‘never welfare’ families into the IV-D program, we too could benefit from earning incentives on collections for middle class families, which generally are easier to make and higher than collections for poor families,” Frye pointed out. “From a public policy point of view, however, we think this is wrong. We believe that Congress did not contemplate…creating a universal Child Support Enforcement Program.”¹⁴ It is difficult not to conclude that the policy changes had little to do with improving the efficiency of collections, since collection could not and did not improve; indeed, as Frye points out, states that worked to improve their welfare collections, no matter how effectively, could not help but lose in the competition with states that simply increased their collection accounts by bringing in more affluent payers: “Mixing the issue of removing the limit on ‘never welfare’ collections with the performance-based incentive system skews the results so that some states, notably those with near-universal child support programs, would receive more incentives for poorer performance, while states with greater proportions of welfare or former welfare families in their caseloads may not ever be able to earn incentives at the current rate, no matter how well they perform.” The purpose of the changes, as Frye suggests, is simply to expand the size of the federal machinery far beyond what Congress intended.

At least three serious adverse results proceed from this transformation of the welfare system:

• Cost to taxpayers
• Subsidy on family breakup and fatherless children
• Criminalization of parents

Cost to Taxpayers

As noted, child support enforcement was originally justified and federalized to save taxpayers’ money by recovering welfare costs. Yet it has incurred a steadily increasing deficit, amounting to $2.7 billion in 2002. “Even amidst cutbacks by the federal government for entitlement block grants and restrictions on the use federal incentive dollars as matching funds, the states’ standing remains to gain billions in funding by including more and more of the middle-class in their welfare programs.” ¹⁵

Cost to the Taxpayer of the Child Support Enforcement Program

Yet this is only the surface, ignoring indirect administrative and other costs. Arguably this abuse may be costing taxpayers (federal, state, and local) tens of billions of dollars annually. Assistant HHS Secretary Wade Horn argues that most of the $47 billion spending in his department is necessitated by broken homes and fatherless children.¹⁶ Further, given the social costs Dr. Horn and others have demonstrated to be connected with fatherless homes – including crime, truancy, drug abuse, unwed teen pregnancy, and more – it is reasonable to see tens of billions of dollars expended in law enforcement and education programs as among the costs. Most strikingly, the law enforcement and criminal justice systems are diverted from their original purpose of protecting society from violent criminals to criminalizing non-violent parents and keeping them apart from their children.

Subsidy on Family Breakup and Fatherless Homes

Child support is usually justified as providing for fatherless children. Yet there are indications that it serves as a taxpayer-funded subsidy on such children, providing an incentive for both mothers and states to remove more children from their fathers. How welfare has exercised this effect on low-income communities has been well known for decades. Child support creates a similar same effect on the middle class.

Because of IV-D funding, states must designate an active, present parent as “absent,” even when both parents are fit, willing, and able to care for their children. These incentives drive courts to rule that a child’s “best interest” is to have limited contact with one parent in order to conform to the Title IV-D model of custodial and non-custodial instead of two custodial parents.

Further, child support creates an economic incentive for mothers (who file most divorces) to break up their families. Robert Willis calculates that child support levels exceeding the cost of raising children creates “an incentive for divorce by the custodial mother.” His analysis indicates that only between one-fifth and one-third of child support payments are actually used for the children; the rest is profit for the custodial parent. “We believe that this recent entitlement,” write two other scholars, “…has led to the destruction of families by creating financial incentives to divorce [and] the prevention of families by creating financial incentives not to marry upon conceiving of a child.”¹⁷ This simply extends well-established findings that increased welfare payments result in increased divorce.¹⁸ In this case, however, a dimension of law enforcement is added, which becomes effectively a system of federal divorce enforcement. ” Enforcement…is the critical variable in the choice dilemma because it represents a greater surety in the assessment of the probability of attaining rewards,” write Folse and Varela-Alvarez. “Strong enforcement, while it is an agreed upon societal goal to protect children, may, in fact, lead to class-based micro-level decisions that lead to the unintended consequence of increasing the likelihood of divorce.”¹⁹ In other words, a mother can escape the uncertainties, vicissitudes, and compromises inherent to life shared with a working husband by divorcing, whereupon she acquires the police as a private collection agency who will force him, at the point of a gun if necessary, to pay her the family income that she then controls alone. At a time when the government is creating new federal programs ostensibly to strengthen marriage, it is operating a program that is working directly contrary to that aim. Bryce Christensen points to “evidence of the linkage between aggressive child-support policies and the erosion of wedlock.” “Because the politicians who have framed such [child support] policies have done nothing to reinforce the social ideal of keeping children in intact families,” he explains, “they have – however unintentionally – actually reduced the likelihood that a growing number of children will enjoy the tremendous economic, social, and psychological benefits which the realization of that ideal can bring.”²⁰

This has created an administrative regime where child support is no longer primarily a system of requiring men to take responsibility for the offspring they have sired and then abandoned, as the public has been led to believe; overwhelmingly child support is now a system whereby “a father is forced to finance the filching of his own children.”²¹ “By allowing a faithless wife to keep her children and a sizable portion of her former spouse’s income,” writes Christensen, “current child-support laws have combined with no-fault jurisprudence to convert wedlock into snare for many guiltless men.” ²²

Criminalization of Parents

To collect federal incentive payments, states must channel all child support payments through their criminal enforcement machinery – not just delinquent payments but current payments, thus subjecting law-abiding citizens to criminal enforcement measures. Private domestic relations matters are being unnecessarily criminalized even when there is no support problem and the non-custodial parent pays consistently. State agencies place all divorced people in the criminal machinery regardless of need or circumstance, because the more clients in the program, the more federal funding the agency receives.

Though most of these fathers were actively involved in raising their children – indeed, they often clamor for more time with them – these fathers had to be designated as “absent” in order to fit into the welfare model, with the unstated stigma that they had “abandoned” their children when clearly they had done no such thing.

The federal funding also supplies an added incentive both to make guidelines as onerous as possible and to squeeze every dollar from every parent available (as well as to turn as many parents as possible into obligors by providing financial incentives for mothers to divorce). “From 1989 to 1998,” writes Georgia assistant district attorney William Akins, “the federal government provided welfare and collection incentive funds to the states based on the gross amount of the total child support payments recovered from non-custodial parents, thus creating a corresponding incentive to establish support obligations as high as possible without regard to appropriateness of amount.”²³ This has led to what Robert Seidenberg describes as “a windfall of income for middle-class and upper-middle-class divorced women.”²⁴ Thus the impossible burdens that plunder and criminalize otherwise law-abiding parents and the heavy-handed criminal enforcement measures against plainly innocent people that are now too becoming conspicuous to ignore.

