Friday, June 11, 2010
911 - Quick! I Need a Husband! Hurry!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VsAE9ORDrA&feature=player_embedded
NO MORE MEN! WOO HOO!
Picture is worth 1,000 words of femi-nazi idiocy. If this read The End of Women, someone would be sued, shot and hung.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
The Feminist College WAVE
‘Classical Liberal’ Alex Knepper Fights the Power!
A little old but still relevant.
American University, Washington D.C. –An opinion piece on Campus censorship in the campus rag The Eagle has turned into a full blown media circus. The Washington City Paper was first to pick up the firestorm, with FOX, NBC, and now CBS’s The Early Show climbing onboard. What’s the entire hubbub about? What’s the big deal about some college kid writing an article for the University’s paper you ask? By now, you have undoubtedly heard of Alex Knepper. If not, read further.
In his initial piece titled Dealing with AU’s Anti-sex Brigade, Alex commented on how “Jeremiah Headen likely lost the vice presidency of the Student Government over a hyperbolic Facebook note.” The comment? An all-caps final sentence “call to raid booty and women from neighboring villages”.
Alex couldn’t see what the issue was. In his opinion, it was most assuredly a “silly” comment, but it really had nothing to do with the content of the total writing.
In his own words, Alex states:
“The comments on The Eagle’s Web site, mostly by Gay Party activists and feminists, condemned Headen for being an “anti-queer misogynist” and for undermining American University’s commitment to being “safe space” for the “gay community.” He was also rebuked for using the term “hermaphrodite” instead of “intersex.”
What a sniveling bunch of emotional cripples! I have never encountered a more insular, solipsistic view of human sexuality than at this college. The rigidity of Pat Robertson has nothing on feminism.”
Knepper further opines on the feminist dogma of “social construct” and the religious like fanaticism with such gems as “Sex isn’t about contract-signing. It’s about spontaneity, raw energy and control (or its counterpart, surrender). Feminism envisions a bedroom scene in which two amorphous, gender-neutral blobs ask each other “Is this OK with you?” before daring to move their lips any lower on the other’s body.”.
As with anyone that challenges feminism or gays, Alex states that “For my pro-sex views, I am variously called a misogynist, a rape apologist and — my personal favorite — a “pro-date rape protofascist.””
Knepper’s words hit a feverous pitch with his opinion on the feminist Holy Grail, rape. In an attempt to put his prose into prospective, he states;
“Let’s get this straight: any woman who heads to an EI party as an anonymous onlooker, drinks five cups of the jungle juice, and walks back to a boy’s room with him is indicating that she wants sex, OK? To cry “date rape” after you sober up the next morning and regret the incident is the equivalent of pulling a gun to someone’s head and then later claiming that you didn’t ever actually intend to pull the trigger.
“Date rape” is an incoherent concept. There’s rape and there’s not-rape, and we need a line of demarcation. It’s not clear enough to merely speak of consent, because the lines of consent in sex — especially anonymous sex — can become very blurry. If that bothers you, then stick with Pat Robertson and his brigade of anti-sex cavemen! Don’t jump into the sexual arena if you can’t handle the volatility of its practice!”
One would expect that with his creative words to define feminists and feminist ideology with lines like “Put down the Andrea Dworkin and embrace the fires of sexuality!” he would garner a few dissenting tongue lashings in the comment section, but you would be wrong.
At last view, over seven hundred comments to date is a telling indicator of the can of worms Knepper has opened. At one point, the comments section was closed (somewhere around six hundred) due to issues with “personal attacks” and “threats”. Considering that Knepper was attacked and labeled a ‘rape apologist”, conservative, and in need of psychiatric help, all in the second comment alone, it is no wonder that Alex responded in the third and fourth comment stating;
“Believe it or not, this column went through about five edits to remove remarks deemed too inflammatory.” And “Also, I am not a “conservative” and do not want my viewpoints associated with it.”
Reading further, Knepper is additionally labeled with such shaming words as misogynist, woman hater, metapod, a-hole, insensitive, and the coup de gras, he has ugly cats.
On April 1st 2010, Alex responded to his critics via op-ed in the Newsbusters titled “Sex, Lies, and Media Bias: A Chronicle of Censorship in Campus”. No, he did not offer up an apology. Nor did he retract his statements. He merely, as with any good journalist, fledgling or not, offered up an explanation, within a chronology of sorts.
The first indication that Knepper had opened the preverbal can of worms was a call on Monday afternoon by Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper. Hess was calling to inquire as to Knepper’s feelings on the fact that hard copies of The Eagle had been gathered up, replaced with signs stating "NO ROOM FOR RAPE APOLOGISTS" and thrown back at the main office of The Eagle.
Knepper finds this both confusing and humorous. For removing information from public consumption that one doesn’t like is exactly what he was initially speaking of – censorship.
Described as a “classical liberal”, Alex states that the article was “designed to elicit strong responses and spur a spirited debate. But the reaction from the campus left, and feminist groups in particular, has been simply beyond the pale of reasoned debate and does a supreme disservice to the notion of a liberal education. It is an attempt at de facto censorship.”
That evening the CASJ held a special meeting to discuss the “Alex Knepper Question”. Knepper felt that it would be prudent for him to attend along with the thirty or so people – to hear what they had to say and even to answer questions.
Immediately upon arrival, an organizer approached Knepper and asked him to leave for “safety reasons” Alex responded, “Do you think I'm going to hurt someone?” To which she responded: "I think you've hurt enough people already." An attendee, Knepper claims is a feminist, identified herself as a rape victim and asked him to look her in the eyes and tell her that she deserved to be raped. Knepper writes, “Almost in disbelief I told her calmly that this of course was not the case.”
As the meeting progressed, Knepper discovered just how adamant the feminist and CASJ members were about this being a political “talking point” and that someone had to pay, specifically Alex Knepper. Ideological political pressure was abounding.The meeting was filled with questions as to how the editors (women) could allow such a ‘pro-rape’ column to be published, what they had to say to all rape victims, and whether or not Knepper was to be fired.
Within the next 24-hours, the attendees had constructed a list of demands which consisted of firing Alex, print the Sexual Harassment code in the next publication, apologize for the column, removal of the column from the archives, and the resignation of the Editor-in-Chief. Additionally what Knepper found to be odd was that many of the students that under normal circumstances could care less about the paper were also rallying to “take it back”. Admittedly, Knepper doesn’t expound on what “take it back” actually refers to.
In true fashion, Knepper was asked to resign his position. He responded; “I'd sooner be fired than send the message that CASJ has a free-reigning veto over the rest of the campus' behavior.”
In the end – of this chapter anyhow, Knepper has agreed to finish out the semester with The Eagle and to not apply for the columnist position next semester. An agreement he willingly accepted since he was told that new editorial policies would be put in place to “weed out provocative columns”. Again, censorship, the point of Alex Knepper’s articles all along. And something that Alex could not sanction. At the time of this article, The Eagle has suspended all opinion pieces and issued an apology which can be read here.
Knepper cannot decide if the main stream media is indeed bias or stupid but it would appear that the coverage of his statements is out of context. His interviews with NBC, CBS, and ABC have all been shot and he has seemingly seen the to-be-aired version and he claims that they edited the interviews in such a manor that alters the context of what he actually stated.
IF anything comes from this Alex admits that “the fight against campus Stalinism will proceed -- and as more and more media pick up on this, the more we can expose what's happening on college campuses all over America.”
Sources:
Alex’s Original Article:
http://www.theeagleonline.com/opinion/story/dealing-with-aus-anti-sex-brigade/
Follow-up Article:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/alex-knepper/2010/04/01/sex-lies-and-media-bias-chronicle-censorship-campus
The "Apology" from the Eagle:
http://www.theeagleonline.com/opinion/story/a-message-from-the-eagle/
TMOTS
posted by The Man On The Street at 7:12 AM
2 Comments:
Alex Knepper said...
While Googling myself, I came across this. Since you find the incident so amusing, I should tell you that there's more.
1. http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/03/30/how-feminists-judge-he-looks-rape-y/
2. http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/04/15/au-president-prostrates-to-feminists-date-rape-column-was-a-mistake/
3. http://www.theeagleonline.com/opinion/story/why-im-leaving-the-eagle/
My final interview on the matter was conducted for NPR, and was edited pretty fairly: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125988719&ft=1&f=46
Here is one of my better interviews, which occurred on a DC-area news station. Look under Thursday, April 1st: http://www.letstalklive.tv/showpage.cfm?a=v
- Alex Knepper
A little old but still relevant.
American University, Washington D.C. –An opinion piece on Campus censorship in the campus rag The Eagle has turned into a full blown media circus. The Washington City Paper was first to pick up the firestorm, with FOX, NBC, and now CBS’s The Early Show climbing onboard. What’s the entire hubbub about? What’s the big deal about some college kid writing an article for the University’s paper you ask? By now, you have undoubtedly heard of Alex Knepper. If not, read further.
In his initial piece titled Dealing with AU’s Anti-sex Brigade, Alex commented on how “Jeremiah Headen likely lost the vice presidency of the Student Government over a hyperbolic Facebook note.” The comment? An all-caps final sentence “call to raid booty and women from neighboring villages”.
Alex couldn’t see what the issue was. In his opinion, it was most assuredly a “silly” comment, but it really had nothing to do with the content of the total writing.
In his own words, Alex states:
“The comments on The Eagle’s Web site, mostly by Gay Party activists and feminists, condemned Headen for being an “anti-queer misogynist” and for undermining American University’s commitment to being “safe space” for the “gay community.” He was also rebuked for using the term “hermaphrodite” instead of “intersex.”
What a sniveling bunch of emotional cripples! I have never encountered a more insular, solipsistic view of human sexuality than at this college. The rigidity of Pat Robertson has nothing on feminism.”
