Wednesday, November 21, 2007

The Judicial War On Fatherhood

Portrait of a policy failure: Somehow, this young father was left unmolested to raise his two beautiful children. How on earth did such a thing happen?
















The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers
.

Dick the Butcher, adding his contribution to Jack Cade's Utopian promises, from Shakespeare's Henry VI, pt. II (Act 4, scene 2)



Most people mistakenly assume metal detectors were installed in courthouses because of criminals and terrorists,” observes Dr. Stephen Baskerville, an assistant professor of government at Patrick Henry College.


In fact, retrofitting courtrooms with metal detectors and other security enhancements was prompted by concerns over violence perpetrated by fathers whose families have been sundered and children have been stolen by what Dr. Baskerville calls “the divorce regime.”


The advent of no-fault – or, as Dr. Baskerville calls it, unilateral – divorce decades ago brought into existence a huge and ever-metastasizing apparatus of coercion, intervention, and social engineering that subsists on the destruction of flawed but salvageable marriages.


Although divorce can be initiated at whim by either party, the system described in Baskerville's infuriating but indispensable new book, Taken Into Custody, is designed to encourage women to file first. Not that it matters all that much: Whenever a divorce ensues, under the logic of the “no-fault” system, either parent can end the marriage and both are considered equally at fault, so the children immediately become the property of the State. Which is what this is all about.


"Now, that's more like it!" exclaim defenders of the Total State: Another helpless man is arrested for the supposed crime of being a divorced father.







After all, writes Baskerville, when a family is broken up each child becomes “a walking bundle of cash” -- not just for the custodial parent or relatives, but for the large and expanding population of tax-gorged bureaucrats who “adopt as their mission in life the practice of interfering with other people's children.”


This system is rigged to treat fathers as dangerous and disposable. “In fact,” as Baskerville correctly observes, “it is no exaggeration to say that the existence of family courts, and virtually every issue they adjudicate – divorce, custody, child abuse, child-support enforcement, even adoption and juvenile crime – depend on one overriding principle: remove the father.”


Regardless of the specific facts of a given divorce, the father is generally treated as useful only for making the initial biological contribution to conception and then to provide regular child support payments once his children are seized by the State. Oh, and we shouldn't forget the father's value as the object of a State-created cult of ritual execration.


Since the early 1990s, the public has been relentlessly barraged with propaganda about “Deadbeat Dads” who, with the calculated malice of Dickensian villains, heartlessly refuse to provide their struggling ex-wives and estranged children the means to avoid starvation.


A staple of radical feminism, the Deadbeat Dad is also dutifully denounced by mainstream conservatives like Alan Keyes and Oliver North. The child support enforcement mechanism is a bi-partisan creation: The enabling legislation was signed into law by Republican Gerald Ford in 1975; funding has been boosted by Congress under both Democratic and Republican control; and in 2002 the Bush administration eagerly carried out a nationwide “Deadbeat Dads” enforcement sweep under a program called “Project Save Our Children” created by Bill Clinton.


The federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) and its state franchises constitute an army of 60,000 enforcement agents (all of whom are permitted to carry firearms under the “Deadbeat Parents Enforcement Act”). This means that in its successful war on parenthood, the OCSE deploys a force thirteen times larger than that mustered by the DEA, which has 4,600 agents employed in the fraudulent “war on drugs.”


At the center of this system is the family court, a legal venue that operates secretly and with plenary powers. Baskerville describes the “regime of involuntary divorce,” particularly the family courts, as “the most authoritarian institution in our society today.”


The divorce regime has infected our legal system with concepts entirely foreign to Anglo-Saxon law, “such as the principle that one could be decreed guilty of violating an agreement that one had, in fact, not violated,” writes Baskerville. A father who is an unwilling party to a unilateral divorce “could be summoned to court without having committed any legal infraction; the verdict was pre-determined before any evidence was examined; and one could be found `guilty' of things that were not illegal.”


Through the family court system, “Citizens who are completely innocent of any legal wrongdoing and minding their own business – not seeking any litigation and neither convicted nor accused of any legal infraction, criminal or civil – are ordered into court and told to write checks to officials of the court or they will be summarily arrested and jailed. Judges also order citizens to sell their houses and other property and turn the proceeds over to lawyers and other cronies they never hired.”