Amid the near-hysteria that has been generated on the subject of unpaid child support and “deadbeat dads,” the fact remains that no such problem has ever been demonstrated. While it is obligatory, when offering the mildest criticism of the child support system, to state that “some” fathers no doubt do fail to provide for their children, there is simply no scientific evidence that there is or ever has been a widespread problem of fathers abandoning their children and not paying child support. No government or academic study has ever documented such a problem. Prior to the creation of the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) and throughout its 31-year history, no study has ever been conducted on the reason for its existence. Indeed, several federally funded studies have come to the conclusion that no such problem exists, and a full-scale government-sponsored study was cancelled by OCSE when an earlier pilot study threatened to undermine the justification for the agency’s existence by demonstrating that nonpayment of child support was not a serious problem.²⁵

Further, our awareness of this alleged problem has come entirely from government sources. No public outcry ever preceded the creation of enforcement machinery; nor has any public discussion ever been held in the media. In fact, no public perception of such a problem even existed until public officials began saying it did.

In light of the facts above, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the public has been seriously misled by a kind of optical illusion. What we have been told is an epidemic of irresponsible fathers is in reality a serious abuse of power by the government.

Footnotes

1.Lary Holland and Jason Bottomley, “How Federal Welfare Funding Drives Judicial Discretion in Child-Custody Determinations and Domestic Relations Matters,” North Country Gazette, 28 February 2006 (http://www.northcountrygazette.org/articles/022806SSAndCustody.html).

2. Child Support Enforcement (CSE) FY 2002 Preliminary Data Report, 29 April 2003 (http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cse/pubs/2003/reports/prelim_datareport/), figures 1 and 2.

3. 2003 Green Book, House of Representatives, Ways and Means Committee, WMCP: 108-6,section 8, p. 8-69 and table 8-5 (http://waysandmeans.house.gov/media/pdf/greenbook2003/Section8.pdf).

4. 1998 Green Book, House of Representatives, Ways and Means Committee Print, WMCP:105-7, U.S. Government Printing Office Online via GPO Access, section 8: Child Support Enforcement Program (http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/useftp.cgi?IPaddress=162.140.64.21&filename=wm007_08.105&directory=/disk2/wais/data/105_green_book;

5. Report to the House Of Representatives Committee on Ways And Means and the Senate Committee on Finance: Child Support Enforcement Incentive Funding (Washington, DC: Department of Health and Human Services, February 1997).

6. 2003 Green Book, table 8-4.

7. C. Jesse Green, interview with Michael E. Tindall, Michigan Lawyers Weekly (http://www.michiganlawyersweekly.com/loty2000/tindall.htm; no date, accessed 1 May 2002).

8. HHS press release, 27 January 2000.

9. Child Support Enforcement: Clear Guidance Would Help Ensure Proper Access to Information and Use of Wage Withholding by Private Firms (Washington, DC: General Accounting Office, GAO-02-349, March 2002), p. 7.

10, FY 1998 Preliminary Data Report (Washington: Office of Child Support Enforcement, May 1999), figure 2, p. 35; Child Support Enforcement: Effects of Declining Welfare Caseloads Are Beginning to Emerge (Washington, DC: General Accounting Office, GAO/HEHS-99-105, 1999), pp. 7-8.

11. At the same time as the Clinton administration was touting its success, the Ways and Means Committee was arriving at a very different conclusion. “In 1978, less than one-fourth of child support payments were collected through the IV-D [welfare] program. This percentage, however, has increased every year since 1978. By 1993, more than two-thirds (67%) of all child support payments were made through the IV-D program. The implication of this trend is that the IV-D program may be recruiting more and more cases from the private sector, bringing them into the public sector, providing them with subsidized services (or substituting Federal spending for State spending), but not greatly improving child support collections. Whatever the explanation, it seems that improved effectiveness of the IV-D program has not led to significant improvement of the nation’s child support performance.” 1998 Green Book, section 8.

12. Jane L. Ross, Child Support Enforcement: Opportunity to Reduce Federal and State Costs (Washington, DC: General Accounting Office, Report # GAO/T-HEHS-95-181), 13 June 1995, pp. 5-6.

13.Molly Olson, “Title IV-D: Child Support Collection and Enforcement, Welfare Service Program,” (Roseville, Minnesota: Center for Parental Responsibility, March 2006).

14. “Statement of Leslie L. Frye, Chief, Office of Child Support California Department of Social Services

Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Human Resources of the House Committee on Ways and Means,

Hearing on the Administration’s Child Support Enforcement Incentive Payment Proposal, March 20, 1997” (http://waysandmeans.house.gov/legacy/humres/105cong/3-20-97/3-20frye.htm), pp. 1-2.

15. Holland and Bottomley, “How Federal Welfare Funding Drives Judicial Discretion.”

16. “Wedded to Marriage,” National Review Online, 9 August 2005 (http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/horn200508090806.asp).

17.Robert J. Willis, “Child Support and the Problem of Economic Incentives,” p. 42, and Robert A. McNeely and Cynthia A. McNeely, “Hopelessly Defective: An Examination of the Assumptions Underlying Current Child Support Guidelines,” p. 170; both in William S. Comanor (ed.), The Law and Economics of Child Support Payments (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2004).

18.Saul Hoffman and Greg Duncan, “The Effects of Incomes, Wages, and AFDC Benefits on Marital Disruption,” Journal of Human Resources 30 (1995), pp. 19–41; Lowell Gallaway and Richard Vedder, Poverty, Income Distribution, the Family and Public Policy (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1986), pp. 84-89.

19. Kimberly Folse and Hugo Varela-Alvarez, “Long-Run Economic Consequences of Child Support Enforcement for the Middle Class,” Journal of Socio-Economics, vol. 31, no. 3 (2002), pp. 274, 283, 284.

20. Bryce Christensen, “The Strange Politics of Child Support,” Society, vol. 39, no. 1 (November-December 2001), pp. 67, 63.

21. Jed H. Abraham, From Courtship to Courtroom: What Divorce Law Is Doing to Marriage (New York: Bloch, 1999), p. 151.

22. Christensen, “Strange Politics of Child Support,” p. 65 (original emphasis).

23. William C. Akins, “Why Georgia’s Child Support Guidelines Are Unconstitutional,” Georgia Bar Journal, vol. 6, no. 2 (October 2000), pp. 9-10.