Knepper further opines on the feminist dogma of “social construct” and the religious like fanaticism with such gems as “Sex isn’t about contract-signing. It’s about spontaneity, raw energy and control (or its counterpart, surrender). Feminism envisions a bedroom scene in which two amorphous, gender-neutral blobs ask each other “Is this OK with you?” before daring to move their lips any lower on the other’s body.”.
As with anyone that challenges feminism or gays, Alex states that “For my pro-sex views, I am variously called a misogynist, a rape apologist and — my personal favorite — a “pro-date rape protofascist.””
Knepper’s words hit a feverous pitch with his opinion on the feminist Holy Grail, rape. In an attempt to put his prose into prospective, he states;
“Let’s get this straight: any woman who heads to an EI party as an anonymous onlooker, drinks five cups of the jungle juice, and walks back to a boy’s room with him is indicating that she wants sex, OK? To cry “date rape” after you sober up the next morning and regret the incident is the equivalent of pulling a gun to someone’s head and then later claiming that you didn’t ever actually intend to pull the trigger.
“Date rape” is an incoherent concept. There’s rape and there’s not-rape, and we need a line of demarcation. It’s not clear enough to merely speak of consent, because the lines of consent in sex — especially anonymous sex — can become very blurry. If that bothers you, then stick with Pat Robertson and his brigade of anti-sex cavemen! Don’t jump into the sexual arena if you can’t handle the volatility of its practice!”
[JB Here. This statement is a little immature for me - but I'll explain that its basically right. Here: women with a few drinks in them may want some love and attention. Men with a few drinks want to f*ck. So the ladies have a plan - a sloppy plan when you're drunk. Go back to his room and makeout and maybe some oral sex and that's it. Man's idea of same room-rendezvous? S-E-X. Period. Many women(and I've experienced this and no, I'm not a rapist, ladies), love the feeling of being wanted, so they like to run up to the line of sex and then put the brakes on. It was the feeling they were after, not the actual sex. What is this like for the guy? Absolutely miserable. As she's effectively using him. They're using eachother, but he feels especially used as he is programmed to f*ck and now her actions say to him "I picked you above the other men because you were the most dominant, most sexual male to me, but that was a lie; I don't want to have sex with you after all. I just wanted to feel wanted for a few minutes. Thanks. Later on I will find a more dominant male than you and screw him instead." Women's response? Men feign feelings to get sex so I can feign sex to get a feeling. No ladies. Two wrongs don't make a right. Don't want to get used? No problem. Date a guy for 6 months before sleeping with him or wait until marriage to have sex. What? That won't work because men will seek sex elsewhere? So the Hell what? That's not my fault or problem! I didn't tell the women to get "liberated"! The Feminists did! So embrace your fellow femi-nazi! She has inadvertently screwed you over! Oh boy! Fun to be equal, isn't it! Turns out equal doesn't mean "the same as." Because it turns out you and men had different agenda's all along. And confusing your agenda for his has caused this ruinous mess. Men have instincts, so respect them: we're after sex. If forced, we will wait, otherwise we will pursue sex. We're not inhumane, we're programmed and driven by hormones. We will marry and have kids BUT we will always need sex. So quit thinking he's going to just ADOPT your hair-brained idea of a little PG-13 action when hiss blood is pumping straight down into his penis and he has mother nature screaming in his ear as loud as she can FORNICATE NOW! Want us to respect your instincts and be closer emotionally before sex? Demand commitment and don't jerk us around. We're not women, don't expect us to act like them. And don't expect a horny, young, drunk male animal to stop mid-intercourse because you suddenly remembered you didn't intend to f*ck when you went back to his bedroom VOLUNTARILY. Men get no excuses and since we're equals - you don't either.]
One would expect that with his creative words to define feminists and feminist ideology with lines like “Put down the Andrea Dworkin and embrace the fires of sexuality!” he would garner a few dissenting tongue lashings in the comment section, but you would be wrong.
At last view, over seven hundred comments to date is a telling indicator of the can of worms Knepper has opened. At one point, the comments section was closed (somewhere around six hundred) due to issues with “personal attacks” and “threats”. Considering that Knepper was attacked and labeled a ‘rape apologist”, conservative, and in need of psychiatric help, all in the second comment alone, it is no wonder that Alex responded in the third and fourth comment stating;
“Believe it or not, this column went through about five edits to remove remarks deemed too inflammatory.” And “Also, I am not a “conservative” and do not want my viewpoints associated with it.”
Reading further, Knepper is additionally labeled with such shaming words as misogynist, woman hater, metapod, a-hole, insensitive, and the coup de gras, he has ugly cats.
On April 1st 2010, Alex responded to his critics via op-ed in the Newsbusters titled “Sex, Lies, and Media Bias: A Chronicle of Censorship in Campus”. No, he did not offer up an apology. Nor did he retract his statements. He merely, as with any good journalist, fledgling or not, offered up an explanation, within a chronology of sorts.
The first indication that Knepper had opened the preverbal can of worms was a call on Monday afternoon by Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper. Hess was calling to inquire as to Knepper’s feelings on the fact that hard copies of The Eagle had been gathered up, replaced with signs stating "NO ROOM FOR RAPE APOLOGISTS" and thrown back at the main office of The Eagle.
Upon further investigation, Knepper discovered that members of the cultural-Marxist campus "social justice" organization called Community Action and Social Justice (CASJ) and Women's Initiative were responsible.
JB Again: "Women's Initiative?" What is that? Sounds equal, fair and unbiased doesn't it? Like maybe the decorate their COLLEGE FUNDED office with men's heads? Who's interest do they represent? Sounds like female-only. What about males? What college funded office do we have to represent their interest? Perhaps we don't need a male-office and female-office and we could just have, you know a little campus justice system BASED ON EQUALITY THAT RESPECTS MEN AND WOMEN AS MUTUALLY EXCLUIVE AND UNIQUE, i.e. INHERENTLY DIFFERENT CREATURES BY DESIGN).
Knepper finds this both confusing and humorous. For removing information from public consumption that one doesn’t like is exactly what he was initially speaking of – censorship.
Described as a “classical liberal”, Alex states that the article was “designed to elicit strong responses and spur a spirited debate. But the reaction from the campus left, and feminist groups in particular, has been simply beyond the pale of reasoned debate and does a supreme disservice to the notion of a liberal education. It is an attempt at de facto censorship.”
[Why do we even have feminists groups in college? Colleges now teach more women than men. Fewer boys even APPLY to college - so few that many colleges actually WEIGHT boy's applications in a desperate attempt to keep the population from becoming even more skewed in favor of women - and at these predominantly female colleges we have how many "organizations," nay INTEREST GROUPS, funded and aimed at promoting women's interests OVER THAT OF MEN, or AT THE EXPENSE OF MEN'S INTERESTS? Ladies and gentlemen, this is gender fascism. Its stunning that men aren't MORE extreme in their anti-feminsm views. Modern day feminsm is aiming to reduce them to women's PETS.].
That evening the CASJ held a special meeting to discuss the “Alex Knepper Question”. Knepper felt that it would be prudent for him to attend along with the thirty or so people – to hear what they had to say and even to answer questions.
Immediately upon arrival, an organizer approached Knepper and asked him to leave for “safety reasons” Alex responded, “Do you think I'm going to hurt someone?” To which she responded: "I think you've hurt enough people already." An attendee, Knepper claims is a feminist, identified herself as a rape victim and asked him to look her in the eyes and tell her that she deserved to be raped. Knepper writes, “Almost in disbelief I told her calmly that this of course was not the case.”
[And right on time, the radical feminstas stir up the ladies and skew the issue so that no one has any idea what the disagreement was about in the first place. You think feminists aren't radical? Where on earth did that girl get the idea that he was pro-rape?]
As the meeting progressed, Knepper discovered just how adamant the feminist and CASJ members were about this being a political “talking point” and that someone had to pay, specifically Alex Knepper. Ideological political pressure was abounding.The meeting was filled with questions as to how the editors (women) could allow such a ‘pro-rape’ column to be published, what they had to say to all rape victims, and whether or not Knepper was to be fired.
[Again, where was he pro-rape? No one offers any evidence. They are emotionally upset and ignoring facts of any kind. This at a place of "higher" education. When emotion replaces facts, you're in a dangerous environment ladies and gentlemen. People may get upset over something that has little to nothing to do with Knepper and then project their feelings onto him - this is ludicrous]
Within the next 24-hours, the attendees had constructed a list of demands which consisted of firing Alex, print the Sexual Harassment code in the next publication, apologize for the column, removal of the column from the archives, and the resignation of the Editor-in-Chief. Additionally what Knepper found to be odd was that many of the students that under normal circumstances could care less about the paper were also rallying to “take it back”. Admittedly, Knepper doesn’t expound on what “take it back” actually refers to.
In true fashion, Knepper was asked to resign his position. He responded; “I'd sooner be fired than send the message that CASJ has a free-reigning veto over the rest of the campus' behavior.”
In the end – of this chapter anyhow, Knepper has agreed to finish out the semester with The Eagle and to not apply for the columnist position next semester. An agreement he willingly accepted since he was told that new editorial policies would be put in place to “weed out provocative columns”. Again, censorship, the point of Alex Knepper’s articles all along. And something that Alex could not sanction. At the time of this article, The Eagle has suspended all opinion pieces and issued an apology which can be read here.
[Communists, Nazis, Fascists and the like don't like disagreement either. It spurns their single-minded, maniacal agenda. History teaches that one quite well. Something else they don't seem to study at this school]
Knepper cannot decide if the main stream media is indeed bias or stupid but it would appear that the coverage of his statements is out of context. His interviews with NBC, CBS, and ABC have all been shot and he has seemingly seen the to-be-aired version and he claims that they edited the interviews in such a manor that alters the context of what he actually stated.
