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!

Globalizing America's "Divorce Regime"

A “single `no’ vote” by the Idaho Legislature disrupted “the finely crafted choreography” behind a UN child support treaty, laments the New York Times. Unless this is reversed in a special legislative session, the paper tremulously informed its dwindling band of readers, the legal architecture of international child support enforcement could collapse.

This prospect is treated as an incipient catastrophe, rather than an outcome greatly to be desired. Threatened with the punitive withdrawal of federal funding, Idaho Governor Butch Otter called for a special legislative session on May 18 to “correct” the previous action. Ratifying the UN child support treaty, Otter predicts, should take “hours, not days.” Regrettably, Otter’s prediction will probably be validated. 

Shortly before the end of the regular legislative session, a group of nine Republican legislators voted to table a measure designated SB 1067. That bill would have reconfigured Idaho’s child support enforcement (CSE) practices to conform with the dictates of the 2007 UN Convention on the International Recovery of Child Support and Other Forms of Family Maintenance (hereafter called the Hague Convention).

Rep. Nate.

Rep. Ronald M. Nate, who was among those who voted against releasing the bill from the House Judiciary Committee, objected that under the terms of the agreement, “Idaho could be stuck enforcing unfair and ill-gotten CSE orders made in foreign countries.” That much is incontestable: Article 28 of the Convention does specify that “There shall be no review by any competent authority … of the merits of a decision” handed down by judicial bodies overseas. This would be done for the benefit of bureaucracies, not the children whose interests they supposedly represent. 

The Hague Convention identifies parties to child support disputes as “creditors” – those to whom payments are due – and “debtors” – those from whom payments are to be extracted. Article 36 (1) of the instrument expands the term “creditor” to include a government entity “acting in place of an individual to whom maintenance is owed.” Section (2) of that provision decrees that “The right of a public body to act in place of an individual to whom maintenance is owed … shall be governed by the law to which the body is subject.”

Under those terms, CSE judgments made in foreign jurisdictions would indeed be enforceable within states that ratify the compact.  This led opponents of the bill to denounce its impact on “state sovereignty,” reflecting the widely held and morally unsupportable belief that it is entirely appropriate for government to intrude in private disputes as long as the entity doing so is geographically proximate. 

Such intrusion is unthinkable when carried out by officious, unaccountable bureaucrats with unfamiliar names and accents who live overseas – yet it is somehow appropriate when done by functionaries of that kind who share the same ZIP code, or at least live within the same national tax jurisdiction.

The Hague Convention is evil not because it would import foreign law, but rather because it exports and universalizes a hideous and tyrannical social engineering scheme.  America’s child support enforcement system follows the familiar formula: Find a policy that doesn’t work, subsidize it lavishly, connect it to a huge and expanding constellation of constituencies, and enforce it ruthlessly.

Presiding over this Hydra-like syndicate of extortion and state terror is the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OSCE), with state-level affiliates acting as its tentacles. To understand the scope of the Regime's war on non-custodial parents, this comparison is useful: In 2007, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the point of the spear in the "war on drugs," employed a total of 4,600 armed field agents; the OSCE at the time boasted more than 60,000 enforcement agents, all of whom are permitted to carry firearms under the "Deadbeat Parents Enforcement Act." 

In his horrifying study Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fatherhood, Dr. Stephen Baskerville examines what he calls the “Divorce Regime.”

"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,” writes Dr. Baskerville. When a family is broken up, each child "becomes a walking bundle of cash" -- not for the custodial parent, but for a huge and expanding population of tax-devouring officials who "adopt as their mission in life the practice of interfering with other people's children." 

"A parent [usually – but not always -- a father] whose children are taken away by a family court is only at the beginning of his troubles,” elaborates Dr. Baskerville. “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 likely that the order will be backdated, so he will already be a delinquent as he steps out of the courtroom. If the ordered amount is high enough, and the backdating is far enough, he will be an instant felon and subject to immediate arrest."

Dr. Baskerville’s assessment is neither partisan nor particularly controversial.