24. Robert Seidenberg, The Father’s Emergency Guide to Divorce-Custody Battle (Takoma Park, Maryland: JES, 1997), pp. 107-108; Irwin Garfinkel and Sarah McLanahan, Single Mothers and Their Children, A New American Dilemma (Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, 1986), pp. 24-25. Christensen also found “windfalls to the custodial parents.” “Strange Politics of Child Support,” p. 66.

25. S.L. Braver, P.J. Fitzpatrick, and R. Bay, “Adaption of the Non-Custodial Parents: Patterns over Time,” paper presented at the conference of the American Psychological Association, Atlanta, Georgia, 1988; F.L. Sonenstein and C.A. Calhoun, “Determinants of Child Support: A Pilot Survey of Absent Parents,” Contemporary Policy Issues 8 (1990); Carmen D. Solomon, The Child Support Enforcement Program: Policy and Practice, Congressional Research Service, 8 December 1989, pp. 1-3.

About the Author

Stephen Baskerville is a fellow at the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society and president of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children. His book, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family will be published in July by Cumberland House Publishing.”

This article was originally published at ipi.org

Denuncia “guerra” contra la paternidad y la familia
Vivian Maldonado Miranda
entrevistas@elvisitante.biz

Since a decision of Puerto Rico’s Supreme Court established in the Island the “mutual agreement divorce”, spouses do not need to give an explanation or reason for divorcing. Also by jurisprudence, when both parents are equally able to raise the child, the custody is given solely to the mother, rather than joint custody.

On the other hand, Puerto Rico’s domestic violence law, in an effort to protect woman, establishes that an accused man should be arrested, making him, at least in practice, guilty before the judgment. It is said that there are woman making false accusation against men in an effort to separate them from their children. Also, it is said that the law against child maltreatment focuses more on the rehabilitation of the abusive parent – especially when the abusive parent is the mother – than on the child’s well being.

Now, there are two bills for introducing joint custody as the first option in divorce cases. Both faced the opposition of the main governmental agencies.

At the same time, the Civil Code has been revised. The draft proposed for public discussion:

–Gives equal marriage rights to same-sex civil unions and regular civil unions.

–Recognizing as part of woman’s right over her body the artificial insemination of single woman, using anonymous genetic material, for having a baby who will not have a father.

–Provides for creating a Posthumous procreation will, for establishing that the child will be conceived after father’s or mother’s death.

–Reorganizes the divorce causes, so all divorce process will be a “no-blame divorce”.

–Gives the custody only to the woman, rather than joint custody, when both parents are equally able to raise the child.

– Provides the option for living in separate houses when the couple get married. If the spouses cannot decide in which house the children will live, the court will decide. (It is important to know that traveling distances to workplaces in Puerto Rico are usually short, for this reason it is not common that a happy marriage couple decide to live in separate houses).

–Eliminates the need of marriage for adopting a child.

–Prohibits the use of sexual orientation as a criteria for limiting the custody of children.

–Recognizes the surrogate motherhood agreements. Also, declares the baby born as a result of assisted procreation, “consanguineous son” (instead of adopted) of the people who pay for the procedure, even if their genetic material was not used and they are not the true biological parents.

–Permits sex changes in birth certificates.

Questions and Answers:

1. More than separate laws, Do you think that exists a philosophy promoting the dissolution of the natural family? (If yes, is that philosophy part of the “divorce regimen”?)

SB: Yes, an unfortunate ethic has arisen in some parts of American and Western society to redefine the family virtually out of existence. The divorce regime is certainly a product of that ethic, though it has also contributed to it. The changes in divorce laws and practice over the last 40 years were never debated publicly in the United States or any other Western country. Even more, we have never had a debate on questions of child custody, though this issue is wreaking havoc with our families and society.

2. How is the image of the marriage woman as a victim of the man being used for spreading this philosophy?

SB: The attack on the family and marriage has included an attack on parents and especially fathers. Parents generally are accused of child abuse with few due process protections and often for ordinary parental discipline. In addition, fathers are demonized as “batterers” and “deadbeats,” even when they have committed no recognized offense and been convicted of no crime. They then lose custody of and even access to their children when they are innocent before the law. Research clearly shows that most child abuse takes place in single-parent homes from which the father has been removed, and most domestic violence takes place after separation. The safest place for women and children is in an intact family. Research is also unequivocal that few fathers abandon their children voluntarily. Most fatherless children result from fathers being forcibly separated from their children by courts.

3. When I was a child, a divorced family group was defined as a “broken family”. Now, is just a “type of family”. When did the family definition becomes something variable? When did the attack to natural family begin?

SB: It has developed gradually over more than a century. But it greatly accelerated with the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the divorce revolution of the 1970s. The current controversy over gay marriage is only the latest development, and it probably would not be taking place were it not for the divorce revolution.

4. How are being spread in the United States the laws promoting that children grow up in household without both biological parents?

SB: The “no-fault” divorce laws, beginning in 1969, certainly accelerated the process. But more than the statute law, it was judicial practice that expanded the growth of single-parent homes. Judges simply responded to the new divorce laws by throwing one parent, usually the father, out of the family at the mere request of the other parent. Legislatures then responded by ratifying that process. But they also provided money to subsidize family break-up, such as greatly expanded programs for child support enforcement, domestic violence, and child abuse. These programs have expanded far beyond their intent, and they are now part of the problem.

5. How is the tendency in the 50 states about family laws?– Is the US becoming more “liberal”?

SB: A good number of states are moving toward shared parenting laws, to ensure that children receive the law and attention of both parents following divorce. These laws offer the promise of minimizing the trauma of family break-up and reducing acrimony. The District of Columbia has a strong law, which unfortunately is seldom enforced. Other states debating shared parenting include Michigan, West Virginia, North Dakota, Iowa, and Georgia.

6. What will be the (social, economic…) consequences for the country and the governmental system of promoting family arrangements without both marriage biological parents?

SB: No such human civilization has even been known. Every known advanced society has been based on the two-parent family, where children have both a father and a mother. We are already seeing the consequences in an assortment of social ills that have been directly correlated to fatherlessness: violent crime, substance abuse, scholastic failure, and psychological ills.

7. Why did you think that no -fault divorce is “our most dangerous social experiment”?

SB: Not so much, as most people believe, because it began the process of family dissolution; that was already taking place. Even more, it gave the government a license to actively dissolve families and seize control of children, over the objection of parents who had not given any grounds for divorce or even agreed to one. So the government can take control over your children without you having committed any offense, either criminal or civil. It effectively eliminated the private sphere of life.

