Divorce, Child Custody, and "Traditionalism" (A Worthless Word)

TooGood Reports ^ | 3/14/02 | Isaiah Flair

[Nick Danger]

There are a LOT of factors that get considered in family law courtrooms. Without knowing many of the necessary factors in his case, its impossible to... yada yada.. are all factors that are going to weigh in favor of the mother.

It's always something though, isn't it? I mean, your argument is reminiscent of the early days of the civil rights movement, when you would find these companies whose management staffs were as white as a fencepost, and they would stand there with a straight face and tell you that they always evaluated each applicant on the merits.

This system is estranging children from their male parents, on a wholesale basis, all across the country, on a scale never seen before in any civilization, and everyone knows it.

Some people support it, because it sounds "traditional" to them to leave children with their mothers. Some people support it because their minds are arranged in such a way that they cannot conceive of a male not being the villain in the piece, no matter what the piece is. In a way, that's traditional as well.

While you worry about case-by-case, we are in the totality producing a society where boys increasingly grow up understanding that adult human males have no role in human families, that they can expect themselves to some day be driven from their homes and defiled in front of their children, and that this future is inevitable for them because even if it hasn't happened to their own father yet, it's happened to half of their friends' fathers.

Kids are not stupid. They see this stuff. They know that Mommy was not an angel, and that Daddy tried really hard to see them, but that forces they do not understand are keeping Daddy away. What they get out of it is that this is going to happen to them, because this is what happens to all the "Daddies" they know.

You cannot do this to a society on this scale without producing a generation of boys who see marriage and family as a losing proposition, and the government as the reason why. If these processes were even halfway fair, such that boys saw that some reasonable percentage of the time, it was not the father the government made go away, they might think something different was going on. But it's patently obvious to them, as it is to all but apologists for the Divorce Industry, that this system is completely biased against fathers and treats them as animals to be sent into the distance to work and send money.

No society has ever tried something like this before. The notion of using governmental force to remove human parents from their childrens' lives is anethema. It violates even rudimentary senses of human dignity. And yet we do this every day in this country to men, as if they were animals. If there were some king in the Middle Ages who had rounded up half the adult men and made them live apart from their children, he would probably be known today as Edward the Horrible. He would be condemned as the cruelest man who ever lived.

We do this right here, right now. And we're proud of it. Something has seriously gone off the tracks, and I for one do not want to hear about case-by-case justification for what is obviously a systemic defect that produces a result that only be called horrific and inhuman.

[jurisdog]

Well Nick, here's the things. I'm a child of divorce. My father was awarded custody in the 1970's, which was unheard of at that time. I'm also an attorney. It's a subject close to my heart, so I feel like my opinion is based in something other than the peanut gallery.

Yes, there's a bias towards women, and for men. But, I think there's enough science and common sense to back up that kind of bias. Young children need a mother more of the time than they need a father.

Isn't that logical? I mean, we are not talking about perfect families, perfect chilhoods. We are talking about moms and dads who are so damn selfish and sinful that they cannot make a marriage work, or live up to their commitments. Eventually, courts have to step in.

I believe there's a bias for mothers, and I believe its appropriate. All things being equal, a mother is more important to a young child than a father, and so IF (Note I say IF) there must be a choice as to "primary" custody, the bias should be for the mother in my opinion.

[Nick Danger]

All things being equal, a mother is more important to a young child than a father

I understand perfectly. Gramsci was not stupid. He knew that widely-held and deeply-felt societal prejudices -- like that one above -- could be employed by skillful agitators to create institutional forms that would then go on to disrupt and eventually destroy the underpinnings of a society.

While you folks are out there saving children one by one, you are doing it on a such a scale that you have estranged half of this nation's children from their biological fathers. And you do more of it every day. Just how wonderful for children do you plan to make this society? Will you be done when no young man anywhere can envision himself ever having a family, because you folks are so efficient at removing these useless appendages called fathers from their childrens' lives?

This is what makes Gramsci's ideas so powerful. People like you pitch right in, destroying the very society you live in, and all the while you think you're doing good.

Yeah, you're just picking up the pieces after the other people broke it. Lawyers always say that. Nice living though, isn't it.

[jurisdog]

Nick, I would really encourage you to get some counseling.