In similar fashion, family court judges “regularly order involuntary litigants to pay the fees of attorneys, psychotherapists, and other court officials they have not hired and jail them for failing to comply.” The system is a racket by any rational definition, and it's often operated with undisguised, vulgar corruption.


In 1999, an Insight magazine investigation learned of a “slush fund” controlled by family court judges in Los Angeles; donors included court-appointed “monitors” who received lucrative government pay-outs for keeping parents (generally fathers) accused of domestic violence under surveillance during child visitations. In Marin County, family court judges were caught funneling child support and alimony payments to preferred attorneys and other cronies.


However, as Baskerville notes, “the real scandal is not what is illegal but what is legal.” Even if scrupulously operated, the family courts are not tribunals of justice, but rather “revenue-generating engines for state governments”; in fact, as Baskerville observes, states frequently depend on child-support moneys to balance their budgets. Which is why the State does everything it can to abet and capitalize on divorce – and why hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of fathers find themselves in the equivalent of debtor's prison.


As he points out, “the astonishing but incontrovertible fact is that with the exception of convicted criminals, no group in our society today has fewer rights than fathers.... A father can be deprived of his children, his home, his savings, his future earnings, his privacy, and his freedom without any ... constitutional protections.”


Baskerville has collected and documented a small but representative sample of cases in which fathers dragged into divorce court have been slapped with impossible child support judgments, deprived of the means to earn enough to pay those judgments, and then jailed for contempt. Some who have been driven to publicize their plight have been jailed or otherwise punished for seeking redress, since “in many jurisdictions it is a crime to criticize family court judges or otherwise discuss family law cases publicly.”


The system also makes use of extra-legal means to punish dissidents. Baskerville recounts how a State-allied virago named Liz Richards operates an identity theft and blackmail scheme through her group Family Court Reform of Annandale, Virginia. Richards circulates e-mail messages “threatening to publicize information that she obtains through government files on the private lives of politically active parents” who criticize the system. The material used to blackmail critics includes financial information pried from parents by family court judges and somehow supplied to Richards.


Meanwhile, “Deadbeat Dads” routinely find themselves publicly vilified, summarily imprisoned, and financially ruined. They are “routinely ordered into employment, the wages from which are then confiscated.” In an Illinois case, a custodial father stayed at home to care for his three children, only to be arrested under an obscure and asinine state law that makes it a felony for a man to be deliberately unemployed.


Rendered permanently insolvent by ... incarceration, [such fathers] are farmed out to trash companies and similar concerns, where they work fourteen- to sixteen-hour days,” writes Baskerville. “Most of their earnings are confiscated for child support, the costs of their incarceration, and mandatory drug testing.” In addition, “the courts are also not above summarily jailing children who fail to cooperate with the criminalization of their parents.”


How can an imprisoned man pay child support? And how can a man whose wages are automatically garnished be accused of failure to make payments? Don't bother posing logical questions of this sort to those in charge of the child support enforcement system.


One spectacularly smug judge who richly deserves a beating gloated that he enjoyed incarcerating fathers who failed to make payments. He calls the jail his “magic fountain”: “Of course, there is no magic. The money is paid by his mother, or by the second wife, or by some other innocent who perhaps had to liquidate her life's savings.” Some judges have seized the bank accounts of grandparents when a father has been accused of an arrearage in child support payments.


Baskerville makes a compelling, if not irrefutable, case that the “Deadbeat Dad” epidemic is a deliberately engineered hoax. He points out that “the government machinery [for child support enforcement] ... was created not in response to claims of widespread nonpayment but before them, and that it was less a response to `deadbeat dads' than a mechanism to create them.”


Here's how the process works, in brief:


“A parent [generally a father] whose children are taken away by a family court is only at the beginning of his troubles. The next step comes as he is summoned to court and ordered to pay as much as two-thirds or even more of his income as `child support' to whomever has been given custody. His wages will immediately be garnished and his name will be entered on a federal register of `delinquents.' This is even before he has had a chance to become one, though it is also likely that the order will be backdated, so he will already be delinquent as he steps out of the courtroom. If the ordered amount is high enough, and the backdating far enough, he will be an instant felon and subject to immediate arrest.”