8. In one of your articles, you said that the main cause of child abuse is family dissolution. Do you have any studies or statistics that support this statement?

SB: Yes, the research is clear and unquivocal. I cite numerous studies in my forthcoming book, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Mariage, and the Family. None has been refuted.

9. What would you say to people who argued that for raising a child “the only that you need is the desire to love and care the baby”, that “family composition does not affect children”, and that “being a good parent relies in being a good person rather than sexual orientation or in the type of family”?

SB: The research is very clear that children thrive best when they have the benefits of a mother and a father. Single-parent homes are the source of almost all our social ills, and again, no known civilization has based based on them. Since there is no agreed-upon definition of what constitutes a “good parent” (any more than a “good person”), the safest course is to allow children to have both their parents, even when they are (as they always are) imperfect.

10. What solution do you suggest for discouraging the false domestic violence accusations, without putting woman in risk?

SB: Domestic violence should be adjudicated as violent assault, with appropriate safeguards for the accused and punishments for the convicted. This conforms to our accepted procedures for all other crimes and puts no one at risk. Treated it as a ill-defined matter where the government can evict parents and seize their children with no show of wrongdoing is the source of the problem.

11. What laws have been passed on the states for protecting natural family?

SB: Almost none that are effective. Governments have debated changes in tax law to encourage marriage, but this will make little difference. Some states are trying to protect marriage by defining it as one man and one woman, but this is treating the symptom rather than the cause. Gay marriage will disappear when marriage is strengthened by making it a legally enforceable contract. Shared parenting will also discourage divorce and ensure that children have the closest approximation to an intact family, even when their parents separate.

12. It is said that in the effort of making woman equal as man, now the man is in a legal disadvantage. What do you suggest for making man and woman equal for the law?

SB: Shared parenting will provide for equality between men and women, mothers and fathers, and ensure that children have the love and nurturance of both their parents. Sole mother custody simply perpetuates the gender stereotypes that only women can raise children and only men can provide for them. This is what the feminists have claimed they wanted all along, but now, for some reason, many seem to oppose it.

Stephen Baskerville is the author of Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Mariage, and the Family available for pre-order on Amazon.com:

Actually quite a few, or at least we might be better off if there were such a debate. The government appropriation of children is now so out-of-control that parents routinely lose their children for less than what Baldwin did, and with neither public debate nor trial by jury. While it may be true that Baldwin is being publicly pilloried because he is a celebrity, the invasion of his privacy is far from unique.

Since when did every parent in America become answerable to the media and the government for what they say to their children? As several commentators noted, if every parent were to lose their children every time they lose their temper, all the children in America would be parentless.

Which is more or less where we are headed. Whether through involuntary divorce, trumped-up abuse accusations, or the myriad methods exercised by the public education system, the government now has so many ways to seize control of your children – without ever proving that you have done anything wrong – that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that we have already embarked on a system of communal child-rearing.

The circumstances leading Baldwin to lose his composure were created entirely by the fact that he was forcibly separated from his daughter by state officials (in legal terminology, he lost “custody”). What he vented was the frustration of a parent prevented from exercising normal parental authority, whose child has been turned against him with the backing of the state, and who was reduced to parenting through an answering machine.

His intemperance opened the gates for swarms of psychologists, prosecutors, and other “experts” to opine on a private family matter of which they know nothing. The fact that Fox News brought in a “former sex crimes prosecutor” to offer her two-cents worth on Baldwin’s “abuse” is a fairly clear indication that the same prosecutorial culture recently seen in the Duke “rape” case was licking its chops here.

Some pronounced on the “irrevocable damage” done to the child’s psyche by his outburst. Yet few mentioned the damage we know results to millions of children like his daughter by keeping them forcibly separated from their parents and systematically instructing them to hate their parents. On the contrary, these “experts” depend for their livelihood on such damaged children and on the government that creates them.

Contrary to the voyeuristic media, a custody battle today is seldom just a dispute between two parents; it is a confrontation between the state and private life. Most often, the state assumes the role of surrogate father, the protector and provider for women and children. And the state does not like rivals.

The problem Baldwin says he will write a book about – “parental alienation” – is a far nastier matter than has been brought out in this debate. At its worst, it amounts to the active indoctrination of children against their parents – a familiar enough practice of ideological regimes in recent history. Though it is usually perpetrated by the custodial parent, she only wields that power because the state stands behind her.

Though children of broken families may be placed in the “custody” of the mother (a term suggesting incarceration), it is more accurate to say that they become wards of the state, which establishes what amounts to a puppet government within the family. It is even reasonable to see the custodial parent as functionally a government official. She is paid to care for her children with money that comes directly from the state (often after being confiscated from the non-custodial parent). The jargon now used by courts and feminists indicates that what we once called a “mother” has been replaced by a gender-neutral government-appointed and government-funded “primary caretaker.”

Pop psychologists have speculated that Baldwin directed at his daughter anger that he really felt toward her mother, Kim Basinger. But it is probably more accurate to regard his explosion as frustration at seeing his daughter adopt the state as her effective father. For the separated child, whether actively “alienated” or not, inevitably shifts her loyalty to the agent she perceives as effectively protecting and providing for her, and that agent is the state. (Some compare parental alienation to Stockholm Syndrome, the process by which captives, especially children, form a bond with their captors.) The father does not lose the child to the mother, after all; most men have children fully intending to share them with their mothers. The interloper is the state. Even children who are not actively programmed against one parent are still effectively raised by the principle that the state, not the parent, is head of the household.

Whatever his imperfections as a parent, Baldwin showed his daughter he cares enough about her to want to see her and to be concerned about her. For children, such actions speak louder than words, even shouted words. If that caused permanent psychological damage, it is damage we all carry as part of the human condition, and we have tested mechanisms for dealing with it. “When we screw up, we have an opportunity to teach our children that humans make mistakes,” writes Martha Brockenbrough, author of The Mommy Chronicles. “We can ask for forgiveness. We can do better in the future and hope that, when our children become parents themselves, they will have learned that we don’t have to be perfect to be lovable and that forgiveness is a gift that heals.”

The gravity of the Duke university “rape” case has been seriously underestimated, even by many of its staunchest critics. The corruption of the criminal justice system by political ideology is far more advanced than has been brought out by most commentators.