IF anything comes from this Alex admits that “the fight against campus Stalinism will proceed -- and as more and more media pick up on this, the more we can expose what's happening on college campuses all over America.”
[He's dead-on. The actions of these people are classic Pravda-esque type of state-dominated propaganda. God Bless the New Femerica]
Sources:
Alex’s Original Article:
http://www.theeagleonline.com/opinion/story/dealing-with-aus-anti-sex-brigade/
Follow-up Article:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/alex-knepper/2010/04/01/sex-lies-and-media-bias-chronicle-censorship-campus
The "Apology" from the Eagle:
http://www.theeagleonline.com/opinion/story/a-message-from-the-eagle/
TMOTS
posted by The Man On The Street at 7:12 AM
2 Comments:
Alex Knepper said...
While Googling myself, I came across this. Since you find the incident so amusing, I should tell you that there's more.
1. http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/03/30/how-feminists-judge-he-looks-rape-y/
2. http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/04/15/au-president-prostrates-to-feminists-date-rape-column-was-a-mistake/
3. http://www.theeagleonline.com/opinion/story/why-im-leaving-the-eagle/
My final interview on the matter was conducted for NPR, and was edited pretty fairly: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125988719&ft=1&f=46
Here is one of my better interviews, which occurred on a DC-area news station. Look under Thursday, April 1st: http://www.letstalklive.tv/showpage.cfm?a=v
- Alex Knepper
WAKE UP
False accusations been a common tactic for YEARS. Why? They work. And there are NO RULES in family court. Anything goes.
Parent Trap
Are false abuse charges a common tactic in child custody battles?
Cathy Young from the December 2006 issue
Child custody disputes are some of the bloodiest battlefields in the gender wars—battlefields upon which allegations of spousal and child abuse are widely regarded as a nuclear weapon. But there are two opposite views of this problem. Fathers’ advocates claim abuse allegations are routinely used to deny divorced fathers contact with their children and to poison children’s minds against their fathers, in what the activists and some psychologists call “parental alienation syndrome.” Feminists argue that well-founded accusations of abuse are often dismissed and even turned against the accusing mothers. The explosive claim that batterers and molesters frequently gain sole custody of their children while protective mothers are branded as liars has gotten a lot of media attention in the last year. In the fall of 2005, PBS broadcast the documentary Breaking the Silence: The Children’s Stories , which profiled several children placed in the custody of allegedly abusive fathers and presented these cases as representative of the system’s failure. After an outcry from fathers’ groups, PBS commissioned a review but eventually declared that the program met the network’s standards of fairness and research. (Corporation for Public Broadcasting ombudsman Ken Bode, by contrast, found the film “so totally unbalanced as to fall outside the boundaries of PBS editorial standards.”) A year later, Newsweek weighed in with a story in its September 25, 2006, issue, “Fighting Over the Kids,” which asserted that many battered mothers were losing custody of their children after being slapped with the “parental alienation” label.
A look at some cases publicized as judicial outrages against women and children shows just how difficult it can be to sort out the truth. A major segment of Breaking the Silence dealt with 16-year-old Fatima Alilire-Loeliger and her mother, Sadia Alilire, who had lost custody of the girl in 1998 to her father, Scott Loeliger, but then regained it. (The mother and daughter appeared under pseudonyms, but their real names were revealed in the subsequent controversy). Men’s rights activist Glenn Sacks charged that Alilire, far from being the heroic mother portrayed in the film, was a child abuser herself—a charge he backed up with documents posted on his website. Alilire responded on the website of feminist blogger Trish Wilson, claiming the abuse charges were engineered by her ex-husband with the help of a therapist with whom he had a close personal relationship. Yet the documents posted by Wilson and Alilire themselves show that Alilire had a history of violence toward her ex-husband and toward his babysitter, and that another therapist with no connection to Loeliger reported Fatima’s allegations of physical abuse by her mother. The records generally paint a depressing picture of two parents behaving badly, rather than a case in which a clear line can be drawn between wrongdoer and victim.
The Newsweek story has an equally problematic poster girl in Genia Schockome, a New York woman whose ex-husband, Timothy, received sole custody of their children after a six-year battle. While giving virtually full credence to her allegations of physical abuse by her former husband, the article doesn’t mention that after the divorce the father initially had custody of the children nearly half the time and was never accused of abusing them, or that Schockome defied numerous court orders and quit a high-paying job in an apparent attempt to avoid child support payments. As Newsweek went to press, an appellate court rejected Schockome’s claim of bias against the judge in her case. Similar issues have dogged Amy Neustein, a leading activist on behalf of mothers penalized for abuse accusations. Neustein lost custody of her own daughter, Sherry, in 1986 after accusing her former husband, Ozzie Orbach, of sexual abuse—charges repeatedly rejected by the courts and by family service agencies. Her crusade has attracted support not only from feminist groups but from politicians from both major parties; in May 2006, she appeared at a press conference in New York with Jeanine Pirro, Republican candidate for state attorney general, and Democratic congressional candidate Chris Owens. Yet a year earlier, Sherry Orbach, then 24 and a student at Columbia Law School, had published an article in The Jewish Press in New York strongly stating that the only abuse she had suffered was her mother’s effort to brainwash her into accusing her father. Orbach wrote, “I, for one, owe my existence as a normal young adult to the family judges, Ohel foster care, and the Legal Aid Society attorney who helped me reunite with my father in the face of considerable opposition in the media.” (While Neustein’s supporters have insinuated that the article was a fake, Orbach confirmed its authenticity when contacted at her law school email address.) o:p> /o:p> /span> /p> p> The bigger picture is as muddy as span class="c2">the individual cases. The Newsweek article, for instance, asserts that “according to one 2004 survey in Massachusetts by Harvard’s Jay Silverman, 54 percent of custody cases involving documented spousal abuse were decided in favor of the alleged batterers.” But the study, published in The American Journal of Public Health , was based on a nonrepresentative, self-selected sample of 39 women recruited by the Battered Women’s Testimony Project. Moreover, the “documentation” of abuse could be nothing more than a restraining order or an affidavit by the woman.
Parent Trap
Are false abuse charges a common tactic in child custody battles?
Cathy Young from the December 2006 issue
Child custody disputes are some of the bloodiest battlefields in the gender wars—battlefields upon which allegations of spousal and child abuse are widely regarded as a nuclear weapon. But there are two opposite views of this problem. Fathers’ advocates claim abuse allegations are routinely used to deny divorced fathers contact with their children and to poison children’s minds against their fathers, in what the activists and some psychologists call “parental alienation syndrome.” Feminists argue that well-founded accusations of abuse are often dismissed and even turned against the accusing mothers. The explosive claim that batterers and molesters frequently gain sole custody of their children while protective mothers are branded as liars has gotten a lot of media attention in the last year. In the fall of 2005, PBS broadcast the documentary Breaking the Silence: The Children’s Stories , which profiled several children placed in the custody of allegedly abusive fathers and presented these cases as representative of the system’s failure. After an outcry from fathers’ groups, PBS commissioned a review but eventually declared that the program met the network’s standards of fairness and research. (Corporation for Public Broadcasting ombudsman Ken Bode, by contrast, found the film “so totally unbalanced as to fall outside the boundaries of PBS editorial standards.”) A year later, Newsweek weighed in with a story in its September 25, 2006, issue, “Fighting Over the Kids,” which asserted that many battered mothers were losing custody of their children after being slapped with the “parental alienation” label.
A look at some cases publicized as judicial outrages against women and children shows just how difficult it can be to sort out the truth. A major segment of Breaking the Silence dealt with 16-year-old Fatima Alilire-Loeliger and her mother, Sadia Alilire, who had lost custody of the girl in 1998 to her father, Scott Loeliger, but then regained it. (The mother and daughter appeared under pseudonyms, but their real names were revealed in the subsequent controversy). Men’s rights activist Glenn Sacks charged that Alilire, far from being the heroic mother portrayed in the film, was a child abuser herself—a charge he backed up with documents posted on his website. Alilire responded on the website of feminist blogger Trish Wilson, claiming the abuse charges were engineered by her ex-husband with the help of a therapist with whom he had a close personal relationship. Yet the documents posted by Wilson and Alilire themselves show that Alilire had a history of violence toward her ex-husband and toward his babysitter, and that another therapist with no connection to Loeliger reported Fatima’s allegations of physical abuse by her mother. The records generally paint a depressing picture of two parents behaving badly, rather than a case in which a clear line can be drawn between wrongdoer and victim.
The Newsweek story has an equally problematic poster girl in Genia Schockome, a New York woman whose ex-husband, Timothy, received sole custody of their children after a six-year battle. While giving virtually full credence to her allegations of physical abuse by her former husband, the article doesn’t mention that after the divorce the father initially had custody of the children nearly half the time and was never accused of abusing them, or that Schockome defied numerous court orders and quit a high-paying job in an apparent attempt to avoid child support payments. As Newsweek went to press, an appellate court rejected Schockome’s claim of bias against the judge in her case. Similar issues have dogged Amy Neustein, a leading activist on behalf of mothers penalized for abuse accusations. Neustein lost custody of her own daughter, Sherry, in 1986 after accusing her former husband, Ozzie Orbach, of sexual abuse—charges repeatedly rejected by the courts and by family service agencies. Her crusade has attracted support not only from feminist groups but from politicians from both major parties; in May 2006, she appeared at a press conference in New York with Jeanine Pirro, Republican candidate for state attorney general, and Democratic congressional candidate Chris Owens. Yet a year earlier, Sherry Orbach, then 24 and a student at Columbia Law School, had published an article in The Jewish Press in New York strongly stating that the only abuse she had suffered was her mother’s effort to brainwash her into accusing her father. Orbach wrote, “I, for one, owe my existence as a normal young adult to the family judges, Ohel foster care, and the Legal Aid Society attorney who helped me reunite with my father in the face of considerable opposition in the media.” (While Neustein’s supporters have insinuated that the article was a fake, Orbach confirmed its authenticity when contacted at her law school email address.) o:p> /o:p> /span> /p> p> The bigger picture is as muddy as span class="c2">the individual cases. The Newsweek article, for instance, asserts that “according to one 2004 survey in Massachusetts by Harvard’s Jay Silverman, 54 percent of custody cases involving documented spousal abuse were decided in favor of the alleged batterers.” But the study, published in The American Journal of Public Health , was based on a nonrepresentative, self-selected sample of 39 women recruited by the Battered Women’s Testimony Project. Moreover, the “documentation” of abuse could be nothing more than a restraining order or an affidavit by the woman.