“The problem begins with child support orders that, at the outset, can exceed parents’ ability to pay,” acknowledged the New York Times shortly before the paper condemned the Idaho Legislature for impeding efforts to globalize the CSE system. “When parents fall short, the authorities escalate collection efforts, withholding up to 65 percent of a paycheck, seizing bank deposits and tax refunds, suspending driver’s licenses and professional licenses, and then imposing jail time.”

Sarah Geraghty, an attorney with the Southern Center for Human Rights, explained to the Times that parents “who are truly destitute go to jail over and over again for child support debt simply because they’re poor…. We see many cases in which the person is released, they’re given three months to pay a large amount of money, and then if they can’t do that they’re tossed back in the county jail.”

In many jurisdictions, notes the Times, “support orders are based not on the parent’s actual income but `imputed income’ – what they would be expected to earn if they had a full-time, minimum wage or median wage job.” In one case that is probably not unique, a man spent more than a decade making court-imposed child support payments for the supposed benefit of  someone else’s biological daughter.

For thirteen years, Houston resident Willie Carson endured wage garnishments despite the fact that a DNA test proved he wasn’t the father of the child in question. 

Notwithstanding recent judicial recognition of that fact, Carson is still liable under what Texas calls the “law” for $21,000 in overdue payments and accumulated interest – not to the teenage girl, whom Carson has never met, but to the state agencies supposedly representing her interests.

That story presents the reality of the CSE system in microcosm. It exists to sustain itself; the children are useful as assets – and, where necessary, as hostages. After Idaho legislators refused to play their scripted role by ratifying Idaho’s involvement in the UN child support treaty, the Regime in Washington threatened to withhold $46 million in CSE program subsidies. According to some calculations, this would deprive “Idaho’s children” – or at least the bureaucracies who supposedly represent their interests -- of up to $200 million in child support transfers

Press coverage dutifully recites the claim that 155,000 Idaho families would suffer because of the intransigence of a handful of “extremists” at the statehouse – without sparing a moment to contemplate the unreasonable stubbornness of the extremist in the White House. After all, according to the official narrative, the Obama administration is willing to inflict suffering on children to punish the state for its political deviationism. This assumes that the children in question actually benefit from the system – which, as we’ve seen, isn’t the case – and that the system is morally supportable – which it manifestly is not.

The CSE system, as Janelle T. Calhoun documented  in the Mercer Law Review, is a “Juggernaut of Bureaucracy” that grew out of the welfare system. Prior to the enactment of the Aid for Families with Dependent Children program eighty years ago, there was little government involvement in child support matters, and no federal involvement whatsoever.

The AFDC program (now known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF) enshrined in federal policy the principle of parens patriae – the State as father. Through AFDC, “the government became a provider for America’s children,” commented litigator Daniel Robert Zmijewski, casually endorsing the proposition that children are a collective “asset” of the nation-state.

While this began with children in households receiving federal transfer payments, that claim was quickly expanded to encompass all children residing within the United States. As GK Chesterton observed, describing how this process unfolded in Great Britain a few decades earlier, the State appointed itself “not the guardian of some abnormal children, but the guardian of all normal children.”

There’s nothing new in that arrangement, nor is it a recent discovery that it cannot possibly work. In Book II of his Politics, Aristotle condemned the idea that children are in some sense “community” property: “Each citizen will have a thousand sons who will not be his sons individually, but anybody will be equally the son of anybody, and will therefore be neglected by all alike.”

In keeping with the iron law of social engineering – “Each intervention will create an indefinitely self-sustaining cycle of failures and `reforms’” – the welfare system created during the New Deal underwent several refinements, each of which resulted in more deeply entrenched poverty and a corresponding expansion of an intractable bureaucracy.

Like Stalin-era agricultural commissars blaming “Kulaks” or perversely consistent bad weather for their perennial harvest shortfalls, those presiding over Washington’s welfare bureaucracy indicted “deadbeat Dads” for the predictable failure of a system that encouraged and subsidized the destruction of family commitments. This led to creation of the federal CSE apparatus, which amplifies the misery of single parents and neglected children while acting as a major tributary feeding the vast river of misery that is the American prison system.

This brings up a transgressive question at least one “mainstream” legal commentator was willing to ask: Why do we allow the government to pretend that being a “deadbeat Dad” is an offense that falls within its jurisdiction?