The central point to be made about this case is precisely the one even most critics have not raised: It is far from unique. If such a blatant injustice can be perpetrated against men whose case attracts vast media attention – the supposed “disinfectant of sunlight” – what befalls those who languish in obscurity, victims of rigged justice that is less palpable? “If police officers and a district attorney can systematically railroad us with absolutely no evidence whatsoever,” said one defendant, “I can’t imagine what they’d do to people who do not have the resources to defend themselves.” Not what they “would do”; what they are doing.

Conservatives who rightly decry judicial “activism” in constitutional law have trouble understanding the equally serious corruption of the criminal justice system. Long before the Duke case, Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence Stratton described this legal underworld in their brilliant but neglected book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.

Michael Nifong fits precisely the profile of prosecutor presented by Roberts and Stratton. They show how prosecutors and the media collude to ensure their victims are convicted by public opinion before their case ever goes to trial. “News of a forthcoming indictment is leaked to the press to put pressure on the accused by tarring him in the eyes of his friends, family, employer, coworkers, and the general public,” they write. “The charges may be largely made out of thin air, but the prosecutor benefits from the public’s presumption that the prosecution has a case.” This describes exactly what Nifong did. The fact that other prosecutors initially defended him is an open admission that they do it too.

The single-minded hype of the racial dimension had made this case appear exceptional. But the far more powerful ideological force driving this and other miscarriages of justice is not race hatred but institutionalized feminism. Race demagogues like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are easy targets for conservatives, but they do not command the institutional clout to politicize criminal justice proceedings on a large scale. There is little indication that white people are being systematically incarcerated on trumped-up accusations of non-existent crimes against blacks. This is precisely what is happening to men (and even some women), both white and black, accused of the kind of family and “gender” crimes that feminists have turned into a political agenda.

For every Duke lacrosse player, there are literally thousands of innocent men forced to stare down the wrong of police gun barrels, hauled off in handcuffs, and incarcerated without trial – all for “crimes,” not only that they did not commit, but that everyone knows did not take place.

Rape accusations have long been out of control. Almost daily, as David Usher has pointed out, men are released from prison after decades of incarceration because DNA tests prove they were wrongly convicted. And they are the lucky ones. While DNA has righted some wrongs, the corruption is so systemic that, as the Duke case shows, hard evidence of innocence is no barrier to conviction. Even the Washington Post has documented how feminist crime lab technicians fabricate and doctor evidence to frame men they know to be innocent. Yet the Post and others invariably blame law enforcement itself. Few point the finger at the very pressure groups that create the hysteria over rape and push for more convictions, as if they are a virtue in themselves.

William Anderson of Frostburg State University and Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal have both pointed out the parallel between the Duke case and the child abuse hysteria of the 1980s and 1990s, where feminist prosecutors like Nancy Lamb in Edenton, North Carolina, similarly whipped up public invective against parents they had jailed yet knew to be innocent. “The press was transfixed” by Lamb, Anderson writes, “with her flashing eyes and bobbed hair. Lamb was speaking ‘for the children,’ you see, and the press adored her. That she was making preposterous claims and attempting to destroy the lives of seven people despite all good evidence to the contrary was not even discussed.”

Like rape, child abuse has been not simply blown out of proportion but politicized by feminism. This reached its apogee in the Clinton administration Justice Department. “From Janet Reno’s infamous prosecutions of Grant Snowden in Florida…to the McMartin case in Los Angeles, to Wenatchee, Washington in the 1990s,” writes Anderson, “the Edenton case was part of a line of what only can be called witch hunts in which state social workers badgered very young children until they came up with lurid tales – after having denied that those things occurred.” These social workers are, in effect, plainclothes feminist police.

The witch hunts were carried into adulthood through “recovered memory therapy,” another fraud perpetrated largely by feminist perversion of the psychotherapy industry, where wild, preposterous tales of childhood sex crimes were manufactured from a psychological theory. In Victims of Memory, Mark Pendergrast shows how the recovered memory hoax destroyed families, ruined lives, and sent innocent parents to prison.

But these are only the tip of the iceberg; at least they required convictions, however unjust. They are dwarfed by “crimes” in which men are removed from their homes and incarcerated without even a trial.

These are “domestic violence” accusations, where no evidence, formal charge, or trial are necessary for the plainly innocent to be hauled away in handcuffs. Defendants are passed by the thousands through mass processing centers that bear little resemblance to a court of law or receive summary punishment without the benefit of media scrutiny. Patently false accusations are not only permitted but rewarded in divorce courts, largely because they are effective weapons in lucrative custody battles that are the bread and butter for venal judges and lawyers, who do all they can to encourage more.

This is now so blatant that even the legal establishment has been forced to recognize it. “Michigan courts do not provide a fair, or impartial, tribunal for any domestic relations litigant,” according to Michigan Lawyers Weekly. “Instead, they customarily and regularly deprive litigants of due process of law.” It is now common knowledge that obviously trumped-up abuse accusations are frequently used, and virtually never punished, in divorce and custody proceedings. Thomas Kasper describes in the Illinois Bar Journal how knowingly false accusations readily “become part of the gamesmanship of divorce.” “Whenever a woman claims to be a victim, she is automatically believed,” says Washington state attorney Lisa Scott. “No proof of abuse is required.” Writing in the Rutgers Law Review, David Heleniak describes domestic abuse as “an area of law mired in intellectual dishonesty and injustice.” Heleniak identifies six separate denials of due process in one state statute, which he terms “a due process fiasco”: lack of notice, denial of indigent defendants to free counsel, denial of the right to take depositions, lack of evidentiary hearings, improper standard of proof, and denial of trial by jury. One family court judge was caught instructing his colleague to violate the constitutional rights of male defendants. “Your job is not to become concerned about the constitutional rights of the man that you’re violating as you grant a restraining order,” New Jersey municipal court judge Richard Russell stated at a government training seminar recorded by the New Jersey Law Journal: “Throw him out on the street… They have declared domestic violence to be an evil in our society. So we don’t have to worry about the rights.”

Also similar to the Duke case, the open politicization of scholarship by domestic violence advocates with an ideological agenda is also simply accepted. Domestic violence has become “a backwater of tautological pseudo-theory and failed intervention programs,” write Donald Dutton and Kenneth Corvo in the scholarly journal Aggression and Violent Behavior. “No other area of established social welfare, criminal justice, public health, or behavioral intervention has such weak evidence in support of mandated practice.”

These are not the excesses most people associate with feminism, which is precisely why they receive little scrutiny or opposition and why the feminists have been able to wreak such damage.