Typical
State Tries to Steal Child Support Money From a National Guardsman Who Was Seven Years Old at the Time the Child in Question Was Born? How "Odd"!
Matt Welch | February 18, 2010
United Press International, I love you, I miss you, I used to work for you...but this story does not belong under "Odd News":
A Florida man says the state is trying to force him to pay child support for a child who was born when he was 7 years old.
Rusty Cole, a National Guardsman from Port Orange, Fla., said his tax return was delayed by the state because officials told him he owes support payments for a child born in 1995 -- despite the fact that Cole was born in late 1987, Central Florida News 13 reported Wednesday.
Cole said weeks of phone calls and office visits failed to yield any results.
"They were like, 'Oh, yes, we have it on here that you are the father,' and I was like, 'Ma'am, there's no way,'" Cole said to News 13.
This case, as older Reason readers will know, is not some kind of quirky accident, but the direct and predictable consequence of a system that incentivizes states to locate any dependable male source of revenue regardless of plausible (let alone provable) connection to the child.
Link via Amy Alkon, who is one of the only journalists working who seems to care about a system that declares you guilty until proven innocent, tries mightily to avoid DNA testing, and results in innocent men losing their passports and professional licenses, among many many other outrages.
Matt Welch | February 18, 2010
United Press International, I love you, I miss you, I used to work for you...but this story does not belong under "Odd News":
A Florida man says the state is trying to force him to pay child support for a child who was born when he was 7 years old.
Rusty Cole, a National Guardsman from Port Orange, Fla., said his tax return was delayed by the state because officials told him he owes support payments for a child born in 1995 -- despite the fact that Cole was born in late 1987, Central Florida News 13 reported Wednesday.
Cole said weeks of phone calls and office visits failed to yield any results.
"They were like, 'Oh, yes, we have it on here that you are the father,' and I was like, 'Ma'am, there's no way,'" Cole said to News 13.
This case, as older Reason readers will know, is not some kind of quirky accident, but the direct and predictable consequence of a system that incentivizes states to locate any dependable male source of revenue regardless of plausible (let alone provable) connection to the child.
Link via Amy Alkon, who is one of the only journalists working who seems to care about a system that declares you guilty until proven innocent, tries mightily to avoid DNA testing, and results in innocent men losing their passports and professional licenses, among many many other outrages.
The Reason for This Blog and Others Like It
This post is an old Reason Magazine article. It is one of the best pieces of journalism for new viewers to this site and others like it because the author takes the view of someone ignorant to the legal and metaphorical raping of single dads everywhere in this "free" country of ours.
And what's behind the great evil being perpetrated? Its always the same: MONEY.
Injustice by Default
How the effort to catch "deadbeat dads" ruins innocent men's lives
Matt Welch from the February 2004 issue
Tony Pierce remembers vividly the exact moment in November 2000 when the state of California began trampling on his life. "There was a loud angry pounding at my door at five o'clock in the morning," he recalls. "Very scary."
It was a female police officer with a complaint accusing him of being the father of an 8-year-old girl in Contra Costa County, east of San Francisco. "I'm like, 'Great! I'm definitely not the father of anybody,'" he says.
There were excellent reasons to think so. He had never met or heard of the mother of the child. He had never lived in Northern California, and at the time of conception (spring 1991) he was attending the University of California at Santa Barbara, beginning a monogamous relationship that would last for two years. What's more, he's a condom fanatic -- only once in his life, Pierce swears, has he failed to use a rubber during intercourse, and that was "many years after." (He's been a friend of mine for 15 years, and I believe him.) And if the summons had included the mother's testimony (it was supposed to, but did not), he would have seen himself described as a "tall" and "dark" black man named "Anthony Pierce." Pierce is a hair over five feet, nine inches; he is so light-skinned that even people who know him sometimes don't realize he's black; and no one calls him Anthony except his mom.
The front page of the court document gave simple but misleading instructions: "You have 30 days to respond to this lawsuit. You may respond in one of two ways: 1. File an Answer to the complaint with the Superior Court of Contra Costa County, not with the District Attorney....2. Settle the case with the District Attorney. You may call us at (925) 313-4200 to discuss your case." Concluding incorrectly (but understandably) that he could settle the matter over the phone, Pierce called -- three times that day -- and tried to weave his way through a labyrinthine phone tree. Finally he found a human being, who instructed him to leave a message with a home phone number. The department called him back the next day and left a message; it took another three calls from Pierce before he reached a caseworker for the first time.
"I said, 'What do I need to do? I'm not the father,'" he remembers. "And they were like, 'OK, well this is what you do: You just call in every day, and then we'll understand that you're not it, because if you're it, you're not gonna call us every day.'"
Pierce did everything he was told over the next three weeks of phone tag, except for comprehending that the 30-day deadline for denying paternity in writing was etched in federal law, regardless of what he discussed with Contra Costa employees -- who he says never once told him the clock was ticking. "All they were doing was delaying me from doing what I needed to do," he says. "It's a huge scam -- huge scam....They're just counting the days. They're like, 'Sucker, sucker, sucker, sucker.'...And this is the government!"
Two months later, after the phone conversations had ended and he assumed he was off the hook, Pierce received notice that a "default judgment" had been entered against him, and that he owed $9,000 in child support. He was between dot-com jobs, and his next unemployment check was 25 percent smaller; the state of California had seized and diverted $100 toward his first payment. Suddenly, he was facing several years of automatic wage garnishment, and the shame of being forced to explain to prospective employers why the government considered him a deadbeat dad. "That's when it hit me," he says. "I mean, it's mostly my fault -- 'Fill out the form, dumb-ass!'...But it's so rigged against you, it's ridiculous."
Dad Blamed
What Pierce didn't realize, and what nearly 10 million American men have discovered to their chagrin since the welfare reform legislation of 1996, is that when the government accuses you of fathering a child, no matter how flimsy the evidence, you are one month away from having your life wrecked. Federal law gives a man just 30 days to file a written challenge; if he doesn't, he is presumed guilty. And once that steamroller of justice starts rolling, dozens of statutory lubricants help make it extremely difficult, and prohibitively expensive, to stop -- even, in most cases, if there's conclusive DNA proof that the man is not the child's father.
This stacked deck against accused dads has provoked a backlash movement, triggering "paternity fraud" legislation and related legal challenges in more than a dozen states. Combined with advances in genetic technology, this conflict may end up changing the way we define parenthood. For now, the system aimed at catching "deadbeat dads" illustrates how a noble-sounding effort to help children and taxpayers can trample the rights of innocent people.
Here's how it works: When an accused "obligor" fails, for whatever reason, to send his response on time, the court automatically issues a "default judgment" declaring him the legal father. It does not matter if he was on vacation, was confused, or (as often happens) didn't even receive the summons, or if he simply treated the complaint's deadlines with the same lack of urgency people routinely exhibit toward jury duty summonses -- he's now the dad. "In California, you don't even have to have proof of service of the summons!" says Rod Wright, a recently retired Democratic state senator from Los Angeles who tried and failed to get several paternity-related reform bills, including a proof-of-service requirement, past former Gov. Gray Davis' veto. "They only are obligated to send it to the last known address."
In fact, a March 2003 Urban Institute study commissioned by the California Department of Child Support Services (DCSS) found that "most noncustodial parents appear to be served by 'substitute' service, rather than personal service, which suggests that noncustodial parents may not know that they have been served." In Los Angeles County, which is notorious for its sloppy summons service and zealous prosecution of alleged fathers it knows to be innocent, nearly 80 percent of paternity establishments come in the form of default judgments. In the state as a whole, which establishes 250,000 paternities a year while collecting $2 billion in child support, a whopping 68 percent of the 158,000 child support orders in 2000 (the last year studied) were default judgments.
Once paternity is "established," even if the government has never communicated with the father, the county court imposes a payment rate and schedule under the statistically mistaken assumption that he makes a full-time salary at minimum wage. (State audits have found that a full 80 percent of default dads don't make even that much.) To collect the money, the county may put a garnish order on the purported father's paycheck or place liens on his assets. If the mother has received welfare assistance after the child was born, the man will be hit with a bill to pay back the state, plus 10 percent annual interest. "That's what they're trying to do, is get some reimbursement to the state," says Carolyn Kelly, public relations officer for the Contra Costa County DCSS. "As you can imagine, [that's] millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars."
If the father falls 30 days behind on his payments, he will be blocked by law from receiving or renewing a driver's license or any "authorization issued by a board that allows a person to engage in a business, occupation, or profession" -- a category that includes teaching credentials, fishing licenses, and state bar memberships. If his credit rating was good, it won't be any more. If his past-due tab exceeds $5,000, the U.S. State Department won't issue him a passport. (An average of 60 Americans discover this each day. Meanwhile, Congress has been pushing to cut the limit to $2,500, while urging the State Department to begin revoking passports, which is allowed under the law.)