First off, when a man or woman loses custody as a result of a divorce decree and custody order, its noone's fault but their own. If they had married the right person, or lived up to their marital vows, they wouldnt be in that situation to begin with.

You seem to have a real problem with laying blame where it belongs. Listen close ~ if someone is unhappy with the terms of a custody order, it's their own fault. Not the judge, not society.

It was their choice to get married and have children to begin with. If you don't want to toss your hat into the ring of public law, then keep your johnson in the hangar to begin with.

That said, when a judge considers all the facts in front of him in making a custody decree, there is going to be a natural and eons old bias towards the mother. That is because when it comes to newbors, infants, toddlers and young children, the mother is more important. She nurses, she comforts, she mothers. That is NOT to say the father is unimportant. A concept you seem to have a real hang up about. That is just to say there is a natural bias because there is a natural fact ~ mothers ARE more important to a young child than fathers.

[truthkeeper]

Maybe if dads realized that their very families will be hurt when they decide to divorce, or play around , or do whatever they do to disrupt the marriage, and maybe if they realized that they will lose their children if they commit adultery or divorce, then maybe , just maybe, they would try to stay married to the little woman...this goes visa-versa for women as well..
In fact, perhaps the rule should be that whoever is the adulterer, or the drinker, or the drug abuser, or the batterer,in short the person who in reality breaks up the home, if that person was guarenteed to not get custody, wow, what a change would take place.

It used to be that way before the wonderful concept of "no-fault" divorce took hold.

[Nick Danger]

I would really encourage you to get some counseling.

Some barrister you are. Argumentum ad hominem. Is this really the limit of your talent? You can't answer my argument, so you question my mental stability? I hope you don't charge your clients more than five bucks an hour for that kind of performance.

when a man or woman loses custody as a result of a divorce decree and custody order, its noone's fault but their own.

Oh, stop it with the shibboleths. We're all big kids here and we all know better. I watched my brother-in-law get destroyed by the court system when even his ex didn't want it. When their kids entered kindergarten she went back to school herself, to finish her degree. Well, she got all infatuated with some professor, and the next thing we know she's decided to leave her husband for him. Couldn't help herself, ya know? She said herself that Mr. X was the perfect husband and father. The kids loved him. Hell, she loved him. She just didn't find him "exciting" anymore. She felt horrible about the whole thing... but she was in luuuuuuuv.

For this sin the father was sent into the distance of his childrens' lives by the court system -- for the good of the children, you understand -- and reduced to poverty while his ex moved in with her boyfriend and lived high on the hog with three sets of checks coming in. And you sit here and tell us that things are all as they should be, and that this is all his fault. What rubbish.

If you don't want to toss your hat into the ring of public law, then keep your johnson in the hangar to begin with.

We're talking about married people here. We're talking about the basic human capacity to have children, and the societal institutions like marriage that we use to insure that children are raised properly. What is this "keep your Johnson in the hangar" nonsense?

You are standing here in front of everybody, arguing that male citizens do not have a basic human right to expect to live in the same house with their own children... that they can and should expect to have their children taken away from them at the whim of government officials, and that their remedy for this is to "keep it in their pants." Don't go sending me to counseling until you figure out where that little piece of anti-male hatred is coming from.

Ultimately, you are about criminalizing male sexuality here, and you're trying to dress it up as some kind of age-old bias in favor of mothers. Did you even know that until this century, fathers were awarded custody of children in nearly all divorces? No, you didn't know that. You're just peddling nonsense to disguise your oh-so-reasonable-sounding arguments for why human males should be treated like animals in our court system. And why it's perfectly OK to do this on such a scale that we now have half the children in the country separated from their biological fathers.

I have to conclude from your comments and arguments here that you are not merely a bystander at this, or just some lawyer trying to justify making a living from other peoples' misery. You're actually in favor of criminalizing and dehumanizing men, and of separating the adult male population from children. In which case, God damn you.

[jurisdog]

The fact that you have some baggage about this issue is clear to everyone else. Youre letting it totally cloud your post and your responses.

All I am saying is that YES there is a bias towards women, and yes its existed a LONG LONG time. I am also saying that part of that reason is because women are more important to children at a young age.

Do fathers get the short end of the stick? Yep. Is it fair? Nope. Do kids need fathers? Of course.

