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Nanny State Clobbers Fathers’ Rights in Court

Stephen Baskerville, September 2000

Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore has been calling for yet another crackdown on "deadbeat dads," with a view toward sending more to jail. The House of Representatives, meanwhile, passed the Fathers Count Act of 1999, which commits $150 million to promote fatherhood and reconnect fathers with their children.

These two measures might seem to indicate a contradictory national love-hate relationship with fathers. Yet in some ways they are two sides of the same coin, which is the government involving itself in the most private corner of our lives: the family. The state promotes fatherhood but denigrates fathers. The state defines fatherhood and punishes fathers who fail to measure up.

What Democrats are promoting as a crackdown and some Republicans are furthering through a social program is based on assumptions about husbands and fathers that increasingly are recognized to be untenable. It now has been more than a year since psychologist Sanford Braver, in the largest federally funded study ever undertaken on the subject, conclusively demonstrated that the so-called "deadbeat dad," who deserts his children and evades child support, largely is a myth. Braver confirmed previous studies showing that it overwhelmingly is mothers, not fathers, who are walking away from marriages and that most forcibly divorced fathers pay child support when they are employed. Columnist Kathleen Parker likewise has written 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 paychecks, assuming they have one." Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West, coauthors of The War Against Parents, also question the state’s war against fathers, calling it "ugly and fierce."

The deadbeat dad is typically a fully responsible and loving father who has been divorced over his objections, whose children then have been taken with no evidence of wrongdoing on his part and who has been thoroughly plundered by a powerful machine of judges, lawyers, psychotherapists and enforcement bureaucrats. Once the state has seized control of his children, a father can be forced to pay almost any amount for attorneys’ fees, psychotherapy and child support (which his children may never see); he can be summoned to court so often he loses his job; and he can be jailed without charge, trial or counsel.

It is especially ironic that conservatives should be silent on this abuse, for every prophecy about the dangers of judicial tyranny, bureaucratic expansion and feminist extremism is being fulfilled in the government’s unrelenting war on fathers.

Many are upset about the trial lawyers’ plundering of tobacco companies and gun manufacturers. Yet lawyers loot vastly more from fathers -- private individuals who are much less able to defend themselves or their children’s patrimony from the shakedown of court-ordered attorney’s fees, for which they can be jailed for not paying.

Conservative critics are unsettled at the costs imposed on business by bureaucratic regulators. But many more fathers are reduced to servitude by bureaucratic courts and police who, in violation of the separation of powers, set the very child-support guidelines they also apply and enforce and which they have a vested interest in making as onerous as possible. By establishing crushing burdens that may consume a man’s entire salary, these agents create the very "deadbeats" they are pursuing and generate demand for an ever-larger coercive enforcement bureaucracy with ever-more intrusive powers.

We hear the term "totalitarian" used to characterize the criminalization of private behavior through sexual-harassment and date-rape laws. But the criminalization of fathers is far more invasive and follows the forced dissolution of their families, the invasion of their homes, the

raiding of their bank accounts, the micromanagement of their personal and family lives, the use of their children as informers and coerced psychotherapy. Fathers and children also are separated by protective orders that are issued without any evidence of wrongdoing and that cannot protect anyone because they serve to criminalize not violence (which of course already is criminal) but a father’s contact with his own children.

It might be one thing if all this somehow benefited children, but it is destroying them. It now is well-known that every major social pathology of our time -- including violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse, unwed pregnancy, truancy and suicide -- all correlate more strongly to fatherless homes than to any other factor. It also is established beyond doubt that removing the father from the home dramatically increases the exposure of children to violence and sexual abuse -- up to 33 times, according to a British study.