Fathers in such circumstances are often imprisoned for having any unauthorized contact with their children, and the terms of that contact are defined entirely by their kidnappers. The children are often indoctrinated to see their fathers as their enemies – if not by embittered ex-wives, then by officials of the system itself. One inconceivably repellent example was offered by Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox, who in 2004 actually “tried to enlist the state's children in an art competition to depict their own fathers as criminals. Cox offered free Domino's pizza to children who participated in the campaign to create billboards vilifying their fathers.”


Once it learned of the nature of the competition – call it the “Pavlik Morozov Memorial Art Contest” -- Domino's withdrew its support. Mike Cox, who really deserves to get his back dirty, continues to afflict Michigan.

By Baskerville's reckoning, “nearly a quarter-million parents could now be incarcerated” on child support-related charges. To relieve the pressure on jails and prisons overburdened by America's inmate population – easily the world's largest – some officials have suggested alternate means of imprisoning “Deadbeat Dads.”


In Georgia, a sheriff and superior court judge recommended the creation of a literal gulag -- “detention camps specifically for fathers.” A city planning commission in Pittsburgh considered a proposal to “convert a former chemical processing plant ... into a detention center” for fathers.


It's hardly surprising that fathers trapped in this Kafkaesque system are often – not occasionally, mind you, but frequently – driven to despairing acts of despairing violence. In 1996, four days before he was to receive a medal of valor for his role in rescuing victims from the Murrah building following the Oklahoma City Bombing, Terrance Yeakey committed suicide. Yeakey could surmount what he witnessed on the morning of April 19, but he was over-matched by the horrors that descended on him when he fell behind in child support payments arising from a bitter divorce.


Other fathers direct their rage at those immediately responsible for their predicament.


The most volatile court in the nation, where judges are killed on the bench, is family courts,” notes Bruce Howell, administrator for the Montgomery, Alabama Juvenile Court. “When you're dealing with people's children, they get really upset. Family court is where it all happens, and judges get killed right on the bench. People whip out guns and start shooting them in front of the courtroom.”


Ugly as it is to say so, it must nonetheless be said: At least some of the judges on the receiving end of the violence Howell describes deserve something akin to what they got – not being summarily gunned down, of course, but some combination of professional ruin and personal humiliation.


The instinct to protect one's children is the single strongest impulse implanted in our nature by our Creator. It easily eclipses the need for food or fame; it is even stronger than the primal drive to create children in the first place. When a flawed but conscientious father whose marriage ends without his consent has his children taken from him, “we call him a `monster' and a criminal for doing what any normal parent is expected to do” -- fight back against those who have attacked his family and threaten his children, using whatever means he can muster.


Those who employ deceit, coercion, and blackmail to separate an honest father from his children really shouldn't expect to be immune to very ugly consequences – beginning, but hardly limited to, unemployment and irreversible ostracism from decent society. And the worst of them really ought to end up like Mussolini.

(To hear a radio interview of Dr. Baskerville in Quicktime audio, click here.)

Dum spiro, pugno!

21 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice blog as always Will, but I believe Terry Yeakey was "suicided" because he knew too much about what really happened to the Murrah building in April of 1995.
The circumstances of his "suicide" don't pass the smell test.

Anonymous said...

Nice blog as always Will, but I believe Terry Yeakey was "suicided" because he knew too much about what really happened to the Murrah building in April of 1995.

Anonymous said...

Nice blog as always Will, but I believe Terry Yeakey was "suicided" because he knew too much about what really happened to the Murrah building in April of 1995.

Anonymous said...

Nice blog as usual Will, but I have always believed Terry Yeakey was "suicided" because he knew too much about who was really behind the OKC bombing and was conducting his own investigation.
The circumstances of his suicide are less believable than the circumstances of Vince Foster's suicide.

Anonymous said...

William, I am a regular reader, I stop by several times a week and enjoy/fume/stew over the things I read here, I must address this particular post. It seems to me to be completely one sided.
You see, one of my best friends married a Frenchman 10 years ago, had a child in '01. He never held a steady job, she was always the breadwinner, a kind and caring nurse. He was also a very berating kind of guy, insising on telling every friend they had that she was good for nothing, a slut, a drunk, and on and on, beating etc. We all knew better. Anyway, she finally filed for divorce 18 months ago and has undergone the most heinous of legislative bullshit. She has been forced to pay all bills: mortgage, utilities, insurance, taxes, daycare. He has taken a job with the Postal Service, has been there a year, and has not yet been ordered to pay a penny. They are still in the same house, living together. Two months ago she broke her leg, was on disability, and could not make all the payments. He made up the difference in the mortgage. She is now in contempt of court for not paying the bills. In one whole year he has not been required to show his income. She is entirely responsible for every bill coming in the house, including his cel phone, insurance, and clothing bill. In the meantime, he has presented her to the court as a drunk and a slut, which I assure you she is not, and has been made to drive 40 miles twice a week to give a urine sample.
So pleeeeez do not single this out as a MEN's issue. It is not.