When a divorce happens, there is no good outcome. It is going to be bad no matter what. But there IS a system in place, and I think it does more good than bad.

The only way to avoid the downsides of the system is to avoid divorce in the first place.

[Nick Danger]

The fact that you have some baggage about this issue is clear to everyone else. Youre letting it totally cloud your post and your responses.

Oh, stop it. You do not know that I have any baggage on this subject. You're projecting your own mental processes onto someone that you don't even know and pronouncing it true. It always seems to baffle the self-centered among us that people can get upset about some principle of justice or governmental abuse without having a personal dog in the fight. Well, it happens every day on FR. It's what we do here.

No, I do not have a divorce decree that I am unhappy about. No, I do not pay any money to anyone because of any divorce decree. My whole concern with this issue is that I do not believe that a society that estranges a significant fraction of its adult male citizens from their children is stable. I would like to think that this is obvious to people, but there are those who cannot get their nose out of the case-by-case details. They appear to be incapable of abstract thinking. Too bad for them.

I do not know what the failure mechanism will turn out to be with this, or how it will unfold, but I am quite certain that divorce by divorce, we are creating a society that men will have no stake in, and which pits them against their own government over an issue as basic as the natural human right to live with one's children. Stuff like this is how tea ends up in the harbor, and we're treating it like it's no big deal. Oh sure, some day all children will live only with their mothers and men will be forced by the state to support them all. It'll work just fine.

Here's a hint: no it won't. We can either start now to adjust this system so that it's something that everyone can live with, or the government that makes this happen is going to get a root canal from its male citizenry.

[jurisdog]

My whole concern with this issue is that I do not believe that a society that estranges a significant fraction of its adult male citizens from their children is stable.

I guess I'm still confused about which conclusion you are really pushing. I mean, can we agree on a list of factors involved in this topic?

1. When people divorce, and cant agree on custody arrangements, they have a right to go before a family law judge.

2. When they do, the judge ends up making a divorce/custody decree.

3. No matter what happens, since the parents arent gonna be living together anymore, there is no perfect solution for custody. Even a "joint custody" arrangement of 50/50 time sharing still sucks.

4. Every state has different laws. While there are common themese, family law is clearly a states law issue.

5. In cases where things like adulters can be proven, or unfitness to be a parent, or etc etc etc, the judge may give custody to one parent over the other, regardless of that parents gender.

6. Historically, there has been a bias towards awarding primary custody to mothers. This is because of the fact that for young children, the mosther plays a more physical role, and a more primary role in the raising of that child.

It seems to me, that what you mean to say is something like this...

In cases of divorce, where both parents want full custody (minimal visitation rights for the other parent, i.e., weekends and holidays etc), and both parents are equally able to parent the child in terms of time/money/employment/character, etc etc ~ meaning, in a perfect example situation, when ALL other factors involved in the judges custody order are taken into account, there is a tendancy for courts to favor the mother.

Isn't that what your point really boils down to? Because if not, there really isnt much point arguing all the rest. There are just too many holes in the arguemnts to make them worth the time. BUT, that point, as Ive phrased it, crystallizes the issue in such a way that its at least arguable.

All factors being equal, should a mother get primary custody over a father, in a situation where the parents wont agree to 50/50 custody, just because she's female?

Well sorry to say, but there's a lot of people out there who would say yes, because of the simple fact that in terms of parenting young children, mothers play a more primary role, at least physically, and according to some experts, in other ways as well.

The bias that exists in life is more pro-mother than anti-father. There's reasons for that, both emotional and factual.

But there's another wrinkle to what youre really complaining about ~ and that's this. IF all factors really were equal, then a judge would be a LOT more likely to order joint (50/50) custody.

[SauronOfMordor]

But there's another wrinkle to what youre really complaining about ~ and that's this. IF all factors really were equal, then a judge would be a LOT more likely to order joint (50/50) custody.

The main issue is that judges and the people who appoint them, despite all pretenses to the contrary, are political beasties.

The facts of life are that men may get angry over their treatment, but they don't DO ANYTHING about it, for the most part. Women, on the other hand, are more likely to protest and create heat for any judge perceived to be "biased against women". Judges who want to be promoted are well aware of this, and the people who appoint judges are unlikely to install a Family Court judge who does not follow the "Party Line"

The problem, as Nick's pointed out, is that the men are starting to get really angry with the system. I've had two friends who've been shafted like Nick's brother-in-law (wifey decides she needs somebody more "exciting", starts affair, decides to get divorce, and rapes the husband in the process).