"When you tell people about the inequities of the system," Wright says, "they're surprised. They go, 'This is America! You couldn't do that!' And I go, 'Yes, you can.'
And what's behind the great evil being perpetrated? Its always the same: MONEY.
Injustice by Default
How the effort to catch "deadbeat dads" ruins innocent men's lives
Matt Welch from the February 2004 issue
Tony Pierce remembers vividly the exact moment in November 2000 when the state of California began trampling on his life. "There was a loud angry pounding at my door at five o'clock in the morning," he recalls. "Very scary."
It was a female police officer with a complaint accusing him of being the father of an 8-year-old girl in Contra Costa County, east of San Francisco. "I'm like, 'Great! I'm definitely not the father of anybody,'" he says.
There were excellent reasons to think so. He had never met or heard of the mother of the child. He had never lived in Northern California, and at the time of conception (spring 1991) he was attending the University of California at Santa Barbara, beginning a monogamous relationship that would last for two years. What's more, he's a condom fanatic -- only once in his life, Pierce swears, has he failed to use a rubber during intercourse, and that was "many years after." (He's been a friend of mine for 15 years, and I believe him.) And if the summons had included the mother's testimony (it was supposed to, but did not), he would have seen himself described as a "tall" and "dark" black man named "Anthony Pierce." Pierce is a hair over five feet, nine inches; he is so light-skinned that even people who know him sometimes don't realize he's black; and no one calls him Anthony except his mom.
The front page of the court document gave simple but misleading instructions: "You have 30 days to respond to this lawsuit. You may respond in one of two ways: 1. File an Answer to the complaint with the Superior Court of Contra Costa County, not with the District Attorney....2. Settle the case with the District Attorney. You may call us at (925) 313-4200 to discuss your case." Concluding incorrectly (but understandably) that he could settle the matter over the phone, Pierce called -- three times that day -- and tried to weave his way through a labyrinthine phone tree. Finally he found a human being, who instructed him to leave a message with a home phone number. The department called him back the next day and left a message; it took another three calls from Pierce before he reached a caseworker for the first time.
"I said, 'What do I need to do? I'm not the father,'" he remembers. "And they were like, 'OK, well this is what you do: You just call in every day, and then we'll understand that you're not it, because if you're it, you're not gonna call us every day.'"
Pierce did everything he was told over the next three weeks of phone tag, except for comprehending that the 30-day deadline for denying paternity in writing was etched in federal law, regardless of what he discussed with Contra Costa employees -- who he says never once told him the clock was ticking. "All they were doing was delaying me from doing what I needed to do," he says. "It's a huge scam -- huge scam....They're just counting the days. They're like, 'Sucker, sucker, sucker, sucker.'...And this is the government!"
Two months later, after the phone conversations had ended and he assumed he was off the hook, Pierce received notice that a "default judgment" had been entered against him, and that he owed $9,000 in child support. He was between dot-com jobs, and his next unemployment check was 25 percent smaller; the state of California had seized and diverted $100 toward his first payment. Suddenly, he was facing several years of automatic wage garnishment, and the shame of being forced to explain to prospective employers why the government considered him a deadbeat dad. "That's when it hit me," he says. "I mean, it's mostly my fault -- 'Fill out the form, dumb-ass!'...But it's so rigged against you, it's ridiculous."
Dad Blamed
What Pierce didn't realize, and what nearly 10 million American men have discovered to their chagrin since the welfare reform legislation of 1996, is that when the government accuses you of fathering a child, no matter how flimsy the evidence, you are one month away from having your life wrecked. Federal law gives a man just 30 days to file a written challenge; if he doesn't, he is presumed guilty. And once that steamroller of justice starts rolling, dozens of statutory lubricants help make it extremely difficult, and prohibitively expensive, to stop -- even, in most cases, if there's conclusive DNA proof that the man is not the child's father.
This stacked deck against accused dads has provoked a backlash movement, triggering "paternity fraud" legislation and related legal challenges in more than a dozen states. Combined with advances in genetic technology, this conflict may end up changing the way we define parenthood. For now, the system aimed at catching "deadbeat dads" illustrates how a noble-sounding effort to help children and taxpayers can trample the rights of innocent people.
Here's how it works: When an accused "obligor" fails, for whatever reason, to send his response on time, the court automatically issues a "default judgment" declaring him the legal father. It does not matter if he was on vacation, was confused, or (as often happens) didn't even receive the summons, or if he simply treated the complaint's deadlines with the same lack of urgency people routinely exhibit toward jury duty summonses -- he's now the dad. "In California, you don't even have to have proof of service of the summons!" says Rod Wright, a recently retired Democratic state senator from Los Angeles who tried and failed to get several paternity-related reform bills, including a proof-of-service requirement, past former Gov. Gray Davis' veto. "They only are obligated to send it to the last known address."
In fact, a March 2003 Urban Institute study commissioned by the California Department of Child Support Services (DCSS) found that "most noncustodial parents appear to be served by 'substitute' service, rather than personal service, which suggests that noncustodial parents may not know that they have been served." In Los Angeles County, which is notorious for its sloppy summons service and zealous prosecution of alleged fathers it knows to be innocent, nearly 80 percent of paternity establishments come in the form of default judgments. In the state as a whole, which establishes 250,000 paternities a year while collecting $2 billion in child support, a whopping 68 percent of the 158,000 child support orders in 2000 (the last year studied) were default judgments.
Once paternity is "established," even if the government has never communicated with the father, the county court imposes a payment rate and schedule under the statistically mistaken assumption that he makes a full-time salary at minimum wage. (State audits have found that a full 80 percent of default dads don't make even that much.) To collect the money, the county may put a garnish order on the purported father's paycheck or place liens on his assets. If the mother has received welfare assistance after the child was born, the man will be hit with a bill to pay back the state, plus 10 percent annual interest. "That's what they're trying to do, is get some reimbursement to the state," says Carolyn Kelly, public relations officer for the Contra Costa County DCSS. "As you can imagine, [that's] millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars."
If the father falls 30 days behind on his payments, he will be blocked by law from receiving or renewing a driver's license or any "authorization issued by a board that allows a person to engage in a business, occupation, or profession" -- a category that includes teaching credentials, fishing licenses, and state bar memberships. If his credit rating was good, it won't be any more. If his past-due tab exceeds $5,000, the U.S. State Department won't issue him a passport. (An average of 60 Americans discover this each day. Meanwhile, Congress has been pushing to cut the limit to $2,500, while urging the State Department to begin revoking passports, which is allowed under the law.)
"When you tell people about the inequities of the system," Wright says, "they're surprised. They go, 'This is America! You couldn't do that!' And I go, 'Yes, you can.'
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Wednesday, May 05, 2010
Caution MY ASS
"Err on the side of Caution" - LET ME SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU, THIS MEANS KICKING YOUR CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE FACE AND SUSPENDING YOUR FREEDOM BASED ON THIN OR NO EVIDENCE. PERIOD. THAT'S ALL THIS AMOUNTS TO AND ITS A FARCE IN A COUNTRY THAT CALLS ITSELF FREE.
Part II: 'Erring on the side of hidden harm'
April 27th, 2010 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
This follows up on my first piece about David Heleniak's fine article in the second issue of the journal Partner Abuse. As I said I would, I tried to find an online link to the article, but there's not one. But David did provide me this link to an earlier article that appeared a little over two years ago (Counterpunch, 10/20/07 ).
In my first piece I recounted how and why courts tend to, in their words, "err on the side of caution" and why that so often means erring "on the side of hidden harm," in Heleniak's. Put simply, there aren't any consequences for a judge who issues a TRO, even on the slimmest of pretexts. But woe betide the judge who refuses to issue one if the mother or the child is later harmed. That's the stuff of banner headlines and judges looking for a new job.
The deep, longlasting harm to children of having a parent taken from them is seldom if ever noticed by the press and is never followed by calls for the judge's electoral head. That doesn't mean the harm to children isn't real or serious; it often is. It just means that it's hidden away from public view behind a veil of public discourse that, ironically, is all about children's welfare.
But there's another aspect of "erring on the side of hidden harm" that promotes the same result - "defensive social work." That's the phrase coined by researcher Paul Chill and it's similar to "defensive medicine." That is to say, action is often taken "for the record" to ensure that the case file demonstrates an activist mindset on the part of the case worker. That often means taking children from parents for reasons that may not bear close scrutiny, but, as with the judges, few if any caseworkers ever lose their jobs for taking children. It's the ones who fail to do so in cases of later child abuse or neglect who get into trouble. As Chill says,
The people who make removal decisions don’t see a child having a panic attack at 3 a.m. because he is suddenly alone in the world. Or slamming his head against a wall out of protest and desperation. Such experiences may not only cause ‘grief, terror, and feelings of abandonment’ but may also ‘compromise’ a child’s very ‘capacity to form secure attachments’ and lead to other serious problems.
Exactly. And it is Heleniak's point that few others see those responses either. The judges don't see it, the case workers don't see it, the press doesn't see it and neither do the rest of us. Nor are they present later in the child's life when he/she fails time and again at romantic relationships, business relationships, friendships, etc. Out of sight, out of mind.
And the phenomenon is far from rare. Chill cites 2001 statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that some 33% of children who were taken from their parents in that year had suffered no abuse or neglect at all. And that's given a very broad definition of abuse and neglect.
Another way in which children are separated from their parents (actually their fathers in most instances) is via the domestic violence TRO which may or may not be desired by the alleged victim. Not long ago I reported on the case of a Washington State woman whose husband was arrested for domestic violence based on the entirely erroneous observation of a passing motorist. In vain did the woman (and her husband) try to convince the ADA, the judge and other court personnel that no DV had occurred. Restraining orders were issued anyway with the result that the man not only couldn't see or speak to his wife, but he couldn't see or speak to his children either.