Anonymous said...

"So pleeeeez do not single this out as a MEN's issue. It is not."

So you were able to name 1 out of, oh I dont know, several million cases where a woman was screwed over. Yes, he touches upon that in one sentence in his article.

It IS a men's issue. Funny how I know about 5-6 men who are burdened with 'child support' payments that the kids get zero percent of (I recall one co-worker whos ex-wife uses it to pay her cell phone bill), yet I know of no women who have the same problem. That is not a coincidence.

Al Newberry said...

Let's be honest. How many women are ordered to pay child support. It is a small minority. Will's article, because it focuses on the primary issue, does not necessarily deny that exceptions exist.

Anonymous said...

"You see, one of my best friends married a Frenchman 10 years ago, had a child in '01. He never held a steady job,..."

Her first mistake was marrying a Frenchman. If she married him as an immigrant with the hope of gaining citizenship for him, she is legally on the hook for him, because she is his sponsor, IIRC.

Will, as a person who has been inside the system as a white male father, I can tell you that you are right on the money.

I was no faulted by my ex and she left with the kid while I was in the Army in the early 80's. I admit we were too young to get married, but we could have made it work as I did love her and provided a good home for her and my daughter.

Anyway, I paid my child support faithfully, but I wasn't paying through the courts and so I ahd to hire a lawyer and have all copies of the cancelled checks to review by a judge.

I thought it was over after the hearing but I was threatened 2 more times after that. I was paying through the court, but now they decided I needed to pay directly to the state. So I ahd to hire a lawyer to show that I had been paying the county clerk and here are the checks.

When my ex moved to Oklahoma, she didn't even let me know. I was still paying to Texas (where the divorce was finalized) and I got a threatening letter from Oklahoma staing that I owed several hundred dollars. I contacted Texas and they faxed the clowns in Oklahoma that I was paid in full and didn't owe a dime. Oklahoma still got $300 garnished from my tax return.

I'm a good dad, I was / am involved in my daughter's life and we have a great relationship. It is just so sad how the deadbeat dad thing is used to beat down good people. Luckily, I had the resources to at least put up a fight. Most people don't and that is what the bureaucracy is counting on, be a good prole and pay the vig to the government.

As an aside, my present girlfriend was divorced with a daughter and was not ordered to pay a dime.

Anonymous said...

In a punitive echo of 18th century debtors prisons, the law now provides for revoking the drivers license and professional licenses of fathers who fall behind in child support. I say 'fathers' because although these laws theoretically apply to women, family courts almost automatically award custody of young children to women under the 'tender years' doctrine.

In a New Jersey courtroom, I saw a young man hauled before the judge in an orange jail jumpsuit. The judge informed him that his back child support had reached 'telephone book numbers,' and that he would be permitted to leave the county jail during the day to work. However, since his drivers license and plumbers license had been revoked, his only option was to find menial labor work within bus riding distance of the jail.

Clearly, it is contrary to the public interest, as well as the children's interest, to cripple the earning power of fathers who fall behind. Such laws are designed to humiliate, denigrate and destroy the father, not to get the child support debt paid.

Woe to the father who becomes unemployed! Getting a child support order modified should his income fall requires hiring a lawyer, often for a retainer of $1,500 or more, and with limited prospect of success. The system is not designed to accommodate fathers facing a financial emergency. Rather, it is designed to kick them in the teeth when they're down by imprisoning them.

Many of these child support cases were preceeded by trumped-up domestic violence claims, which is a whole other subject involving completely biased courts. Basically, in an impending divorce situation, it takes only one phone call to 911 alleging domestic violence for a woman to get hubby kicked out of the house -- probably permanently -- that very evening. If convicted (about a 99% probability, regardless of facts or evidence), he will permanently lose his right to own a gun.