The problem for these biased judges is that eventually they're going to encounter husbands who "ain't gonna take it any more". And I'm not sure if the judges realize that the guards who they rely upon to protect them are men who see how judges treat men

[Nick Danger]

I know you are trying to sound reasonable, but you are talking about treating half the people in the country as sub-human animals, and on a subject that is as close to Nature and the Meaning of Life as exists.

You are attempting to justify this in various nice-sounding ways, and trying to be patient in explaining to me that some people just really are sub-human animals and not very important after all, and that's just the way it is. But I am not going to let you get away with that, because it is bigoted bullsh*t that has no place among civilized people. I salute you for phrasing it nicely, and for trying to dress it up in black robes, but it is crap.

One of the things that mature adults should to be able to do is make sensible tradeoffs between short- and long-term consequences. Obviously we can structure rhetoric to produce a case-by-case analysis that appears to justify a policy that women be presumed the "preferred" custodians of children in the event of divorce. However, it is in no one's interest that this go on to the point that the average well-meaning young man can no longer reasonably approach "marriage and family" except as a game of Russian Roulette with half of the cylinders loaded.

That is yer basic undesireable long-term consequence of continually looking only at short term consequences in after-the-fact cases. Adults are supposed to be able to recognize these situations and put the brakes on before the Long Term Bad News arrives. We're not doing a very good job of that.

It is also not in anyone's interest that a sizable fraction of the male population develops a sense that life is pointless unless Things Really Change, which is a reasonable thing to expect from human beings whose children have been taken away from them for reasons that make no sense, except that it is "standard policy" that males are to be treated as non-humans by the family court system.

Policies can change. Sauron's #31 will undoubtedly be misinterpreted by some as a not-so-thinly-velied threat of violence to judges, but it is better taken metaphorically.

Men are not especially vocal about their difficulties. They are socialized not to be. They are trained from birth to take things like being treated like an animal with a stiff upper lip. They will therefore take this for some period of time without appearing to be too pissed off about it.

This should not be taken for passive acceptance. There is a lot of anger over this policy out there. Much of it is restrained by men's own sense that talking about their difficulties is not cool. But more and more, it is being restrained by governmental force. Therefore what could be a nice easy adjustment that everyone could agree to is likely to be more of a tectonic phenomena, with some huge built-up force spending itself in a short period of time, probably very destructively.

The long- and short-term tradeoff that I see is between adjusting this policy now, so that it is does not produce a huge overhang of disillusioned and very angry men that is large enough to be explosive, or pretending that everything is just fine and that men as a class will continue to accept this almost inhuman violation of basic dignity from their government.

To tell the truth, I really don't care what happens in short-term contexts in after-the-fact cases. We're past the point where focusing on that makes sense. The bigger danger now is to the society at large from the accumulated detritus of all these little short-term fixes we've been making... and continue to make.

Here is what I would do. I would replace the family court system's custody decisions with a flip of a coin. This is actually no more unreasonable than Nature itself, which for many millenia used to remove one parent or another by the pseudo-random actions of predatory beasts. We can therefore be assured that human children know how to cope with this, since they had to cope with it for so much of our history.

I predict that this system will produce not a fifty-fifty split in custody decisions, but a precipitous drop in the divorce rate. One of the things that made it easy for my ex sister-to-law to give in to her passions for the professor was the certain knowledge that she could take the children with her. Had she been faced with a 50-50 chance that she might lose them, that divorce would never have happened. Her passions would have cooled, life would have gone on, and the truth is that except for her temporary chemical imbalance, even she would tell you that she had a good marriage with that man.

Her advance knowledge that custody of the children would be awarded purely on the basis of sexist bigotry, in her favor, made it too damned easy for her to give in to something that --in another era -- would never have happened. A man's life was destroyed, the childrens' relationship with their father was destroyed, all at her whim... which itself was being driven by a hormone attack. How can anyone possibly defend a policy that produces these kind of results? And not rarely, but regularly.

It really would be better to just flip a coin.