Many were appalled that the Duke faculty should publicly demand that the lacrosse players confess – as if professors are prosecutors, judges, and jurors. Yet precisely this modus operandi has long characterized “women’s studies” programs, hotbeds of trumped-up accusations that have polluted the curricula of thousands of higher education institutions with political ideology masquerading as scholarship, turned students and faculty into police informers, and incited young women into believing that every personal hurt is a crime of “violence.” “If a woman did falsely accuse a man of rape,” opines one graduate of such programs, “she may have had reasons to. Maybe she wasn’t raped, but he clearly violated her in some way.” A Vassar College assistant dean thinks false accusations contribute to a man’s education: “I think it ideally initiates a process of self-exploration. ‘How do I see women? If I didn’t violate her, could I have?’” Such views have long been dismissed as belonging to the extremist margins, but we see the fruits of them at Duke.

This is mob justice at its most incendiary, because it is perpetrated by the educated. It vindicates James Madison’s observation that “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

Conservatives cannot afford to be smug, for many have colluded in this degeneracy of the criminal justice system. When it comes to anything labeled as “crime,” conservative skepticism crumbles. The demand for conviction becomes unanimous and unchecked by any voice of restraint or reason.

Conservatives are correct that criminals often go free. What many fail to understand is that this happens because of a politicized judiciary that also sends the innocent to prison. The acquittal of Andrea Yates, convicted of capital murder in 2002 after admitting to drowning her five children, is the other side of the ideological justice coin. Yates was defended by feminists like Rosie O’Donnell, who expressed “overwhelming empathy” with her, and by the National Organization for Women. “One of our feminist beliefs is to be there for other women,” said Deborah Bell, president of Texas NOW. “We want to be there with her in her time of need.”

More than a decade ago, Michael Weiss and Cathy Young warned of this trend in their Cato Institute paper, Feminist Jurisprudence. Seen in the larger context of feminist justice, the Duke case demonstrates that the corruption of the criminal justice system by political ideology is now the greatest danger to American freedom, surpassing both Islamic radicalism and government measures against it. Judicial corruption – where avenues of legal redress are not only blocked but turned into instruments of injustice – is the most debilitating corruption, because it cripples the means to redress injustice elsewhere.

But what is most alarming is the complacence. At one time, the incarceration of the knowingly innocent would have incited outrage from Americans, who were known, even among Western societies, as staunch defenders of civil liberties. Today there is little outcry. Few have been concerned to know if this case is typical of many more or why the criminal justice system of what was once the freest society on earth is so compromised that law-breaking officials sit in judgement on law-abiding citizens.

This is where “social” justice has led us. Decades of pursuing this illusory, subjective, and politically defined “justice” have left Americans so incapable of distinguishing guilt from innocence that we are now inured to the most open injustice.
Stephen Baskerville, PhD, is president of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children. His book, Taken Into Custody: The War against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family, will be published in the summer by Cumberland House Publishing. The views expressed are his own.

Gov. Tom Vilsack’s quest for the presidential nomination may not be as quixotic as it appears. Vilsack is in an excellent position to influence the next election and possibly emerge as a leader in the domestic policy debate, which is a traditional winner for Democrats.

The November election showed that Republicans have no monopoly on one of their core issues: the family. Democrats who championed positive family policies outflanked Republicans who offered only rhetoric. Bob Casey in Pennsylvania and Jim Webb in Virginia are the most obvious examples.

Vilsack has already gone further in this direction than Casey, Webb, or any other Democrat. In 2004, he signed House File 22, a bill that put Iowa on the forefront of divorce-custody reform and showed that Democrats can lead when it comes to the family.

The bill, which encouraged shared parenting in custody cases, was not only a step toward gender equality in family policy. It also represented an alternative approach to dealing with one of the most intractable and vexatious problems of American society: the continued rise in out-of-wedlock births and fatherless children.

New figures from the National Center for Health Statistics show that, despite 10 years of welfare reform that was supposed to remedy this problem, out-of-wedlock births are at a record high. The Census Bureau also reports that married couples now comprise less than half the nation’s households. Such news traditionally helped Republicans.

But the Bush administration’s response to the perennial family dilemma has been weak. Questionable programs to “promote fatherhood” and “healthy marriage” have left Republicans ironically open to the charge of promoting big government and “throwing money at the problem.”

A simpler and less costly alternative is the measure Vilsack – in cooperation with moderate Republicans – has enacted to keep fathers involved with their children.

Vilsack has also enhanced his appeal among a potential huge voting bloc. Some 20 million parents (about 10 percent are mothers) have lost their children to divorce and separation. That number doubles if one adds second spouses and grandparents, and the problem touches virtually every family in America. Disproportionately affected are blacks and other minorities, whose traditional loyalty to the Democrats has been strained over family issues.

No political party can ignore a voting bloc this massive. In Massachusetts, 85 percent of voters approved a nonbinding shared parenting referendum in 2004. This year, North Dakota voters narrowly missed enacting a binding referendum only because of massive spending by bar associations.

Republicans are getting hammered hard right now by pro-family groups who feel taken for granted. Few have much enthusiasm for the administration’s family psychotherapy programs. It also isn’t that long ago that many social conservatives were Democrats or grew up with parents who were. Democratic populists with a creative pro-family message have an opportunity right now to regain what was once their constituency.Hillary Clinton is not likely to capitalize on this. With her base among young singles, and her view that “there is no such thing as other people’s children,” she is not likely to energize the heartland as a convincing family-issues candidate.

Vilsack, who can invoke his own childhood in an orphanage and “bouncing between separated parents,” could pull it off much more plausibly.

He could even end run Hillary on gender issues. One of the earliest feminist grievances urged fathers to take a more active role in child-rearing. The National Organization for Women once advocated shared parenting, and moderate feminists remain consistent, such as former NOW president Karen DeCrow, who says that “part of ending sexism involves eliminating the inhuman practice of awarding a parent ‘visitation’ to his or her own child.”

As the family and parenting rise to the top of the nation’s domestic agenda, Vilsack and Iowa could constructively employ the state’s caucus influence to lead this critical debate.

Bryan Iehl is founder and president of IowaFathers.com. Stephen Baskerville, PhD, is president of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children.

This article was originally published in Iowa’s Waterloo Courier.

The topic was, “Does the Media Get it Right on Fatherhood?” The theme is ironic given that NFI’s extreme reluctance to examine the causes of the fatherhood crisis in family court abuses leads some to question whether the National Fatherhood Initiative itself entirely “Gets it Right on Fatherhood.” This is somewhat unfair. NFI deserves enormous credit for calling the nation’s attention to the crisis of fatherless children. Whether NFI can continue to be on the cutting edge of solutions to this crisis remains to be seen.

