Happy Father's Day

(This post is based on a previous one, entitled Witch Hunts in Contemporary America)

We thought that feminism was all (or mostly) about "date rape and sexual harassment" and the like, and we believed (or at least hoped) that perhaps the term "feminazis" was slightly exaggerated, finding the gals (and their male allies) slightly inoffensive and amusing; and so it is highly distressing to find our society has been warped and hamstrung for the past 30 years by related, if unrecognized, hysterics — with the government and the law on the side of the feminists (i.e., the statists and the state interventionists). What is double maddening (as we can read in the second and third next-to-last paragraphs) is how the bleeding-hearted liberals deliberately (if unconsciously (?)) create poverty and add ever more people to the ranks of the poor.

Just read what Stephen Baskerville reports from the trenches (emphasis in bold mine) in Taken Into Custody (The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family):

…the ideologues who control organized feminism today have found that the penal apparatus provides an effective instrument for waging gender warfare on the most personal level, institutionalizing feminist ideology within private life, and criminalizing individual men (and sometimes women) who fail to measure up to the feminist ideal of ideologically correct behavior in their private lives…

Child custody is not the only area where feminists have discovered they can commandeer the criminal justice system to punish ideologically incorrect private behavior, and certainly it is not the best known. Their agenda in more politically salient issues such as date rape and sexual harassment has commanded far more media and scholarly attention (where it is frequently characterized as "totalitarian"). "Feminism today, in its erasure of the boundaries between public and private, is writing a new chapter in the dystopian tradition of surveillance and unfreedom," observes Daphne Patai, "… whereby one's every gesture, every thought, is exposed to the judgment of one's fellow citizens."

Yet while the trends are connected, the intrusive tendencies of law governing sexual harassment or date rape are minor compared to the invasiveness government-enforced feminism has already realized in family law. Yet this receives no comparable scrutiny from critics of feminism, let alone from the mainstream media or civil libertarians. As recently as 1996 a scholarly critique of "feminine jurisprudence" did not address family law at all. Nevertheless, we were warned then that "through the use of civil rather than criminal law for purposes of censorship, and under the guise of legislating equality, large areas of speech are becoming per se illegal, unbeknownst to the majority of Americans."

…Ostensibly scientific feminist scholarship is similarly revealing. Fathers trying to see their children following unproven accusations is described as "further violence" and the "threat of kidnapping"; simply responding to court proceedings is described as "violence." One highly influential feminist scholar claims to have examined 100,000 cases where women "reported" that "the batterer threatened to kidnap their children," "batterers had threatened legal custody action," and "the battering man used court-ordered visitation as an occasion to continue verbal and emotional abuse of the woman." This is not violence; it is fathers trying to recover their children through the same legal process by which their children were removed and which, in most cases, they themselves did not initiate.

…What we confront here is a bureaucratic machine of a kind that has never before been seen in the United States or the other English-speaking democracies. … The implications reach far beyond fathers and even beyond the family itself, for forcibly severing the intimate bond between parents and their children threatens the liberties of all of us. "The right to one's own children … is perhaps the most basic individual right," writes Susan Shell, "so basic we hardly think of it." By establishing a private sphere of life from which the state is excluded, family bonds also serve as the foundation of a free society. "No known society treats the question of who may properly call a child his or her own as simply … a matter to be decided entirely politically as one might distribute land or wealth," Shell continues.

…To understand what is at work here, it is necessary to examine and discard some legal jargon that serves more to obfuscate than to illuminate. Foremost is the term "custody," which I have adopted in my title. Common sense notions of young children needing their mother — along with the mistaken belief that fathers are behind the dissolution of most marriages — lead many people to accept the overwhelming bias towards mothers in custody decisions. But it is important to understand that "custody" is not the right to parent one's children; it is the power to prevent someone else from parenting his children and to marshal the penal apparatus — courts, police, and jails — to ensure he stays away from them. [Similarly, it would be more correct to speak of plundered pops than deadbeat dads.]

…Contrary to popular belief (and centuries of common-law precedent), child support today has nothing to do with fathers abandoning their children, reneging on their marital vows, of even agreeing to a divorce. It is automatically assessed on all non-custodial parents, even those divorced over their objections and who lose their children through no legal fault or agreement of their own. It is an entitlement, in short, for all divorcing mothers…

…child support is no longer primarily a method for requiring men to take responsibility for the offspring they have sired and then abandoned, as most people are led to believe. Overwhelmingly it is now a regime whereby "a father is forced to finance the filching of his own children."