Seeing the domestic violence and family courts in action, for even one day, will demonstrate with stomach-churning impact the complete absence of fairness, justice or search for truth in these venues. As Mr. Grigg stated, the heavy security in courthouses was necessitated because some brutalized male defendants crack under the cognitive dissonance of learning that, contrary to what they were taught all their lives, there is no justice in family courts and the deck is completely stacked against them.

wayimp said...

Thank you for having the courage to blog on this issue. Of all the evils of government in Amerika today, this must top them all. For those who have never seen the inside of a family court, they could never even imagine the half of it. I have seen more injustice than could fill a blog, and more diabolically insidious than police brutality or other topics that are usually addressed here. In the most corrupt politically-motivated courtrooms of Asia or Africa, they could scarce compare to the pure Satanic evil perpetrated against fathers and children in Amerika's family courts today.

James Redford said...

Police Sgt. Terrance Yeakey was clearly brutally tortured and murdered:

"Who Killed Terry Yeakey?," Pat Shannan http://www.riflewarrior.com/who_killed_terry_yeakey.htm

"Murder In The Heartland: Who Killed Terry Yeakey?," Pat Shannan http://www.patshannan.com/yeakey.html

"The Request to Re-open the Terry Yeakey Case," Craig Roberts, Tulsa PD, Ret., May 1, 2006 http://www.riflewarrior.com/chief_william_citty.htm

"The Murder of Oklahoma City Police Department Sgt. Terrance Yeakey," May 4, 2006 http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20060505151112667

On the matter of the illegal family courts (illegal, because no Constitutional legal rights apply with them), you raise a number of good points, Mr. Grigg. But the fundamental problem goes even deeper than the above analysis.

The fundamental issue here is the one of slavery. Once the notion is granted that people--whoever those people be--are entitled to another's labor when said other has not aggressed against them (and in the contrary case of an actual aggression, when the punishment exceeds proportionality), then horrors such as we find with the illegal family courts are inherent.

For more on that, see Chapter 14: "Children and Rights" in The Ethics of Liberty by Prof. Murray N. Rothbard (New York, N.Y.: New York University Press, 1998; originally published 1982) http://www.mises.org/rothbard/ethics/ethics.asp .

Beyond the most fundamental issue of slavery, by creating a system of enforced so-called "child support" and alimony payments, one necessarily creates a perverse incentive structure that rewards the creation of broken homes. That is, one subsidizes the activity.

Throughout all past human existence, the major benefit for women (in material terms, i.e., in terms of survival) for staying in committed relationships with men was the fact that the man's labor provided most of the energy and shelter requirements to sustain a woman's life and the life of her (and his) children.

But if a spouse can impose a state of slavery on the other partner to extract by violence such resources, so also the most vital of all reasons for staying together has been nullified.

By right, the woman has the naturally proper claim of custodial ownership of the children she births, since her body provided virtually all the atoms which make up her newborns. The father inherently has no natural claim of such custodial ownership rights, since his sperm was a "gift" (in the economic sense) to her. (This right obtains unless she significantly aggresses against her children, or abandons them.)

So, in the naturalistic sense, the incentive for the father in staying with his spouse (beyond whatever she herself brings to the table) is to be able to raise his children. (Of course, the typical sex-drive of a man is to create progeny far and wide, but this get into why there exists markedly different approaches to sex between men and women [i.e., generally speaking]: it's women's incentive to find a man who will care about raising his children and supporting her.)

It's not the fact that men's children are given to the mother for custodial ownership which would cause so many men to lose it, since that in of itself is not injustice. After all, if that were all it were about, he would at least still have his life as a free human being to get on with (or what passes for a free human among those with corrupted standards), and could look forward to seeing his children as circumstances allow and once they got older. Rather, it's that on top of not being able to raise his children, he is enslaved in a cold system, made by violence to support a woman whom is no longer with him (and whom may often hate him), and to putatively support children, of whom he is not allowed to raise. He is a pawn in other people's game, a rag-doll to be tossed about--no longer a self-owner (though he actually wasn't before, but here it becomes laid bare). But to crown all, this system which he is enslaved in is absurdist to Satanically clownish proportions, for it goes out of its way to forever ruin his life by unendingly presenting him with unresolvable Catch-22 situations and unmeetable demands, whereupon he is punished further in a nightmare that never ends when, quite predictably, he is unable to meet the demands. And so the process continues into a downward spiral.