Failure to pay child support “is not a crime,” writes defense attorney and CNN legal analyst Danny Cevallos. Although some states criminalize delinquency in child support payments, this is “rightly a civil matter. Skipping child support court should similarly not be a crime either.” The current approach is “bill collection, only with a collection agency bristling with lethal and other weapons, and acting under color of law.”

Writing in 1992, prior to the most recent enhancement of the federal CSE system and the attempt to globalize it via the Hague Convention, Janelle Calhoun reported that the default rate for child support payments “is nearly 50%” compared to “a default rate of only 3% for car loans….”

She offered that comparison without fully appreciating its significance: Lenders who underwrote automobile purchases enjoyed a 97% compliance rate without threatening borrowers with imprisonment or death as punishment for default. The penalty for failure to make car loan payments is repossession of the vehicle, coupled with a stain in one’s credit history.

Acting in the "best interests of the child."

For someone who is suited by character and disposition to be a parent, no conceivable punishment is worse than being deprived of the company of his or her child. 

For those who treat marriage in covenantal terms, preserving that union – where possible -- for the benefit of the children is a responsibility dictated by honor and enforced through the intangible but effective pressure of solemn commitments made in the presence of honorable people. The State – a fictive entity devised to justify violence and plunder -- cannot compel honorable behavior.

For most of our nation’s history, marriage was treated as a commercial contract. In my view, that derogates from the true meaning of the institution – but even that arrangement was preferable to the one that currently prevails.

“Thirty years ago, with no public discussion of consequences, no-fault divorce laws effectively ended marriage as a legal contract and precluded couples from entering binding agreements to raise children,” points out Dr. Baskerville. “Deception was involved from the start. Laws advertised as allowing divorce by mutual consent actually created unilateral divorce, permitting one spouse to dissolve a marriage without accepting any liability for the consequences.”

Rather than recognizing marriage as a private contract, and removing it entirely from the purview of government, the “no-fault” enactments “created a public-private complex of judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, mediators, counselors, social workers, child support agents, and others with a vested interest in perpetuating divorce,” Dr. Baskerville continues:

“Whatever pieties these practitioners voice about the plight of fatherless, poor, abused, and violent children, the fact remains that their livelihood depends on a steady supply of such children. The children of divorce fill government coffers, fuel political patronage, expand police powers, justify surveillance of citizens, and create a host of problems for officials to solve – to which [has been] added the problem of creating more healthy marriages.”

The “child support enforcement” system helps sustain this vast and ever-metastasizing population of privileged parasites – which is why demolition of that system is an urgent necessity.

Click here to download or listen to the most recent Freedom Zealot Podcast.
For updates, please follow me on Twitter.

If you can, please donate to help keep Pro Libertate online. Thank you, and God bless!

Dum spiro, pugno!

When the State Breaks a Man

"How much does the State weigh?" Josef Stalin asked an underling who had been ordered to extract a confession from an enemy of his regime. Stalin understood that, given enough time, agents of State-sanctioned cruelty can break any man.


Thomas J. Ball, who committed suicide by self-immolation on the steps of New Hampshire's Cheshire County Courthouse on June 15, was a man who had been broken by the State. A lengthy suicide note/manifesto he sent to the Keene Sentinel, which was published the day after his death , described how his family had been destroyed, and his life ruined, through the intervention of a pitiless and infinitely cruel bureaucracy worthy of Stalin's Soviet Union: The Granite State's affiliate of the federal "domestic violence" Cheka. 

Ball and his family were casualties in what he calls a federal "war on men." He wasn't exaggerating -- and he has a lot of company.

The federally subsidized domestic violence industry operates a bit like the hypothetical Von Nuemann Machine: Placed into a material-rich environment, it will sustain and replicate itself by destroying and assimilating everything within its field of influence. One useful sci-fi example is the robotic Planet Killer from the Star Trek episode "The Doomsday Machine" -- an immense, funnel-shaped engine of destruction propelled by the remnants of the worlds it destroys (according to one deutero-canonical source, the Planet Killer uses the same material to generate replicas of itself). 

That monstrous device was "self-sustaining as long as there are bodies ... for it to feed on." The same is true, of course, of the State and all of its components -- including what Dr. Baskerville calls "The Divorce Regime."

