According to the on Oct. 26, 2007 transcript, in Moultrie County Judge Dan Flannel's chambers he stated during a conversation with Mary Hughes, a representative for DOVE, an Illinois domestic violence agency, “I have grave concern over the truth and veracity of this petitioner," [Shannon Phillips.]
Hughes said under oath that she had given Phillips and her mother thousands of dollars for travel, as well as retained the services of local domestic violence attorney Priscilla Ebdon. Hughes stated that I am a member of Fathers for Justice and therefore am a huge danger and risk for the mother, the child, herself and the judge.
In the past, the religious right has fought against mothers denying the non-custodial parent, usually the father, access to their children. But, now are backing the rights of mothers to deny the non-custodial parent access to the children. The women's rights groups have always fought for the rights of mothers to deny the non-custodial parent, usually the father, access to the children, but are now fighting for the rights of non-custodial parents. In the past, they believed the mother must have had a reason. What's the difference? The non-custodial parents are now women. Just one example, Lisa Miller and Janet Jenkins had a civil partnership in Vermont, but now are divorced. Lisa is denying Janet access, despite court orders. Janet is learning what tens of millions of fathers know. Custodial mothers can violate court orders with near immunity from prosecution. This problem has been growing with the growth of divorces for gay couples. Is history repeating itself? According to the US Dept. of Health & Human Services study, "Survey of Absent Parents" over 60% of mothers regularly violate the access rights of fathers, cutting off all contact between the children and their fathers within five years. Now that lesbian mothers are doing the same thing, should the women's movement start fighting for the rights of all non-custodial parents, which happens to be most men? Of interest, we've not seen a similar problem with males couples.
To answer:
Social Science/Gender & Women's Studies
Unfortunately, the Justice may be half right. I've worked with divorced and single fathers for 20 years, and I can say the a marriage between an African/American male and a Caucasian female have a high rate of failure, resulting in the mothers trying to alienate the children from the father. There's a much lower rate with them marrying a Asian woman. For Caucasian males marry an African/American woman, the failure rate of the marriage is much lower than marrying a Caucasian woman. I hate using the term race as we are all a part of the human race.
Now for this couple, if they were both virgins, their chances of a long marriage would be much greater due to their ages. Both were fully mature. Over 85% of divorces involve couples who cohabit or marry prior to age 24. The best age for a male to first develop a relationship, and get married, is when he passes age 30.
A lot is being made about youth violence and it's cause, yet President Obama's political career, and our government as a whole over the last 30 years, has shown how they are unwilling to fully address all the causes of it because it goes again the right of women to choose.
This is not the right to choose to have an abortion, but the right to choose whether the father of their children will be involved in their lives, to so called Gatekeeper Syndrome.
"Ominously, the most reliable predictor of crime is neither poverty nor race but growing up fatherless." Fortune Magazine
Our President agrees that a Fatherless Generation has led to the problemsof increased crime, but he is unwilling to address the 60% rate of mothers denying the fathers access to thir children, a finding that came out of the Survey of Absent Parent: Pilot Results by the The Urban Institute for the Department of Health and Human Services. They were pilot results because after this part became known, funding for the rest of the study was withdrawn.
If we are to address the problem of youth crime for future generations, we must immediately begin equal enforcement of court ordered parental rights to that of court ordered child support. This can be done by mandating that states spend equal amounts of enforcement programs for parental rights as they do for child support. This money is nothing compared to what they are spending on the fights against crimeresulting from children growing up fatherless.
Since it's passage in 1989, all Missouri County Prosecutors have refused to prosecute, and have instructed police officers not to take criminal reports of, violations of this law.
The Kansas Legislature recently turned down a law to allow paternity testing in cases where the payer is not the father.Man jailed for not supporting someone else's child2006 Article - 7 states with lawsPaternity Fraud Bill Provides Relief for Some Men - Florida2009 Article - 30 states with lawsMissouri governor signs bill allowing paternity challengesCitizens Against Paternity FraudParent Trap? Litigation Explodes Over Paternity Fraud
It should be noted that even though previously states didn't allow paternity testing once the man was paying child support, it was allowed in custody challenges the prove he had no right to the child. The drawback of that is the woman than forfeits her support claim, but than she can file a retroactive claim against the bio dad. None of what she gets from the bio dad is required to be paid back to the ex boyfriend or husband that not only supported the child, but also raised the child.
Your Honor,
June 28th, 2009 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
On June 20th, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a press release describing a new "public service campaign...promoting fatherhood." The press release directs readers to the website www.fatherhood.gov, and breathlessly promises a public service announcement by none other than President Obama himself. Needless to say, that was an offer I couldn't refuse.
When I went to the site, I discovered it was the home of something called the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse. And, much as I would expect from a site with that name, I found pablum - the shallowest, most out-of-touch-with-reality ideas of fatherhood and the barriers to father involvement imaginable. Obama's 30-second PSA is skin-deep, essentially an exhortation to fathers to take their children to the zoo and help them with homework. Michelle Obama's message is no better.
The message is simple; fathers are good for children, therefore, responsible fathers will spend time with them and everyone will be better off. Surrounding this message on every side is the subtext of "responsibility," i.e. if a father isn't actively involved in his kid's life, he's at fault. He's just irresponsible and, if he cared about his child, he'd man up and do the right thing. In short, it's the standard narrative of male perfidy that omits all mention of family laws and court practices that doggedly separate fathers from children. And there's no mention of maternal gatekeeping that marginalizes fathers, sometimes from the first hours of a child's life.
But...
Look further on the site. Go to the library of publications and a whole new world opens before you. The publications the site links to aren't many and they're not up to date, but they paint an entirely different picture of fatherhood and the many barriers fathers face in trying to establish and maintain relationships with their children. There are scholarly publications on maternal gatekeeping, programs to enhance non-custodial parents' access to children, an article by Kathryn Edin about young, poor fathers and others.