The government has created a grotesque system of evilly genius dimensions. It manufactures the "criminals" it so so desperately needs on a figurative assembly line. The family courts are but one example of this. The same basic pattern, on a larger scale, was also put into mass-production with the psychotropic-prohibition wars. Although it's even far older than that, as governments creating their enemies in which to wage war against (and hence providing a rationale for diminishing the liberty of society in general) is quite ancient. It's just that they've honed it to a veritable razor-sharp science.

As Ayn Rand wrote in Atlas Shrugged (Random House, 1957):

""
"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against--then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it.

You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted--and you create a nation of law-breakers--and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."
""

Anonymous said...

Anonymous 12:22 PM wrote:
> As Mr. Grigg stated, the heavy security in courthouses was necessitated because some brutalized male defendants crack under the cognitive dissonance of learning that, contrary to what they were taught all their lives, there is no justice in family courts and the deck is completely stacked against them.

And then, to really set the gilded roof on it, you are deemed to have consented to the search.

Mark Odell

Anonymous said...

This is by the vast majority of cases an attack upon fathers. Satan is utilizing a wicked gov't to do this and marr the plan of God who said in the last verse of the OT (the very Scripture that lies between both testaments) that in these last days He is turning the hearts of the FATHERS to the children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest He come and smite the earth with a curse (Malachi 4:6).I am a father of 1 precious little boy and since 2001 have been grossly overcharged child support. There is no recalculating recourse even though anyone who can use a calculator can plainly see i was grossly overcharged. Who was charged and overcharged child support, the mother or the father? Who's stuck with a $17,000 arrearage by no fault of his own? The father. And yet the father has paid child support since 2001 but simply cannot possibly pay 60% of his income and still survive (due to living expenses and ongoing very expensive legal fees). I live in Texas and the judge who presided over the original case is Vicky Issacks (whose husband is Bruce Isaacks, former DA of Denton county). Vicky Isaacks is a wicked person/woman who hates men and has destroyed the lives of untold men and their precious children. Now the reaping is coming. Her own son is in big trouble with the law and has been involved in numerous criminal acts (Exod. 15:3).
www.SafeGuardYourSoul.com

Indy (Lou) Schneider said...

2007 December 7 Friday 19:58 GMT

Aloha, Will,

Stumbled on your blog via:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/foreign-policy-rp.html >

http://www.lewrockwell.com/ >

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2007/12/beware-war-propheteers.html

Wow. Great prose. Great links. Incisive and entertaining.

Encountering you in cyberspace make me think of a line from a song in the first Muppet Movie:

“The haven’t got a word yet,
for old friends who’ve just met.”

Would you accede to a draft to be Ron Paul’s running mate?

Mahalo nui loa,
Indy

Anonymous said...

I am sick of hearing about how bad fathers are treated in family court. I am a woman and a mother. I am a good mother and have never lived anything but a clean life. I have been stalked in the family courts by my child's father who just wanted to make me suffer through litigation and utilized the court system to do it. He also made our child suffer needlessly. I never tried to keep him from her, however he just wanted to make me a birth canal. This thing goes both ways. Stop the gender bullshit, that's how it all starts for everyone. The bottom line in that people need to stop looking to the government to settle their personal issues. Even if one is intelligent enough to not go that route the other parent gets sucked in. You can't just put the summons that accuses you of everything short of being a crack whore in the next door neighbor's mail box. You don't dare show up in court without a blood sucking attorney because the judge will treat you like shit. Wake up and realize it's about who's got the bucks and is sour grapes enough to spend even their own hard earned money on the system that is so corrupt that at this point I'd move to a third world country and live in a grass hut to get away from. I feel sorry for anyone who wanted to make a family work and gets the short end of the stick, but this constant trying to completely alientate children from one parent or the other is sick and disgusting. This country is becoming so dumb downed that nobody is going to deserve to have their children if they can't figure out that all their doing is subsidizing the system and making their children wards of the court.

kringle said...