As Baskerville points out in his horrifying study Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fatherhood, "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." When a family is broken up, each child "becomes a walking bundle of cash" -- not for the custodial parent, but for a huge and expanding population of tax-fattened functionaries who "adopt as their mission in life the practice of interfering with other people's children." 


Thomas Ball, like millions of others, learned that the people who choose this profession have an unfailing ability to exploit even the tiniest opportunity to invade a home and destroy a family.

One evening in April 2001, Mr. Ball suffered a momentary lapse of patience with a disobedient four-year-old daughter and slapped her face. He left the house at his wife's suggestion. When he called her a short time later, he learned that his wife -- "the type that believes that people in authority actually know what they are talking about" -- had called the police, who told her that her "abusive" husband wasn't permitted to sleep in his own home that night. Ball was arrested at work the following day. Under the conditions of his bail, he wasn't allowed to ask his wife what had possessed her to call the police. 

Years later Ball would learn that if his wife hadn't called the police and accused her husband of abuse, she would have been arrested as an accessory -- leaving the children at the mercy of New Hampshire's utterly despicable Division of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF). 

Dot Knightly, who tried vainly for years to win custody of three grandchildren seized on the basis of spurious abuse and neglect accusations, recounts how a DCYF commissar contemptuously batted away both her pleas and her abundant qualifications to serve as a custodial caretaker: "Nobody gets their kids back in New Hampshire. The government gives us the power to decide how these cases turn out. Everyone who fights us loses." 

Despairing over being wrested away from everyone he loved, Dot's grade-school age grandson Austin -- who had literally been dragged screaming from his grandparents' home -- tried to commit suicide. This led to confinement in a psychiatric hospital and involuntary "treatment" with mind-destroying psychotropic drugs. For New Hampshire's child-snatchers, the phrase "nobody gets their kids back" translates into a willingness to destroy the captive children by degrees, rather than allow any successful challenge to their supposed authority.

The instant the police intervened in the domestic affairs of Thomas Ball's household, his family's destruction became inevitable. The officers were required -- not by law, but by official policy that followed profit incentives created by Washington -- to make an arrest. In a similar fashion, and for the same reason, prosecutors are forbidden to drop domestic abuse cases under any circumstances. 

Ball recalled that he was eventually found not guilty, much to the visible disgust of the be-robed dispenser of official injustice who presided at the trial. But this made no material difference: His wife -- who divorced him six months after his arrest -- was now a consort of the State, his children were its property. His innocence notwithstanding, Ball was given an open-ended sentence of serfdom -- and the prospect of being sent to debtor's prison -- through government-mandated "child support" system. Furthermore, he wasn't permitted to see his children, despite the fact that a jury had found him innocent.

"I lost visitation with my two daughters when I got arrested. One was the victim-the other was the witness. After a not guilty, I expected to get visitation with my girls. But the divorce judge ... decreed that counseling was in order and they would decide when we would reunite." 

The policy options that are rewarded by federal subsidies don't include allowing an innocent man to reunite with his children. Consigning him to the State-aligned "domestic counseling" industry -- which was apparently co-designed by August Mobius and Franz Kafka -- is a much more profitable alternative.


"Judges routinely use our children as bargaining chips," Ball explained. "Get the adult into counseling, continue the case for a year, and then drop it. This will open up the docket for the new arrests coming in next week. These judges that use our children are not honorable. Which is why I never use the term 'Your Honor' any more. I just call them judge."

Ball's experiences, once again, are all but identical to those endured by millions of others. Dr. Baskerville offers a potent and infuriating summary:


"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 of 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, thought it is likely that the order will be backdated, so he will already be a delinquent as he steps out of the courtroom. If the ordered amount is high enough, and the backdating is far enough, he will be an instant felon and subject to immediate arrest."


The sinews of this system are the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement (OSCE) and its state-level affiliates. Some idea of the scope of the Regime's war on fathers is found in this comparison: In 2007, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the spearhead of the "war on drugs," employed a total of 4,600 armed field agents; the OSCE at the time boasted more than 60,000 enforcement agents, all of whom are permitted to carry firearms under the "Deadbeat Parents Enforcement Act." 