Yet, ironically, the new awareness of fatherhood is appropriated by politicians and bureaucracies to further demonize actual fathers and penetrate deeper into the private lives of individuals and families. "Child support is more than money," declares the National Child Support Enforcement Association. Child support also is love, emotional support and responsibility. This sounds reassuring. Yet there is something troubling about government officials taking it upon themselves to define and enforce a parent’s love and emotional support of his own children. Are the state and its operatives mandated to punish fathers who are deemed to have defaulted on this as well? In Massachusetts, state officials have used federal money to draw up a list of "Five Principles of Fatherhood," including: "give affection to my children" and "demonstrate respect at all times to the mother of my children." One cannot help but wonder what penalties the state will bring to bear on fathers who fail to show sufficient "affection and respect."

Government-sponsored media campaigns similarly claim to promote fatherhood by vilifying fathers with the slogan, "They’re your kids. Be their dad!" The Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, is spending $1.4 million to put out advertisements in nearly 25,000 newspapers, magazines and TV and radio stations around the country. The spots portray fathers walking out on their children for no apparent reason: "When Vanessa’s Daddy walks out the door today, he’s never coming back," declares the voice-over. "Goodbye Vanessa," the pretend father says coldly. "Goodbye Daddy," says Vanessa.

The Christian Science Monitor sees these ads as "the latest sign that Americans, including the government, are waking up to the importance of fatherhood." Perhaps, but fathers who have been ejected from their families by the full force of the state find them disturbingly close to propaganda, reinforcing the assumption that being pursued by federal agents is their just desert for having, in President Clinton’s words, "chosen to abandon their children." By comparison, mothers account for at least 55 percent of child murders, according to a Justice Department study (and fathers for a tiny percentage), but were HHS to sponsor TV commercials showing a mother smothering her infant and saying, "They’re your kids. Don’t kill them!", it would not likely be taken to indicate an awareness of the importance of motherhood.

This agenda is institutionalized in what is perhaps the most dishonest and frightening side of government promoting fatherhood: programs billed as facilitating access and visitation with children. This entails creating supervised visitation centers, institutions where fathers charged with no wrongdoing must pay up to $80 an hour to visit their own children under the gaze of social workers.

Rick Brita is a father in Massachusetts who has been forced to use such a center, though he was never convicted of child abuse. Brita tells me: "It’s like being in jail. Everything the father does on the visitation has to be permissioned. Even hugging your own children could end your visit." He can’t take the children out to a park or anything else outside the center. He can’t even take pictures of his own children. Expansion of these centers is being pushed by the Cambridge, Mass.-based Supervised Visitation Network, described in a series by the Massachusetts News as a "matrix of lawyers, judges, social workers, academics and domestic-violence activists who have networked, talked with each other, served on various commissions, boosted each other’s careers and helped to expand state and federal funding massively."

If our leaders were serious about providing for children, they would end the power of the divorce industry to rip apart their homes in the first place. On economic grounds alone, the most effective antipoverty program is an intact family; this even was recognized in a 1998 paper by the Democratic Leadership Council. Those concerned about encouraging irresponsible men should consider that there is nothing mutually exclusive about protecting the rights of fathers and their children not to be separated without cause and enforcing child-support collection on those men who truly abandon the offspring they have sired. That the former would benefit vastly more children than the latter is precisely why the iron triangle of family courts, child-support-enforcement bureaucracies and organized feminism won’t allow it to happen.

Not since the overthrow of the Weimar Republic have the leaders of a major democracy used their offices and the mass media to disseminate invective against millions of their own citizens. In fact it was Adolf Hitler who urged that "the state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people" and who explained, in the words of Rabbi Daniel Lapin, that "as long as government is perceived as working for the benefit of children, the people happily will endure almost any curtailment of liberty." Using children to tug on our heartstrings may be not only a weakness of the sentimental. It also may be a ploy by those cynical and unscrupulous enough to exploit children for their own purposes. This is likely to be remembered as one of the most diabolical perversions of governmental power in our history, a time when we allowed children to be used and abused by fast-talking government officials and paid for it with our families, our social order and our constitutional rights.