It's at that precise instant that the seemingly invariable desire by the state to expand its power intersects with feminism's false concept of domestic violence with disastrous consequences for the rest of us. One canon of feminist DV law is that a woman will often deny abuse out of some misguided effort to remain with her abuser. Doubtless that may occur, but the sensible (not to say, constitutional) way of dealing with such a situation would be for a judge or jury to hear evidence and make a ruling. The approach taken, however, is to treat all women as incapable of acting in their own self-interest. It's one thing to say that sometimes DV victims will want to stay with their abusers; it's quite a different one to say that they all do. Once again the interests of the state and the interests of radical feminism coincide, with our individual rights coming out the loser.
What happened to the woman and her husband in Washington was mandatory, and the same is true in New York, about which Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk writes. There, even cases that involve no actual violence and no injury can nevertheless "trigger application of a mandatory domestic violence protocol." That means the issuance of a Temporary Order of Protection as a condition of bail or pretrial release. (That's essentially what happened in the Washington case.) So a man who may have done nothing violent or injurious is put in jail and offered a deal; he can stay in jail until trial or he can get out and be subject to the TOP. Violation of the TOP of course is a criminal offense and will land him back in jail.
If there are children in the family, the TOP will prohibit contact with them unless the family court rules otherwise. Later, at the plea-bargaining time, the ADA bootstraps the temporary order into a final one. The father will be offered an extremely lenient sentence such as no jail time or even adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, but there's a catch. He has to also agree to a final order of protection which means no contact with his wife or kids for some substantial period of time, usually years.
That's what Suk calls de facto divorce, but in some obvious ways it's worse than that. No order of divorce is ever made, no visitation schedule is worked out, no support payments ordered, but the parent who's the subject of the TOP, again usually the father, is in fact out of his children's lives and that of his wife. Most divorced parents still communicate and most divorced fathers still get to see their kids at least occasionally, but fathers under a TOP can do neither.
And again, none of that may be desired by either husband or wife, but with the state involved, it's the best they can do. And just so we don't forget, the vast majority of domestic violence (i.e. in which there's actual violence) is either entirely non-injurious or results in injuries so slight they're easily overlooked in the course of everyday life.
But the state criminal system "errs on the side of caution," which Heleniak rightly points out means erring "on the side of hidden harm."
Part II: 'Erring on the side of hidden harm'
April 27th, 2010 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
This follows up on my first piece about David Heleniak's fine article in the second issue of the journal Partner Abuse. As I said I would, I tried to find an online link to the article, but there's not one. But David did provide me this link to an earlier article that appeared a little over two years ago (Counterpunch, 10/20/07 ).
In my first piece I recounted how and why courts tend to, in their words, "err on the side of caution" and why that so often means erring "on the side of hidden harm," in Heleniak's. Put simply, there aren't any consequences for a judge who issues a TRO, even on the slimmest of pretexts. But woe betide the judge who refuses to issue one if the mother or the child is later harmed. That's the stuff of banner headlines and judges looking for a new job.
The deep, longlasting harm to children of having a parent taken from them is seldom if ever noticed by the press and is never followed by calls for the judge's electoral head. That doesn't mean the harm to children isn't real or serious; it often is. It just means that it's hidden away from public view behind a veil of public discourse that, ironically, is all about children's welfare.
But there's another aspect of "erring on the side of hidden harm" that promotes the same result - "defensive social work." That's the phrase coined by researcher Paul Chill and it's similar to "defensive medicine." That is to say, action is often taken "for the record" to ensure that the case file demonstrates an activist mindset on the part of the case worker. That often means taking children from parents for reasons that may not bear close scrutiny, but, as with the judges, few if any caseworkers ever lose their jobs for taking children. It's the ones who fail to do so in cases of later child abuse or neglect who get into trouble. As Chill says,
The people who make removal decisions don’t see a child having a panic attack at 3 a.m. because he is suddenly alone in the world. Or slamming his head against a wall out of protest and desperation. Such experiences may not only cause ‘grief, terror, and feelings of abandonment’ but may also ‘compromise’ a child’s very ‘capacity to form secure attachments’ and lead to other serious problems.
Exactly. And it is Heleniak's point that few others see those responses either. The judges don't see it, the case workers don't see it, the press doesn't see it and neither do the rest of us. Nor are they present later in the child's life when he/she fails time and again at romantic relationships, business relationships, friendships, etc. Out of sight, out of mind.
And the phenomenon is far from rare. Chill cites 2001 statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that some 33% of children who were taken from their parents in that year had suffered no abuse or neglect at all. And that's given a very broad definition of abuse and neglect.
Another way in which children are separated from their parents (actually their fathers in most instances) is via the domestic violence TRO which may or may not be desired by the alleged victim. Not long ago I reported on the case of a Washington State woman whose husband was arrested for domestic violence based on the entirely erroneous observation of a passing motorist. In vain did the woman (and her husband) try to convince the ADA, the judge and other court personnel that no DV had occurred. Restraining orders were issued anyway with the result that the man not only couldn't see or speak to his wife, but he couldn't see or speak to his children either.
It's at that precise instant that the seemingly invariable desire by the state to expand its power intersects with feminism's false concept of domestic violence with disastrous consequences for the rest of us. One canon of feminist DV law is that a woman will often deny abuse out of some misguided effort to remain with her abuser. Doubtless that may occur, but the sensible (not to say, constitutional) way of dealing with such a situation would be for a judge or jury to hear evidence and make a ruling. The approach taken, however, is to treat all women as incapable of acting in their own self-interest. It's one thing to say that sometimes DV victims will want to stay with their abusers; it's quite a different one to say that they all do. Once again the interests of the state and the interests of radical feminism coincide, with our individual rights coming out the loser.
What happened to the woman and her husband in Washington was mandatory, and the same is true in New York, about which Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk writes. There, even cases that involve no actual violence and no injury can nevertheless "trigger application of a mandatory domestic violence protocol." That means the issuance of a Temporary Order of Protection as a condition of bail or pretrial release. (That's essentially what happened in the Washington case.) So a man who may have done nothing violent or injurious is put in jail and offered a deal; he can stay in jail until trial or he can get out and be subject to the TOP. Violation of the TOP of course is a criminal offense and will land him back in jail.
If there are children in the family, the TOP will prohibit contact with them unless the family court rules otherwise. Later, at the plea-bargaining time, the ADA bootstraps the temporary order into a final one. The father will be offered an extremely lenient sentence such as no jail time or even adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, but there's a catch. He has to also agree to a final order of protection which means no contact with his wife or kids for some substantial period of time, usually years.
That's what Suk calls de facto divorce, but in some obvious ways it's worse than that. No order of divorce is ever made, no visitation schedule is worked out, no support payments ordered, but the parent who's the subject of the TOP, again usually the father, is in fact out of his children's lives and that of his wife. Most divorced parents still communicate and most divorced fathers still get to see their kids at least occasionally, but fathers under a TOP can do neither.
And again, none of that may be desired by either husband or wife, but with the state involved, it's the best they can do. And just so we don't forget, the vast majority of domestic violence (i.e. in which there's actual violence) is either entirely non-injurious or results in injuries so slight they're easily overlooked in the course of everyday life.
But the state criminal system "errs on the side of caution," which Heleniak rightly points out means erring "on the side of hidden harm."
Monday, April 19, 2010
It Must Be Because Boys are Lazy
Or some other rationale that dismisses the fact school curriculum has been hijacked by feminists idealogues who fantasize of a female-dominated universe. Of course, the boys are screwed out of gaining entry to college, but who cares, anyway.
http://www.adventistreview.org/article.php?id=3273
The Adventist Review occasionally prints responsible opinions on a wide variety of topics. The following is one opinion. -- Editors
A visit to your local college or university campus is likely to reveal that a revolution has taken place. On many campuses, young women now outnumber young men, and a gender gap of momentous importance is staring us in the face.
This gender gap has been growing for some time now, as successive generations of young women have entered the world of higher education. Yet, no one seemed to see a gap of this magnitude coming — until it had already happened.
The disparity of enrollment by gender varies by institution, but it is now estimated that almost 60 percent of all undergraduate students enrolled in American colleges and universities are women. This represents something altogether new in human experience since the rise of the university model as the dominant learning environment for young adults. For the first time, a generation of young women will be markedly more educated than their male generational cohort.
Is this a bad thing . . . a negative development? Yes — and profoundly so. The problem is not the larger enrollment of young women in colleges and universities. The problem is the phenomenon of missing young men, whose absence spells big trouble for the future.
The numbers point to the problem, but do not explain it. Explanations for the phenomenon of missing young men point to the fact that girls outperform boys at every level in grades K-12, and are thus more ready for the college experience than the boys. Other factors include economic and cultural patterns. Among some ethnic groups, the disparity between men and women entering college is far greater than 60 percent to 40 percent. Many young men consider the educational environment to be frustrating, constricting, and overly feminized. Others have lost confidence that an undergraduate education will lead to a job with adequate income and stability. Whatever the reason, their absence makes a big difference on the college campus today — and will make an even bigger difference in the larger society in years ahead.
The New York Times offered an unusually candid portrait of this gender disparity in “The New Math on Campus,” published in its February 5, 2010 edition. Reporter Alex Williams described a radically transformed social scene on some of today’s largest and most historic state universities.
The University of North Carolina, for example:
North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges. Women have represented about 57 percent of enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000, according to a recent report by the American Council on Education. Researchers there cite several reasons: women tend to have higher grades; men tend to drop out in disproportionate numbers; and female enrollment skews higher among older students, low-income students, and black and Hispanic students.
Williams described a campus filled with young women who socialize with each other out of necessity — there are just not enough young men on campus. As Williams notes, this makes some college campuses resemble retirement communities, where women also generally outnumber men.