To its credit, NFI departed from the familiar themes about “good fathering” and “responsible fatherhood” and moved the discussion to the more contentious area of negative depictions of fathers in the media. After an hour, as the discussion was on the verge of becoming repetitious, panelist Stephen Perrine of Best Life, a magazine targeted at men, startlingly shifted the discussion by declaring that primary responsibility for the fatherhood crisis lay not with fathers nor with the media but with “the government.” He specifically criticized divorce courts for arbitrarily separating children from fit and loving fathers and challenged the myth that the crisis is caused by fathers “abandoning” their children.

Since the shift to audience questions was long overdue, I piped in at this point and asked about the “media blackout” on the problem of why loving and committed fathers who have not “abandoned” their children can be arrested for trying to see them, arrested for inability to pay extortionate child support, and arrested for mere allegations of domestic violence when not a shred of evidence is produced. I also asked why we have seen no media investigations of the courts in which this scandal is taking place. Soon after, David Levy of the Children’s Rights Council, pointed out that the District of Columbia in fact already has a shared parenting giving both parents equality in custody arrangements.

A father sitting to my right immediately informed me that everything I had mentioned had just happened to him and handed me a moving account of his efforts to reunite with his daughters. Another told me that the question was long overdue.

What is the moral of this event? Change the subject! We must be bold and not afraid to speak up at every opportunity. We have no right to criticize NFI for not bringing up these topics if we fear to do so. They are helping us by holding such events; it is our duty to take advantage of the opportunity. For too long we have sat in silence as others frame the terms of debate and set the agenda. We must take the initiative. We can be polite, but still firm and forceful. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Mitch Sanderson and the North Dakota Coalition for Families and Children are fighting a David and Goliath battle that has already sent shock waves throughout the divorce industry. Not surprisingly, divorce operatives are now pulling out all the stops during the final week to defeat the Initiative.

The only opponents of this Initiative are those who profit from family breakup and fatherless children: lawyers, judges, social workers and other bureaucrats, child support enforcement agents, domestic violence lobbies, and feminist groups. Because they have no substantive arguments to wield against the measure, they resort to insulting personal attacks against the citizens who have collected thousands of signatures to place the measure on the ballot.

Here is what Mitch and the NDCFC are up against:

• The wealthy bar associations have begun an all-out media campaign to protect the profits they acquire by destroying families and encouraging fatherless homes.

• The state’s Division of Human Services has again been caught using taxpayers’ money to lobby against the Initiative. DHS director Carol Olson has already admitted such practices when she directed DHS employees to stop using government, taxpayer-financed time for political purposes, in violation of North Dakota law and standard ethical principles.

• The federal government has also been caught using taxpayer-funded government resources to lobby against the citizen Initiative. This is a flagrant violation of federal law, the constitutional division between federal and state government, and standard ethics. HHS Deputy Secretary Dr. Wade Horn has likewise corrected misinformation propagated by his region administrator, but much of the damage has been done.

The big guns of bar associations and state and federal bureaucrats are being trained on this Initiative. The stakes are even bigger than shared parenting and the American family, important as those are. They have upped the ante to the point where the issue is now American democracy itself and the power of an out-of-control federal tax-and-patronage apparatus to thwart democracy, suppress lawful citizen initiative, and destroy the republican institutions and participatory democracy for which this nation has long been a shining beacon.

Yet the response from family defenders across the country and even in neighboring states has been less than overwhelming. If you cannot go in person to help, what Mitch and his allies need more than anything during this last week is money. The financial power of the bar associations is massive. As a political scientist, I can attest that referenda are usually won by the side that has the most money to saturate the media, and no law requires that they tell the truth. Measures that begin with huge popular support are often defeated by well-funded special interests.

In this case, the bar associations are using precisely the same tactics politically that they use in the courtroom: Plant doubt in the public’s minds. Spread misinformation which, however inaccurate, nevertheless creates fear. Slander the opposition and innocent people. And if all else fails – if you are a state or federal bureaucrat – break the law.

To contribute to the North Dakota Shared Parenting Initiative, go to http://www.ndspi.org. You can contact Mitch Sanderson and the North Dakota Coalition for Families and Children at their website: info@ndspi.org.

Stephen Baskerville is President of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children (www.acfc.org). His latest major article, “Politics and Same-Sex Marriage,” is published in the November-December issue of Society, a journal of the social sciences.

Mitch Sanderson is waging a heroic stand there against the slings and arrows of the Mitchell Sanderson, A Hero Who Needs Our Helpdivorce industry. Arrayed against Mitch is virtually the entire North Dakota government, as well as the bar associations, social workers, feminists, and all the others who have discovered how lucrative it is to take control of other people’s children. All these groups are receiving help from outside the state who realize the earth-shaking importance of what Mitch has done.

Mitch is the driving force behind the North Dakota Shared Parenting Initiative – a ballot referendum that will provide for equal parenting and child support levels at reasonable levels that do not subsidize broken homes. This summer Mitch and other parents collected sufficient signatures to place the referendum on the November ballot.

For decades now policymakers have bellyached about the “fatherhood crisis,” which they use to procure federal funds for useless government psychotherapy programs. The North Dakota Initiative is the first effective measure that will actually do something about this problem. It is no wonder the divorce industry is bringing out the big guns against him. The State Bar Association of North Dakota, the North Dakota Association of Counties, the state’s Department of Human “Services,” even the federal government are pulling out all the stops to suppress this measure. In the most appalling action yet, a federal HHS official, using his office for political purposes that are clearly improper and probably illegal, issued an ultimatum to North Dakota: Pass the initiative and we will cut off all federal funding. Such an act of federal bullying against citizens exercising participatory democracy may be unprecedented. HHS Assistant Secretary Wade Horn, to his credit, recently refused to back this threat, but state officials are ignoring him.

Mitch and the North Dakota Coalition for Families and Children have already achieved heroic feats. They collected over 17,000 signatures for the Initiative. They have attracted the attention of television, newspapers, and internet pundits like Wendy McElroy. In some cases, they have turned them from hostility to sympathy.

But they cannot stand alone much longer. It is well known that referenda are won by whoever has the most money and time to wage a media battle. Mitch and his allies are vastly outgunned. Though the public clearly favors the measure – this is clear from the speed with which they collected the signatures (and by a similar but non-binding referendum in Massachusetts that garnered over 85% of vote in 2004) – with each passing day, the divorce industry has more time to wage their propaganda onslaught against Mitchell, against the truth, and against families.

