Thursday, April 5, 2007

Family Courts are courts of the absurd.

Family courts have become courts of the absurd and they are extorting fathers. Child support enforcement is federally mandated. State Family Courts are using it to destroy families. It is a conspiracy of judges, lawyers, and court administrators fleecing the average citizens.
Massive numbers of fathers who are accused of no wrongdoing now are separated from their children, plundered for everything they have, publicly vilified and incarcerated without trial.
. . About 24 million American children live in homes where the father is not present, with devastating consequences for both the children and society. Crime, drug and alcohol abuse, truancy, teenage pregnancy, suicide and psychological disorders are a few of the tragic consequences. Conventional wisdom assumes that the fathers of these children have abandoned them. In this case the conventional wisdom is dangerously wrong. It is far more likely that an "absent" father is forced away rather than leaving voluntarily.
. . In his new study, Divorced Dads: Shattering the Myths, Sanford Braver of Arizona State University has shown conclusively that the so-called "deadbeat dad," one who deserts his children and evades child support, "does not exist in significant numbers." Braver confirms that, contrary to popular belief, at least two-thirds of divorces are filed by mothers, who have virtual certainty of getting the children and a huge portion of the fathers' income, regardless of any fault on their part. The title of Ashton Applewhite's 1997 book says it succinctly: Cutting Loose: Why Women Who End Their Marriages Do So Well.
. . Other studies have found even higher percentages of divorces filed by mothers, and lawyers report that, when children are involved, divorce is the initiative of the mother in virtually all instances. Moreover, few of these divorces involve grounds such as desertion, adultery or violence. The most frequent reasons given are "growing apart" or "not feeling loved or appreciated." (Surveys consistently show that fathers are much more likely than mothers to believe parents should remain married.) Yet, as Braver reports, despite this involuntary loss of their children, 90 percent of these deserted fathers regularly pay court-ordered child support (unemployment being the main reason for nonpayment), often at exorbitant levels and many without any rights to see their children. Most make heroic efforts to stay in contact with the children from whom they are forcibly separated.
...The voices of fathers rarely are heard in the public arena. Instead we hear the imprecations of a government conducting what may be the most massive witch-hunt in this country's history. Never before have we seen the spectacle of the highest officials in the land -- including the president, the attorney general and other Cabinet secretaries, and leading members of Congress from both parties -- using their offices as platforms from which publicly to vilify private citizens who have been convicted of nothing and who have no opportunity to reply.
. . Under the guise of pursuing deadbeat dads, we now are seeing mass incarcerations without trial, without charge and without counsel, while the media and civil libertarians look the other way. We also have government officials freely entering the homes and raiding the bank accounts of citizens who are accused of nothing and simply helping themselves to whatever they want -- including their children, their life savings and their private papers and effects, all with hardly a word of protest noted.
. . And these are fathers who are accused of nothing. Those who face trumped-up accusations of child abuse also must prove their innocence before they can hope to see their children. Yet now it is well established that most child abuse takes place in the homes of single mothers. A recent study from the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, found that "almost two-thirds [of child abusers] were females." Given that male perpetrators are not necessarily fathers but much more likely to be boyfriends and stepfathers, fathers emerge as the least likely child abusers. A British study by Robert Whelan in 1993 titled Broken Homes and Battered Children concluded that a child living with a single mother is up to 33 times more likely to be abused than a child living in an intact family. The argument of many men legally separated from their families is that the real abusers have thrown the father out of the family so they can abuse his children with impunity.
...In Virginia alone the state Division of Child Support Enforcement now is "pursuing" 428,000 parents for up to $1.6 billion, according to its director, Nick Young. In a state of fewer than 7 million people, the parents of 552,000 children are being "pursued." That is the parents of roughly half the state's minor dependent children. HHS claims that almost 20 million fathers in the nation are being pursued for something close to $50 billion. We are being asked to believe that half the fathers in America have abandoned their children willfully.
. . . . These figures essentially are meaningless. If they indicate anything it is the scale on which families are being taken over by a destructive and dangerous machine consisting of judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, social workers, bureaucrats and women's groups -- all of whom have a direct financial interest in separating as many children from their fathers as possible, vilifying and plundering the fathers and turning them into criminals. The machine is so riddled with conflicts of interest that it is little less than a system of organized crime. Here is how it works: Judges are appointed and promoted by the lawyers and "custody evaluators," into whose pockets they funnel fees; the judges also are influenced with payments of federal funds from child-support enforcement bureaucracies that depend on a constant supply of ejected fathers; child-support guidelines are written by the bureaucracies that enforce them and by private collection companies that have a financial stake in creating as many arrearages and "deadbeat dads" as possible. These guidelines are then enacted by legislators, some of whom divert the enforcement contracts to their own firms, sometimes even taking personal kickbacks (as charged in a recent federal indictment in Arkansas). Legislators who control judicial appointments also get contracts (and kickbacks, again the case in Arkansas) for providing legal services at government expense in the courts of their appointees. And, of course, custody decisions and child-support awards must be generous enough to entice more mothers to take the children and run, thus bringing a fresh supply of fathers into the system. In short, child support is the financial fuel of the divorce industry. It has very little to do with the needs of children and everything to do with the power and profit of large numbers of adults.
...There is no evidence that endless "crackdowns" on evicted fathers serve any purpose other than enriching those in the cracking-down business. With child- support enforcement now a $3 billion national industry, the pursuit of the elusive deadbeat yields substantial profits, mostly at public expense. "In Florida last year," writes Kathleen Parker in the Orlando Sentinel, "taxpayers paid $4.5 million for the state to collect $162,000 from fathers"; and the story is the same elsewhere.
. . . . Instead of the easy fiction that massive numbers of fathers are suddenly and inexplicably abandoning their children, perhaps what we should believe instead is that a lucrative racket now is cynically using our children as weapons and tools to enrich lawyers and provide employment for judges and bureaucrats. Rather than pursuing ever greater numbers of fathers with ever more Draconian punishments, the Justice Department should be investigating the kind of crimes it was created to pursue -- such as kidnapping, extortion and racketeering -- in the nation's family courts.