On the secular university campus, the gender imbalance has forced adjustments in the “hooking up” culture of sexual negotiation. As Williams reports:
“If a guy is not getting what he wants, he can quickly and abruptly go to the next one, because there are so many of us,” said Katie Deray, a senior at the University of Georgia, who said that it is common to see six provocatively clad women hovering around one or two guys at a party or a bar.
This is a portrait of demographic disaster, and the imbalance is not limited to secular campuses or students. Even as women now outnumber men in baccalaureate programs, they also indicate a desire to marry a man with equal or greater educational attainments. As the numbers now make clear, many of these young women will be disappointed.
Christian parents and all concerned with the coming generation should look closely at this phenomenon and ask the hard question — why is it that so many young men are falling behind in educational attainment? What are we doing that allows or encourages boys to exit formal education at their earliest opportunity? Why do we accept at face value the fact that boys fall behind girls of the same age in maturity and educational level? Why is college now an aspiration for far more young women than young men?
These are hard questions, but the answers will be even harder. We have allowed the development of an elongated boyhood and delayed adulthood. We frustrate them in school and then wonder why they bolt at the first exit from the classroom. We allow boys and young men to forfeit their futures.
All this might be different if the missing young men on our college and university campuses were missing for some good reason — such as military service or similar deployment. But, even as young men are more likely to join the military, the numbers do not explain the differential on campus.
Biblical manhood requires that young men grow up, assume adult responsibilities, and prepare for leadership and service in the home, in the church, and in the larger society.
This much is clear — if this trend is not reversed, the college campus will not be the only place these young men are found missing.
http://www.adventistreview.org/article.php?id=3273
The Adventist Review occasionally prints responsible opinions on a wide variety of topics. The following is one opinion. -- Editors
A visit to your local college or university campus is likely to reveal that a revolution has taken place. On many campuses, young women now outnumber young men, and a gender gap of momentous importance is staring us in the face.
This gender gap has been growing for some time now, as successive generations of young women have entered the world of higher education. Yet, no one seemed to see a gap of this magnitude coming — until it had already happened.
The disparity of enrollment by gender varies by institution, but it is now estimated that almost 60 percent of all undergraduate students enrolled in American colleges and universities are women. This represents something altogether new in human experience since the rise of the university model as the dominant learning environment for young adults. For the first time, a generation of young women will be markedly more educated than their male generational cohort.
Is this a bad thing . . . a negative development? Yes — and profoundly so. The problem is not the larger enrollment of young women in colleges and universities. The problem is the phenomenon of missing young men, whose absence spells big trouble for the future.
The numbers point to the problem, but do not explain it. Explanations for the phenomenon of missing young men point to the fact that girls outperform boys at every level in grades K-12, and are thus more ready for the college experience than the boys. Other factors include economic and cultural patterns. Among some ethnic groups, the disparity between men and women entering college is far greater than 60 percent to 40 percent. Many young men consider the educational environment to be frustrating, constricting, and overly feminized. Others have lost confidence that an undergraduate education will lead to a job with adequate income and stability. Whatever the reason, their absence makes a big difference on the college campus today — and will make an even bigger difference in the larger society in years ahead.
The New York Times offered an unusually candid portrait of this gender disparity in “The New Math on Campus,” published in its February 5, 2010 edition. Reporter Alex Williams described a radically transformed social scene on some of today’s largest and most historic state universities.
The University of North Carolina, for example:
North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges. Women have represented about 57 percent of enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000, according to a recent report by the American Council on Education. Researchers there cite several reasons: women tend to have higher grades; men tend to drop out in disproportionate numbers; and female enrollment skews higher among older students, low-income students, and black and Hispanic students.
Williams described a campus filled with young women who socialize with each other out of necessity — there are just not enough young men on campus. As Williams notes, this makes some college campuses resemble retirement communities, where women also generally outnumber men.
On the secular university campus, the gender imbalance has forced adjustments in the “hooking up” culture of sexual negotiation. As Williams reports:
“If a guy is not getting what he wants, he can quickly and abruptly go to the next one, because there are so many of us,” said Katie Deray, a senior at the University of Georgia, who said that it is common to see six provocatively clad women hovering around one or two guys at a party or a bar.
This is a portrait of demographic disaster, and the imbalance is not limited to secular campuses or students. Even as women now outnumber men in baccalaureate programs, they also indicate a desire to marry a man with equal or greater educational attainments. As the numbers now make clear, many of these young women will be disappointed.
Christian parents and all concerned with the coming generation should look closely at this phenomenon and ask the hard question — why is it that so many young men are falling behind in educational attainment? What are we doing that allows or encourages boys to exit formal education at their earliest opportunity? Why do we accept at face value the fact that boys fall behind girls of the same age in maturity and educational level? Why is college now an aspiration for far more young women than young men?
These are hard questions, but the answers will be even harder. We have allowed the development of an elongated boyhood and delayed adulthood. We frustrate them in school and then wonder why they bolt at the first exit from the classroom. We allow boys and young men to forfeit their futures.
All this might be different if the missing young men on our college and university campuses were missing for some good reason — such as military service or similar deployment. But, even as young men are more likely to join the military, the numbers do not explain the differential on campus.
Biblical manhood requires that young men grow up, assume adult responsibilities, and prepare for leadership and service in the home, in the church, and in the larger society.
This much is clear — if this trend is not reversed, the college campus will not be the only place these young men are found missing.
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Yet Again
An example of one group of men (and a few women), trying to take advantage of another group of men (pension funds, endowments, private investors, etc.).
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/%22rotten-to-the-core%22:-bill-black-and-barry-ritholtz-react-to-goldman-fraud-charges-469554.html?tickers=GS,JPM,C,XLF,BAC,^DJI,FAZ
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/%22rotten-to-the-core%22:-bill-black-and-barry-ritholtz-react-to-goldman-fraud-charges-469554.html?tickers=GS,JPM,C,XLF,BAC,^DJI,FAZ
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Oh Wait....
You mean women don't get to make money that isn't counted when its divorce time? You mean men's money is always at stake to be taken, nearly in its entirety regardless of his actions or the duration of the marriage!?!?!?! An outrage! Its like saying women aren't privileged member of society when it comes to divorce. SICKENING!
Amanda Platell: 'Britain's Divorce Laws Need to be Changed to Stop Ladies Leeching Off of Men'
April 7th, 2010 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
Philippa Vaughan, 66, has no children, lives in a four-bedroom £1million house in fashionable Hammersmith, West London, and inherited £770,000 from her parents.
Not only that, she's
a working woman (with a job as an expert in Islamic and Indian art).
In short, she's in no way hurting financially, but the British divorce laws and the judges who interpret them, believe she is. That's why, after 25 years of separation from her ex, a judge just ordered him to pay her an additional £215,000 out of his estate. And, as this article points out, it's not as if Vaughan contributed anything to her ex-hubby's estate (Daily Mail, 4/3/10). He saved almost all of it after they split up. So what's the rationale for the payout ordered by the court? It's hard to see.
And writer Amanda Platell isn't happy about it, not a bit. She rightly points out that continuing to treat women as if they were children, incapable of caring for themselves and requiring ongoing infusions of male-earned money is an insult to the concept of women's equality.
It's particularly so in Vaughan's case. She supports herself and contributed essentially nothing to her ex's estate. Of course it's satisfying for her to "get one over her ex," but the larger picture is one of female privilege at the expense of males. When feminists complain that there aren't equal numbers of male and female elected officials, maybe they should look at the other side of the coin, the one on which they demand privileged status for women in many walks of life. I don't think you can have both. In the last analysis, I don't think a society that looks at women as uniquely needy, uniquely frail, uniquely weak, uniquely in need of protection, will simultaneously see them as equal. I don't think it works that way.
As if to underscore the point, the judge in Vaughan's case
said it was 'plainly wrong' to think she could adjust to life after her ex-husband's maintenance payments were cancelled last year.
Really? I wonder if he would say the same if the sexes were reversed. After all, this woman is well-educated and holds a good job, lives in a posh house and has about $1 million in the bank. Somehow, she required his "maintenance" and now without it, she can't "adjust to life." Who knew life could be so hard?
More important than the shakiness of the judge's reasoning though, are his assumptions. How pathetic a figure must he perceive Vaughan to be! Somehow, given all that she has, according to his logic, she just can't make it on her own. There are billions of people in this world who'd love to give it a try. It's that mindset that holds women to be overmatched by any and all circumstances that will consign them to secondary status as surely as any law ever could.
And it's that mindset that's got Amanda Platell spitting mad, and rightly so. Changing Britain's divorce laws isn't the whole answer of course, but it would be a start. Ex-spouses should only get part of the marital estate to which they contributed, and that includes non-monetary contributions. They should only get "maintenance" in cases of actual need, and when the need runs out, so should the maintenance.
It's past time to start treating divorcing couples like adults, whether they act that way or not.
Amanda Platell: 'Britain's Divorce Laws Need to be Changed to Stop Ladies Leeching Off of Men'
April 7th, 2010 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
Philippa Vaughan, 66, has no children, lives in a four-bedroom £1million house in fashionable Hammersmith, West London, and inherited £770,000 from her parents.
Not only that, she's
a working woman (with a job as an expert in Islamic and Indian art).
In short, she's in no way hurting financially, but the British divorce laws and the judges who interpret them, believe she is. That's why, after 25 years of separation from her ex, a judge just ordered him to pay her an additional £215,000 out of his estate. And, as this article points out, it's not as if Vaughan contributed anything to her ex-hubby's estate (Daily Mail, 4/3/10). He saved almost all of it after they split up. So what's the rationale for the payout ordered by the court? It's hard to see.