From now to Election Day, every parents’ group, every parent, every citizen in America should turn their eyes to North Dakota. Mitch and his friends are in desperate need of volunteers to help with the campaign and of money – not only to compete with the wealthy lawyers and other interests who have mobilized against the citizens of North Dakota, but perhaps even to survive.

This is no exaggeration. Mitch himself has gone into debt to pay for the campaign and is now vulnerable to arrest if he cannot meet his extortionate “child support” payments. This is only one weapon wielded by the divorce industry to silence its critics. We must hang together or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.

On the other hand, Mitch Sanderson and his friends have already sent shock waves through the divorce industry and, thanks to them, we have an opportunity to bring this behemoth under control. The name of Mitchell Sanderson deserves to be known wherever people fight for freedom. The rest of us can help these courageous parents at no risk to ourselves. Now is the time for all parents who love their children and their country to stand up and act.

You can contact Mitch Sanderson and the North Dakota Coalition for Families and Children at info@ndspi.org. Their web site is http://www.ndspi.org.

Stephen Baskerville is President of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children (www.acfc.org). His latest major article, “What God Hath Joined Together…”, is published by MovieGuide.com.

“When Words Bear Witness” is a more appropriate headline than Michael Rips and Amy Lester may realize, since their own words reveal the brave new world the feminists and bar associations are creating around the trumped-up issue of “domestic violence.”

“Domestic violence accounts for up to 34% of all reported violent crimes,” they state. Given that government authorities define domestic “violence” as “name-calling and constant criticizing, insulting, and belittling,” it would appear that many “reported violent crimes” are not very violent.

“Reported” crimes are also not proven crimes, and strong incentives exist to report violence where none has taken place. Fabricating abuse accusations ensures custody of children and marital property during divorce. The custody battles are lucrative for lawyers, whose bar associations control judicial appointments and promotions, which is why patently false accusations are treated as fact.

This perversion of the justice system is now common knowledge among legal practitioners. Thomas Kasper recently described in the Illinois Bar Journal how false accusations readily “become part of the gamesmanship of divorce.” Bar associations and even courts themselves sponsor divorce seminars counseling mothers on how to fabricate abuse accusations. “The number of women attending the seminars who smugly – indeed boastfully – announced that they had already sworn out false or grossly exaggerated domestic violence complaints against their hapless husbands, and that the device worked!” astonished Thomas Kiernan, writing in the New Jersey Law Journal. “To add amazement to my astonishment, the lawyer-lecturers invariably congratulated the self-confessed miscreants.” The UMKC Law Review reports a survey of judges and attorneys found complaints of disregard for due process and allegations of domestic violence used as a “litigation strategy.”

Since most reports involve no crime, it is hardly surprising that domestic violence, as Rips and Lester claim, “is notoriously difficult to prosecute, because [alleged?] victims frequently drop charges or refuse to testify when their [alleged?] abusers [allegedly?] threaten them with further violence.” What is this “further violence”? “One study found that many such witnesses received threats that their children would be kidnapped if they testified,” says Joan Meier of George Washington University. Their children kidnapped! These wife-beaters are so sophisticated they have organized child kidnapping operations to intimidate witnesses. Translation: The accusations are concocted to separate the children from their fathers, and the fathers understandably want their children back. Each lie necessitates another.

Rips and Lester continue: “In the 1980’s and 1990’s, the refusal of [alleged?] victims to cooperate in the prosecution of their [alleged?] batterers may have resulted in the dismissal of as many as 70% of all domestic violence cases.” The refusal of Rips and Lester to observe the presumption of innocence in their writing is not only standard in feminist literature; it pervades state and federal statutes, including the notorious Violence Against Women Act, for which Congress is now considering appropriations. VAWA grants encourage governments to “mandate and encourage police officers to arrest [alleged?] abusers.” It is more likely that the cases were dismissed because there was no evidence, because there was no violence and no crime, and because the objective of obtaining custody was accomplished.

But now we can secure convictions even when there is no evidence, no victim, and no crime: “Prosecutors, police officers, and advocates for domestic violence victims have developed techniques, together known as ‘evidence-based prosecution,’ that focus on the use of reliable evidence, like 911 tapes, to build cases that do not depend on the cooperation of the [alleged?] victim.” As with the Ministry of Truth, “evidence-based prosecution” is designed to convict those against whom you have no evidence. And since the defendant – excuse me, the “batterer” – can be convicted using hearsay, with no right to face his accuser, it is not really necessary that there even be an accuser, or for that matter a crime.

It is not difficult to see where this is going. In Britain, “special domestic violence courts” allow third parties such as civil servants and pressure groups to use “relaxed rules of evidence and the lower burden of proof” to bring actions against those they identify as batterers, even if no alleged “victim” comes forward (or even exists). “Victim support groups,” who say women “should be spared having to take legal action,” can now act in the name of an anonymous or purported plaintiff to seize the children, homes, and other property of men who have not been convicted of any crime. Similar “domestic violence courts” are being created in the United States and Canada, where “conviction rates have risen” and “guilty pleas are way up,” Mother Jones magazine enthuses. In other words, rigged trials and the certainty of conviction allow prosecutors to extort guilty pleas.

Sending men to jail is apparently now a virtue in itself. In San Diego, Rips and Lester report with glee, suspending due process protections “obtains convictions in about 88% of its cases.” Convicting people of crimes – thousands of people of whose guilt or innocence we can have no first-hand knowledge – is now something to be celebrated for its own sake.

Guilt used to be determined by juries weighing evidence in specific cases. But Rips and Lester apparently know that these “batterers” are guilty en masse, and all that remains is removing constitutional impediments to convicting them. Trials, juries, evidence, and the entire apparatus of due process are superfluous because guilt is not defined by whether an individual committed a specific deed. Guilt is a foregone conclusion because the defendant belongs to a class that is guilty by political definition. The New Jersey family court invokes feminist jargon to argue that allowing due process protections to abuse defendants “perpetuates the cycle of power and control whereby the [alleged?] perpetrator remains the one with the power and the [alleged?] victim remains powerless.”

My niggling interpolations are no doubt annoying for prosecutors whose careers depend on their conviction rates. They have effectively institutionalized the archetypal loaded question, “When did you stop beating your wife?”

Stephen Baskerville [send him mail] is a political scientist and president of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children and author of Family Violence in America: The Truth about Domestic Violence and Child Abuse.

Copyright © 2006 Stephen Baskerville