[Harrison Bergeron]

"...a world where men have no interest in science or the world around them, and where women bend their social skills toward being mean, vicious backstabbers. What the Hell kind of a society would that make? "

Much of corporate America in 2002. If I had a dollar for every engineering shop that has abandoned R&D in favor of marketing and exploiting "existing technology," I could buy myself a new Lincoln Navigator with the satellite video and surround sound packages. I have no evidence that these companies are weighted heavily with women executives who tend to favor such strategy, but HP and Compaq suddenly come to mind.

[Harrison Bergeron]

"First off, when a man or woman loses custody as a result of a divorce decree and custody order, its noone's fault but their own.

That's the logic of an abuser. "I didn't want to hit you, you made me hit you!"

"If they had married the right person, or lived up to their marital vows, they wouldnt be in that situation to begin with.

Says who? Infidelity didn't exist a hundred years ago? Everyone on earth has a perfect "soul mate?" Divorce is the only reasonable response to marital discord? Utter hogwash and feminist propaganda of the highest order. The divorce industry has perfected the litigious game of "Let's you and him/her fight" to a degree heretofore unmatched by any other category of law. Divorce lawyers as a profession have taken marriage where Don King has taken boxing.

I've been following these issues intensely and studeously for almost eight years now with no personal axe to grind other than I'm a married man. This recent spate of FR threads on divorce and custody has been most enlightening, as they attract lawyers with opinions to a higher degree than the discussions in the men's or divorce forums. My new conclusion: Feminists, with their vitriol, their narrowminded bigotry, and their lack of common sense could not in a hundred years have advanced divorce and fatherlessness to the degree seen today. But in thirty years, the so-called "Family Courts" have become mills where the fastest track to a paycheck is to follow the "two legs good - three legs bad" stereotype to it's scripted conclusion. It's "for the children." The really cool thing for the legal profession is that it now harvests a second wave windfall as the sons of those custodial mothers move through the criminal justice system at about four times the rate of those from intact homes or even those with involved fathers.

[Harrison Bergeron]

"And why it's perfectly OK to do this on such a scale that we now have half the children in the country separated from their biological fathers."

According to a Fox News piece last night, that number is up to 60% now. I was busy picking up Lego blocks, I didn't catch the original source.

[Nick Danger]

I hear stories that Carly Fiorina is so unpopular at Hewlett-Packard that she actually has to travel with bodyguards to company events. They slip her in the back door, she gives her little ten-minute speech, and they whisk her away. What a far cry that is from Hewlett's and Packard's "MBWA."

I have a product that I recently bought from them (a DVD writer) that is shockingly bad. It's "shocking" only because it came from them. It's the sort of thing that if you buy it from Creative Labs, you take it back to the store, figure "Oh well, those things aren't ready for prime time yet," and think no more of it.

I was so sure that HP would have done this right that I went to their support forum expecting to find that everyone but me was happy with the unit. Not exactly. It was clear from the sheer number of irate IT guys on there that this thing has serious driver and software problems, and that it has no business even being on the market in the state it's in, let alone with an HP logo on it. There are guys on there talking about lawsuits if HP doesn't take them back

I think we can both guess that this thing was declared 'finished by order of the king' and sent out the door in order to make the quarter. It must really frost engineers at a place like HP to be ordered to ship stuff that they know isn't ready. They know what's being lost by doing that; I don't think Carly has a clue.

[Harrison Bergeron]

"MBWA."

Some CEOs still do that, but for many of them, it's only when there's a guy with a camera walking around with them.

[The Giant Apricots]

Your diatribe is fallacious beyond measure. What colossal ignorance and bias you show. Aren't you embarrassed by your own irredeemable stupidity?

[The Giant Apricots]

#27, hell of an argument , Nick. Good guy, brilliant mind. You have my respect.

[jurisdog]

I have laid out the argument to a T. What is sad about the majority of the posters on this thread is that they fail to address the specific things they are complaining about.

I've received nothing but personal attacks, for simply sharing my opinion and trying to flesh out a real analytical issue for this topic.

You wouldn't believe how many private messages I've received from people in support of what I've written.

Child custody law is a STATE issue. Every state has its own family law. They are handled very differently from state to state. Each case has its own specifics.

This post is full of hateful rhetoric and personal attacks, yet I'm still waiting for a serious attempt to point out some specific instances of bias that seem unfair or harsh.