Child Support Sanity in Tennessee

The Tennessee General Assembly's lower house passed a bill that would allow a man to discontinue child support payments 60 days after learning, via genetic testing, that he is not the biological father of the child.  The companion bill in the Senate is currently pending before the Judiciary Committee.  The vote in the House was 66-24 with three abstentions.  Read about it here (Chattanooga Times Free Press, 4/23/09).

How sane.  If a man is not the father and has proven he's not the father, he wouldn't, under this bill, have to support the child.  What a concept.  And of course that would mean that the actual father would have to support his child.  And what it also might mean is that women wouldn't lie as much about paternity, since they've got less to gain.

One legislator, Mark Maddox, bemoaned the fact that, if the bill becomes law, the child might not receive support.  Somehow he seems to not quite grasp the concept that one reason for child support is to make adults who bring a child into the world responsible for that decision.  If a man does not in fact father a child, it doesn't make sense for him to bear that responsibility.

Maddox's idea is what I think of as 'Paintball Paternity.'  It's like a game of Paintball in which we give the mother a paintball gun and the first guy she plugs is the deemed to be the father.  And after all, why not do it that way?  He'd have exactly as much relationship to the child as every other man in the world except of course the actual dad.  So as long as we're ignoring actual paternity, why not just choose anyone?

Maybe if Maddox had to pay for a child who wasn't his, he'd understand.  Maybe if women were required to pay support for children who weren't theirs, things would be different.

In any case, this bill is a step towards a saner family law system.

Meanwhile, Senator Dewayne Bunch is sponsoring the senate bill that's in committee.  Here's his email address if you'd like to make your opinion known:  sen.dewayne.bunch@capitol.tn.gov.

Thanks to John for the heads-up.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 1:58 pm and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. | 529 views | Trackback | Print this page |

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