…Ironically, the one thing that cannot be debated in the court is legal guilt or innocence — such as violating the marriage contract or leveling false accusations. For to admit the most rudimentary notions of justice would be to undermine the logic of the proceeding.

…In the jargon of family law, faithfully parroted by the media and academia, this father has "lost custody," a simple and harmless enough sounding formulation of events, so common as to be mundane. But this jargon disguises far-reaching implications. In plain English, this father's unauthorized association with his own children is now a crime.

…the media will go to any lengths to avoid admitting that we are in a massive epidemic of government-sponsored child stealing. So pervasive is the demonization of fathers today that fathers themselves share in it even after they have become its victims. "It is typical for a man to believe … the media myth of the Evil Male," writes Robert Seidenberg. "While he knows that he is a great father himself, he thinks everybody else is a deadbeat dad."

…The growth of this machinery has been accompanied by a huge propaganda campaign that has served to justify punitive measures against citizens who are not convicted of any crime. "is there a species on the planet who is more unjustly maligned than fathers?" writes columnist Naomi Lakritz. "Fathers are abusers, bullies, deadbeats, molesters, and all-around sexist clods who have a lot of gall wanting a relationship with their children once the intital moment of conception is over."

… "The overwhelming majority of so-called 'dead-beat dads' are just judicially created," says [an] attorney. "Why all this talk about so-called 'deadbeat dads'? Because there is a lot of money to be made through that myth." … Contrary to highly publicized but inaccurate figures on the cost of divorce to women, peer-reviewed economic research concluded that "it is the non-custodial parent, usually the father, who suffers the most [from divorce]."

…The December 1999 issue of Government Executive, a trade journal that describes itself as "government's business magazine" representing public and private bureaucracies, ran a cover story that blared out, "Where's Dad? HHS is leading a forceful change to make deadbeat parents pay up." … Strikingly, the article never addressed its own question, the most likely answer being that Dad is being kept away by the government.

…"We're ratcheting up the pressure on these deadbeats," Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano tells the New York Post, which allows its pages to be used to publicly "shame" citizens who have been convicted of no crime by publishing their photograph. Were these citizens wanted for murder, they would be described as "suspects," but the government and media have already convicted them.

…social scientists have found that as much as 95 percent of fathers having no unemployment problems for the previous five years pay their ordered child support regularly, and that 81 percent paid in full and on time. Columnist Kathleen Parker concluded that "the 'deadbeat dad' is an egregious exaggeration, a caricature of a few desperate men who for various reasons — sometimes pretty good ones — fail to hand over their paycheck, assuming they have one." Deborah Simmons of the Washington Times observes that "there is scant evidence that crackdowns … serve any purpose other than to increase the bank accounts of those special-interest groups pushing enforcement."

…The federal Office of Child Support Enforcement and its state affiliates now maintain an army of some 60,000 enforcement agents (13 times that of the Drug Enforcement Administration, which has about 4,600 agents worldwide) … What may be most striking about this police mobilization is that the initiative has come entirely from government officials. No public outcry ever preceded these measures, nor did any public perception of such a problem exist until government officials began saying they did … Needless to say, the voices of pursued parents are seldom heard amid the chorus of condemnation. The bipartisan certainty of their guilt is sufficient to set aside their right to trial and declare them public enemies by general acclaim. Yet there is reason to believe that this problem is largely an optical illusion and that what is being portrayed as irresponsible fathers is in reality a massive abuse of government power.

… What is taking place here should be made very clear: Citizens who are completely innocent of any legal wrongdoing and simply 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 proceeds over to lawyers and other cronies they never hired. Summoning legally unimpeachable citizens to court and forcing them to empty their bank accounts to people they have neither hired for services they have requested nor received on threat of physical punishment is what most people would call a protection racket. Were any other public officials to use their position of public trust to coerce money out of private citizens, they would likely face indictment. Yet family court judges do this as a matter of routine. This is by far the clearest example I have ever encountered in my professional research of what we political scientists term a "kleptocracy," or government by thieves.