When brought to bear against an isolated individual, the weight of this State apparatus will eventually destroy the victim. With each year, Ball's financial condition deteriorated and he became deeply mired in intractable despair. By the time he ended his life on June 16, Ball was a 58-year-old Vietnam Era Army Veteran who had been unemployed for two years. Owing to the fact that he couldn't pay the amount of child support extorted from him, Ball was quite likely going to be sent to jail on the following morning.

His only consolation, the company of his children, was sadistically withheld from him. The unfathomably arrogant and completely unaccountable functionaries who did so are people who have learned how to monetize the misery of the innocent.


Ball's manifesto is a work of tortured eloquence. Rather than being the chaotic outpouring of a deranged personality, the letter is cogently organized, laden with impressive amounts of detailed research, and admirably epigrammatic. The lucidity Ball displayed in explaining his decision to kill himself by the most painful method imaginable underscores not merely the depth of his despair but also of the entrenched corruption and viciousness of the people who had demolished his family. 


The leitmotif in Ball's letter is the phrase "Second Set of Books," a phrase that refers to the "policies, procedures and protocols" actually followed by bureaucrats and their enforcers in defiance of the "First Set of Books" -- that is, the federal and state constitutions. 

"You never cover the Second Set of Books your junior year in high school," Ball pointed out. That because we are not suppose to have a Second Set of Books." The Second Set of Books contain writings that are too holy to be inspected by mere Mundanes. Those of us who don't belong to the Sanctified Brotherhood of Official Coercion are required to behave as if there is some continuing relevance to the First Set of Books. Maintaining this official fiction is necessary in order to convince the credulous -- well, those who pay attention to such matters -- that it is possible to receive redress of grievances through the same system that has aggrieved them.

Like millions of other victims of the State's "domestic violence" apparatus, Ball came to understand that the system cannot be reformed from within:


"On one hand we have the law. On the other hand we have what we are really going to do-the policies, procedures and protocols. The rule of law is dead. Now we have 50 states with legal systems as good as any third world banana republic. Men are demonized and the women and children end up as suffering as well. So boys, we need to start burning down police stations and courthouses. The Second Set of Books originated in Washington. But the dirty deeds are being carried out by our local police, prosecutors and judges." 

Tunisian martyr Mohamad Bouazizi shortly before his death.

 Rather than voting them out, Ball insists that it is necessary to "Burn Them Out" through arson attacks on the appropriate bureaucratic facilities. 

He hoped that his self-immolation would be the symbolic spark that would ignite that revolution --  just as a similar desperate act by Tunisian street vendor Mohamad Bouazizi sparked a nation-wide rebellion against the fetid dictatorship ruling that country.

While I hope that God has granted rest to Ball's tortured soul, and pray for the comfort of his family, it must be said that his proposed strategy is as tragically mistaken as his suicide. 

Rather than attacking the architectural manifestations of the State, we should withdraw from contact with it. In other words, don't call the police under any circumstances, and insulate your family, to the extent possible, from any contact with "welfare" bureaucracies of every kind. This will mean being prepared as parents to take appropriate evasive action when one of the State's tentacles reaches out, with malign intent, in the direction of one's children. It also means being prepared and able to employ purely defensive force where all other alternatives have failed. 


Human beings have an instinctive, primordial fear of fire. Burning to death is a prolonged agony in which pain receptors operate at full capacity. The torment Thomas Ball experienced was sufficient, in his mind, to eclipse the horrors of death by fire. 

On the same day that this tortured man poured gasoline on his body and struck a match, pundit Ann Coulter used her syndicated column to emit a thick stream of snotty abuse at Rep. Ron Paul and others who insist that the State must be removed entirely from any role in regulating or overseeing marriage and the family.


Hey, Ann-- do you get the point now? 

My thanks to everyone who has donated to help keep the Pro Libertate blog (as well as Pro Libertate Radio) on-line. I'm sending a copy of Global Gun Grab to anyone who donates $10 or more. Use the PayPal button below, or contact me via e-mail (WNGrigg[at]msn[dot]com) for snail mail directions. Thanks again, and God bless!

  

Be sure to tune in each Sunday afternoon from 4:00-6:00 Central Time for Pro Libertate Radio on the Liberty News Radio Network.

Dum spiro, pugno!