...Truth was the first casualty of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Welfare Reform. The Best Interests of the child was the second.
The Best Interests of the Family was the third.
This is the legacy of Welfare Reform. God only knows what perils we avoided by passing up Hillary’s Health Care Reform package.
Military salaries and federal workers’ salaries come from outside of the state and bring in big money to the state family courts. Stay out of Family Court. You cannot win. Keep your children out of public schools, and never call the police for a domestic problem. Public schools teach children to call 911 for all kinds of things. They teach them to call the police on their parents if they think they are being physically or mentally abused. Police must respond to every 911 call, even from a child’s cell phone. And they must believe the child even when they know the child is not telling the truth. The same goes for a female spouse, if she calls the police. The police must arrest someone. It is usually the man. Once you get to Family Court your financial future is in jeopardy.
..Your salary is the target. The truth is irrelevant. They do not care about the truth. They will make up their own facts to fit the situation. Lawyers distort and even fabricate. Judges are indifferent to both Petitioner and the Respondent.
All they want to know is who makes the most money. The name of the game is “Get the Money”. There is no justice in Family Court.
...They do not care what is in the best interests of the child. Truth is irrelevant.
Fathers and mothers are the greatest experts when it comes to the best interest of the child. The office of child support enforcement, the courts, the district attorney and many experts on children don't have a clue what children really need. Children need time and attention from their parents, not more draconian methods to collect more money.

...Family Courts are worse than organized crime. They are an organized crime, and they are the so-called administrators of the law. So, it is legal, but, it is unconscionable.
...Are you concerned about father's rights? Fathers are routinely discriminated against in family court, the district attorney, and the office of child support enforcement. Parenting includes much more than writing a check once a month. The best interest of the child is served most effectively by shared parenting. Courts all across the nation continue to ignore the importance of fathers in family court. The District Attorney looks upon fathers as mere pay checks.

...I was made aware of this article by ANCPR, Alliance for Non-Custodial Parents Rights.
I urge you to contact them in order to receive an information packet that further substantiates the destructive effect of the draconian child support enforcement laws that have been enacted in recent years. Their address is:
ANCPR http://ancpr.org

1 comment:

ichbinalj said...

Family Court judges and commissioners are practicing law from the Bench. Rather than deciding cases, they are advocating for the petitioners in domestic dissolution cases. I saw a Commissioner in a California court practically beg a woman to ask for alimony (Maintenance and Support) in a pro se dissolution action. She was acting as her own attorney. She did not want her former husband to pay alimony. The Commissioner asked her four times if she wanted alimony. He told her that she was entitled to it. He cautioned her that if she did not ask for it at that time, she would never ever again be able to get it. She was unequivocal. She said absolutely no. She did not even say maybe. I could not understand why the Commissioner seemed to be so disappointed that she did not want alimony. Now, I see why he was pushing so hard to get her to ask for alimony. He was trying to increase the income of the court and qualify for federal matching dollars. If Commissioners and judges in state Family Courts cannot be trusted to decide the cases without becoming lawyer/advocates from the Bench, the citizen fathers and husbands in America are an endangered specie. This will eventually kill the institution of marriage. Women will not be able to find a husband. The State will have succeeded where Adolf Hitler failed. The State will have truly become the father of every child in the State.