…The regime of involuntary divorce, forcible removal of children, coerced child support, and knowingly false accusations is now warping our entire legal system, undermining and overturning principles of common law that have protected individual rights for centuries. The presumption of innocence has been inverted

…It is always tempting to dismiss such violations as aberrations, the result of excess by a few overzealous officials, since civil and human rights are violated be every government, even in democracies. Yet considered in the light of constitutional principle, the destruction of ancient protections is clearly systematic with the nation's family courts and endemic to a governmental regime whose very existence is predicated and dependent on the power to remove children from their parents. Far from simple violations of particular constitutional clauses, these practices and powers are undermining constitutional government in its most fundamental principles. The power to take children from their parents for no reason is arbitrary government at its most intrusive, since it invades and obliterates all of private life. Yet we have created a governmental machinery that exists for no other purpose.

…But what may be most insidious — because it undermines the material foundations of constitutional government — is when systematic means are mobilized to finance unconstitutional government operations. Like any system of accountable government, the divorce regime can only be sustained so long as it can be paid for. This is the effect of the system of child support, coerced on pain of incarceration whose children have been seized by the courts literally through "no fault" of their own.

…The federal funding also supplies an added incentive to make guidelines as onerous as possible and to squeeze every dollar from every parent available (as well as to turn as many parents as possible into payers by providing financial incentives for mothers to divorce)…

Perhaps most destructive is that this federal funding is subsidizing middle-class divorce and fatherless children. "While the new measures resulted in virtually no measurable improvement in the lives of impoverished single-mother families,' [Robert] Seidenberg points out, "it did create a windfall of income for middle-class and upper-middle-class divorced women." Misleadingly promoted as a measure to help poor children whose mostly young and unmarried fathers had allegedly abandoned them, the new laws ended up as a means to plunder middle-aged and middle-class fathers who had done no such thing and whose children were taken from them through literally "no fault" or agreement of their own. Empirical evidence indicates that this is precisely the effect. Economist Robert Willis calculates that child-support levels vastly exceeding the cost of raising children creates "an incentive for divorce by the custodial mother. His analysis indicates that only between one-fifth and one-third of child-support payments are actually used for the children; the rest is profit for the custodial parent. "We believe that this recent entitlement," write two other scholars, "… has led to the destruction of families by creating financial incentives to divorce [and] the prevention of families by creating financial incentives not to marry upon conceiving a child."

This simply extends well-established findings that increased welfare payments result in increased divorce. In this case, however, a dimension of law enforcement is added, which effectively becomes a system of federal divorce enforcement … In other words, a mother can simply escape the uncertainties, vicissitudes, and compromises inherent to life shared with a working husband by divorcing, whereupon she acquires the police as a private collection agency who will force him, at gunpoint if necessary, to pay her the family income that she then controls alone.

…The pursuit of these fathers by armed federal agents has now reached the dimensions of a national witch hunt, by far the most extensive this country has ever seen … A look at the government machinery reveals that it 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.

…Men who are truly intent on abandoning their progeny have little difficulty in disappearing; it is fathers who want to see their children who allow themselves to be snared. This may reveal the cruelest and most cynical side of the child-support machine: its willingness to use a father's love for his children to plunder and destroy him.…

To the question of why so many ejected fathers are unemployed or penurious, this is not to difficult to answer once one understands how the courts operate. Once the children are separated from their father, neither the courts nor the bureaucracy has much incentive to ensure his continued solvency — indeed, a solvent father is a threat — so they can happily reduce him to penury. After all, a fresh supply of fathers is constantly being brought into the system. The myopia was starkly illustrated during periodic controversies over whether to give child support priority over other debts in bankruptcy proceedings, when noone stops to ask the obvious question of why so many allegedly well-heeled "deadbeats" were going through bankruptcy in the first place…

To what extent child support is responsible for the very poverty it is claimed to alleviate is unclear. It has long been known that the vast majority of the homeless are male. Widespread anecdotal evidence suggests that family courts may be partially responsible for their plight.

…Do these questions matter? Yes, they do matter, because in these questions lies the difference between a father who is pursued because he has abandoned his children and a father who is pursued because he refuses to abandon his children. Courts exist to dispense justice against those who violate the law or agreements. When they abandon this role to become a "social service delivery system" it is much more likely that the justice and penal systems will be perverted to persecute the innocent.