In short, once a visitor to the site gets past the bumper-sticker phrases about responsible fatherhood, there's a lot of real information by (dare i say it?) responsible social scientists to be had.
And the juxtaposition of the two is mind-bending. It's the same thing we see every day. We know the truth; we read the massive amounts of social science that shows us the incontovertible fact that fathers strongly desire close relationships with their children, but are thwarted by a bewildering array of laws, policies and practices that seem to be based on a complete ignorance of well-established facts.
To listen to the president of the United States intone the mantra of responsible fatherhood, cheek-by-jowl with the real information about everything we do to prevent that very thing verges on the surreal. The site neatly, if inadvertently, catches the deeply contradictory nature of our public discourse and our public policies on fatherhood.
A powerful story from Jordan Monroe on NPR about Parental Alienation. Another example of how difficult it is for fathers to remain a part of their children’s lives in the face of mothers’ hostility and a family law system which too often acts as an angry mother’s enabler. His sad childhood remembrances also shed light on the way a child processes losing a mother or father after a divorce or separation.
Standing In My Father's Shoes
by Jordan Monroe - June 19, 2009
But after that day, my mother and grandmother didn't make it easy for my dad to see me. I remember asking myself all these questions: Where is he? Why doesn't he come pick me up? Doesn't he know where we are?
My grandmother made her opinions clear. She didn't like my father. "Your daddy ain't never done nothing for you," she would say whenever I mentioned his name. Well, he didn't give me anything for my birthday, I thought. Maybe she was right.
What I didn't know then is that I would come to understand my father when I became a dad. My longtime girlfriend and I had a baby when we were young: I was 21 years old. A few years later, we separated. I went from kissing my daughter goodnight and being woken by her jumping on me in the morning, to dropping her off at her mom's house and giving her goodnight kisses over the phone
My daughter's mother seems to resent me the same way my grandmother resented my father. When I started noticing my daughter developing a bad attitude toward me, I heard my grandmother's voice in my ear: "Your daddy ain't never done nothing for you."
Standing in my father's shoes, I was able to see things more clearly. My grandmother's opinion about my dad was just that — her opinion. And it was shaped by her own dysfunctional relationship with her father.
I'm determined to redefine fatherhood in my family. My daughter adores me, and her love isn't based on what she thinks a father should be, it's based on what her father has been — there for her.
When we spend a weekend together, she often says, "I love you." But it's the look she gives me that eternally confesses her feelings. I look at my father the same way now that I know he was thinking about me all those years we were apart. I no longer see a man who did nothing for me my whole life, but a man who has always loved me.
After all, he's my father; just as I am hers.
"With support from President Obama, Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN) and Congressman Danny Davis (D-IL) introduced the Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Families Act of 2009 for Father's Day, a bill cosponsored by then-Senator Barack Obama in the last Congress. Obviously Bayh and Davis have to contend with DC political realities, which work against fathers and make rational legislation to help them politically difficult. Still, this Responsible Fatherhood bill will help bureaucrats and others far more than it helps dads, and in some ways it will hurt fathers"
If President Obama really wants fathers to be involved, he should make a Presidential Decree ordering the states to allow them to be!!!
An HHS study, SURVEY OF ABSENTEE PARENTS, showed mothers violate the court ordered rights of divorced and single fathers 60% of the time. Further, they cut off all between the father and children within five years.
In Missouri, under RSMO 565.156 sub. 5, it is a Class C felony to deny the court ordered visitation rights of the other parent, yet in 20 years, all county prosecutors have refused to enforce it.
The President knows this full well the greater problem of fatherless children is not uninvolved fathers, but fathers being denied involvement.
Every day I advise fathers on how to deal with the courts refusing to enforce their own orders. The President needs to order them to do so. Further, under Public Law 12, setting up the Federal Commission of Child Support Enforcement in the 80s, the states were also ordered to set up programs to enforced visitation rights equally to child support. NO STATE HAS DONE THAT IN THE 25 YEARS THAT LAW HAS BEEN IN PLACE.
With the growing rates of children conceived using sperm banks, as well as cases of mothers not knowing who the child's father was, let alone who their own father (the grandfather) was, should Father's Day be discontinued to avoid hurting the feeling of the children?
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090619132652AAYIzvc
In view of the push for equal rights for women, should this also include the fully government funded program involving Selective Service? Should women be given this right? With the increasing number of protests, sponsored by the National Organization for Women, outside government buildings demanding this right, why won't the government, and especially the Democrats, listen?
Yahoo! Answers
I believe the President is wrong in his effort to increase fuel efficiency in cars. He's beating a dead horse. When we entered the 20th Century, cars began displacing horse and wagon, despite limited access to fuel supplies. The time has come for electric to replace the use of fuel.
The President needs to challenge the industry to design a bottom mounted universal battery that can be easily replaced at Battery Service Stations, similar to Gas Stations. In this manner, we will not be limited to specific distances. When you start to run low, you stop and and get a quick change out for a fully charged one.
The car companies compete to develop more efficient electric cars and the battery companies compete to developa higher capacity battery. They start with family and commuter cars. Large scale production should reduce costs, though one has to wonder whether to believe their claims of costs are to be believed. Perhaps a new car company needs to be started, run by scientists.
The electric companies can work on making their proction more efficient and less polluting, while work continues on alternatives.
I'm on my way out to the local HQ to make some phone calls, but wanted to share a photo of our Halloween Candy - every piece had a "Vote Obama" sticker on it!
Click Here for the photo
.... I think the McCain households were giving away Kool Aid to trick-or-treaters.....