I am a mother of two that had my two children taken from me. My ex wanted out of the marriage--I tried everything to keep the family together, but when someone doesn't want to stay nothing will ever work. He confessed to several affairs, drugs (pot & cocaine), alcohol, gambling. He left me alone with our two kids for 3 years before he finally decided to file. Once he did, I was accused of being an unfit mother. I have been treated like a criminal throughout this whole ordeal. I was a stay at home mom for 14 yrs and he never complained about my parenting. I was active in the kids schools and after school activities. I was doing nothing immoral or illegal--only minding my own business and raising two kids mainly on my own--helping with homework and getting the kids to baseball and gymnastics. Cooking supper and making sure they brushed their teeth and into bed at a decent time on school nights. Our two kids were my job and I worked hard at it and also maintaining a decent home. And both kids are very well behaved, well liked, responsible and honor students. The "War" can go either way. Some Fathers are now standing up and wanting to be recognized, or in my case-wanting to continue to control and hang on to their money. Depending on your judge and how much a dirty lawyer can cost is pretty much how you win in Alabama. It's a court of favors, who likes who, and the good ole boy system. My judge is female and is known to have it out for women, so I pretty much never had a chance. And since I was left without money I couldn't afford a lawyer who was willing to fight for what is right. My ex has gotten away with murder pretty much and I can't do a thing about it. I have been seaching for help, and cannot find any unless I can front the money. I now live in a house my parents pay for, see my son every other weekend--our daughter is now in college and thankfully out of her father's angry control, pay my ex child support out of a $1,800 a month check, owe a court appointed guardian over $3600 and had to pay a court appointed shrink $3500 to prove I wasn't crazy which my ex requested the testing. I requested drug test and had to pay for those even though the ex confessed to drug use. This court is so backward I am sure Boss Hog and Rosco are lurking in the hallways of the courthouse. So I am tired of hearing how the men are the ones to get cut out of their kids life. It happens to the mothers also and I am proof. I know several women this has happened to-one being a good friend of mine and she has been dealing with this for over 10 yrs--and her ex is a puncher and even has punched their son, giving him a black eye--this creep now has 50/50 visitation. Go figure

Anonymous said...

Rare that a writer has the bravery to speak the truth about what happens in the United States against ordinary men.

Mr. William Grigg may have been through the divorce process himself and or he is wise while listening to divorced people, not subscribing to the business as usual stereo-typing that occurs against men.

What is written in this article is true and accurate, yet more non-sense occurs against fathers that this article could not have the capacity to reveal to us.

At the end of the day, the only way for a man to avoid the feminist's (man bad, Woman good) legal trap is to not marry in a westernized culture, for example, U.K., United States, Australia, and more.

William I hope you do not get fired from your job for speak the truth that support men.

Anonymous said...

Judges and all thieves of souls SHOULD BE PUT TO DEATH!!! Ever read the Bible???

Exodus 21:16 And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.

So, while you rightly condemn the judicial and other thieving antiChrist pigs for their thefts of children, money, liberty and imprisonments of fathers, you say nay to the righteous execution of the same thieves.

Repent and believe the truth.

We should all say HalleluYah when we hear of judges like these and social workers and all AGENTS OF SODOM getting their just reward for serving their lord Satan.

Amen.

Anonymous said...

We males brought it all on our own heads. And this man hatred and misandric madness is just the beginning of it all.

Anonymous said...

Althought it is men that are most often victims of the government sponsored kidnapping and extortion racket known as the family court system, women too have been victims. Not just by being made the "nonparent" like men are often made into, but sometimes by a system that creates a "state of war"between parents that makes the man dig his heals in and refuse to pay for what he, correctly I might add, considers a criminal act committed against him and his children. The women with her state codefendants tries, often by draconian methods, to force dad pay her and her state codefendants.
This methodology never has and never will work.
What will work is the creation of a law that mandate joint physical custody and shared parenting. This removes the "state of war"that often existe, because it creates, after a time, a consciounable arrangement, ie a working arrangement where both parent are truely equal and both feel vindicated, ie the man get his rights restored and the women get help from the father and the old issues are no longer relevant to either parent, all that matters is the children belong to both of them and that these children do not deserve to be in the middle of a protracted conflict.
The real enemy is not women, or the mythical " deadbeat daddy" but the system, that is out of control and doesnot understand who works for whom.

Anonymous said...

Vickie Isaacks was forced out of office due to her son's 3 arrests. Her and her DA husband who was also voted out of office are full-blow scoundrels who need to be saved. Vickie Isaacks presided over my divorce case and for no good reason attacked me to no end with a huge child support payment (60% of my income) and didn't even give me standard visitation. BEWARE OF THIS WICKED WOMAN, NO MATTER WHAT SHE IS DOING NOW. SHE IS A HORRIBLE PERSON WITH A BLACK HEART!