And writer Amanda Platell isn't happy about it, not a bit. She rightly points out that continuing to treat women as if they were children, incapable of caring for themselves and requiring ongoing infusions of male-earned money is an insult to the concept of women's equality.
It's particularly so in Vaughan's case. She supports herself and contributed essentially nothing to her ex's estate. Of course it's satisfying for her to "get one over her ex," but the larger picture is one of female privilege at the expense of males. When feminists complain that there aren't equal numbers of male and female elected officials, maybe they should look at the other side of the coin, the one on which they demand privileged status for women in many walks of life. I don't think you can have both. In the last analysis, I don't think a society that looks at women as uniquely needy, uniquely frail, uniquely weak, uniquely in need of protection, will simultaneously see them as equal. I don't think it works that way.
As if to underscore the point, the judge in Vaughan's case
said it was 'plainly wrong' to think she could adjust to life after her ex-husband's maintenance payments were cancelled last year.
Really? I wonder if he would say the same if the sexes were reversed. After all, this woman is well-educated and holds a good job, lives in a posh house and has about $1 million in the bank. Somehow, she required his "maintenance" and now without it, she can't "adjust to life." Who knew life could be so hard?
More important than the shakiness of the judge's reasoning though, are his assumptions. How pathetic a figure must he perceive Vaughan to be! Somehow, given all that she has, according to his logic, she just can't make it on her own. There are billions of people in this world who'd love to give it a try. It's that mindset that holds women to be overmatched by any and all circumstances that will consign them to secondary status as surely as any law ever could.
And it's that mindset that's got Amanda Platell spitting mad, and rightly so. Changing Britain's divorce laws isn't the whole answer of course, but it would be a start. Ex-spouses should only get part of the marital estate to which they contributed, and that includes non-monetary contributions. They should only get "maintenance" in cases of actual need, and when the need runs out, so should the maintenance.
It's past time to start treating divorcing couples like adults, whether they act that way or not.
Monday, December 21, 2009
More Judicial Gerrymandering
This is a total joke. The system is slanted in favor of the ACCUSED and THE INNOCENT. Its also based on finding the FACTS at hand at ALL TIMES. This ruling has, like so much else in our FASCIST country, turned lying, cheating and stealing into REAL LIFE actions that go UNPUNISHED. What do you think the big corporations are going to do? HIDE ALL EVIDENCE SHOWING THEIR GUILT IN ANY MATTER AND DEMAND THE CASE BE DISMISSED AND NO FACTS FOUND DURING THE TYPICAL "DISCOVERY" PROCESS. Unreal.
Is America Still a Nation of Laws?
Congress and the White House may have been co-opted by the big lobbyists and Wall Street insiders, but you may assume that at least the third branch of government - the courts - are still following the rule of law and protecting the little guy.
Unfortunately, the American system of justice is also under attack.
I'm not talking simply about judicial corruption. True, as I pointed out on February 17, 2009:
Senior judges in Pennsylvania have pleaded guilty to falsely convicting and imprisoning hundreds of youths (they got kickbacks from the prisons).
***
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court refused to hear a case regarding the corrupt judges. A month later, only after the judges confessed to criminal wrongdoing, did the Supreme Court change its mind and take any interest
In fact, I'm talking about something much more disturbing than simple corruption. I am talking about abandoning the very foundations of our judicial system.
For example, as I noted on July 21, 2009:
The New York Times is providing important coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court's May 18, 2009 decision in the case known as Ashcroft v. Iqbal:
The lower courts have certainly understood the significance of the decision, Ashcroft v. Iqbal, which makes it much easier for judges to dismiss civil lawsuits right after they are filed. They have cited it more than 500 times in just the last two months.
“Iqbal is the most significant Supreme Court decision in a decade for day-to-day litigation in the federal courts,” said Thomas C. Goldstein, an appellate lawyer with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington.
Why is Iqbal such an important case?
As the Times notes:
For more than half a century, it has been clear that all a plaintiff had to do to start a lawsuit was to file what the rules call “a short and plain statement of the claim” in a document called a complaint. Having filed such a bare-bones complaint, plaintiffs were entitled to force defendants to open their files and submit to questioning under oath.
This approach, particularly when coupled with the American requirement that each side pay its own lawyers no matter who wins, gave plaintiffs settlement leverage. Just by filing a lawsuit, a plaintiff could subject a defendant to great cost and inconvenience in the pre-trial fact-finding process called discovery...
Information about wrongdoing is often secret. Plaintiffs claiming they were the victims of employment discrimination, a defective product, an antitrust conspiracy or a policy of harsh treatment in detention may not know exactly who harmed them and how before filing suit. But plaintiffs can learn valuable information during discovery.
The Iqbal decision now requires plaintiffs to come forward with concrete facts at the outset, and it instructs lower court judges to dismiss lawsuits that strike them as implausible.
“Determining whether a complaint states a plausible claim for relief,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the five-justice majority, “requires the reviewing court to draw on its judicial experience and common sense.”
Note those words: Plausible. Common sense.
So what is the real world effect of the Supreme Court's decision?
The Times provides some hints:
“It obviously licenses highly subjective judgments,” said Stephen B. Burbank, an authority on civil procedure at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. “This is a blank check for federal judges to get rid of cases they disfavor.”
Courts applying Iqbal have been busy. A federal judge in Connecticut dismissed a disability discrimination suit this month, saying that Iqbal required her to treat the plaintiff’s assertions as implausible. A few days later, the federal appeals court in New York dismissed a breach of contract and securities fraud suit after concluding that its account of the defendants’ asserted wrongdoing was too speculative.
Indeed, the Plaintiff in Iqbal himself, was a Pakistani Muslim working and living in Long Island, who claims he was arrested 2 months after 9/11 and then beaten and tortured. But the court didn't want to hear about it:
Justice Kennedy said Mr. Iqbal’s suit against two officials had not cleared the plausibility bar. All Mr. Iqbal’s complaint plausibly suggested, Justice Kennedy wrote, “is that the nation’s top law enforcement officers, in the aftermath of a devastating terrorist attack, sought to keep suspected terrorists in the most secure conditions available.”
In other words, the Court found the allegation that an innocent person was tortured as "implausible". It has become apparent to everyone, however, that many innocent people were tortured.
The Iqbal decision is - literally - an assault by the Supreme Court on the American system of justice. For it prevents plaintiffs from having their day in court if either:
1. The judge doesn't want to hear the case; or
2. The defendant has hidden the evidence of wrongdoing, so that the plaintiff cannot provide the details of defendant's wrongdoing without the use of the formal discovery process which only starts once litigation has commenced
People may ask "the Supreme Court interprets and enforces the American justice system, so how can it gut that system?
Well, Congress members and the President are supposed to represent the interests of the American people. Have they always done so?
Judges - like people in the White House and Congress - are human beings with political and personal viewpoints. Some stick to the case precedent while others - no matter how high and mighty - abandon it for political or personal reasons. That is the dirty little secret that those who work inside the justice system know.
In rendering the Iqbal decision, the Supreme Court abandoned some of the fundamental principals of justice, leaving a system which only pays lip service to that word.
Several Supreme Court justices dissented with the majority's opinion in Iqbal. As Raw Story writes:
Departing Justice David H. Souter sided with the minority in this case, expressing dismay in his dissent and suggesting the decision could “upend,” said the Times, the federal civil litigation system. He argued that complaints should be accepted “no matter how skeptical the court may be,” so long as the accusations are not “sufficiently fantastic to defy reality as we know it.”
“[Claims] about little green men, or the plaintiff’s recent trip to Pluto, or experiences in time travel,” he said, should be the bar for disqualification.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed, suggesting the court had “messed up the federal rules” for civil suits.
Now, Chris Floyd and Yves Smith point out another worrisome Supreme Court decision:
If the president or one of his subordinates declares someone to be an “enemy combatant” (the 21st century version of “enemy of the state”) he is denied any protection of the law. So any trouble-maker (which means anyone) can be whisked away, incarcerated, tortured, “disappeared,” you name it. Floyd’s commentary:
After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president’s fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a “suspected enemy combatant” by the president or his designated minions is no longer a “person.” They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever — save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.
It is hard to overstate the significance of this horrid decision. The fact that the Supreme Court authorized this land grab says we no longer have an independent judiciary, that the Supreme Court itself is gutting the protections supposedly provided by the legal system. Per Floyd:
In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.
Now Floyd saw this mainly as an issue of the treatment of enemy combatants and Obama hypocrisy about torture, which is bad enough:
The Constitution is clear: no person can be held without due process; no person can be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. And the U.S. law on torture of any kind is crystal clear: it is forbidden, categorically, even in time of “national emergency.” And the instigation of torture is, under U.S. law, a capital crime. No person can be tortured, at any time, for any reason, and there are no immunities whatsoever for torture offered anywhere in the law.
And yet this is what Barack Obama — who, we are told incessantly, is a super-brilliant Constitutional lawyer — has been arguing in case after case since becoming president: Torturers are immune from prosecution; those who ordered torture are immune from prosecution….let’s be absolutely clear: Barack Obama has taken the freely chosen, public, formal stand — in court — that there is nothing wrong with any of these activities.
Yves here. The implications are FAR worse. Anyone can be stripped, with NO RECOURSE, of all their legal rights on a Presidential say so. Readers in the US no longer have any security under the law.
Roman citizens enjoyed a right to a trial, a right of appeal, and could not be tortured, whipped, or executed except if found guilty of treason, and anyone charged with treason could demand a trial in Rome. We have regressed more than 2000 years with this appalling ruling.
Is America still a nation of laws? Or is it a nation in which judges get to throw out cases soon after filing because the plaintiffs claims go against the judge's belief system or world view and the President can decide that someone is entitled to no legal protection whatsoever?
Is America Still a Nation of Laws?
Congress and the White House may have been co-opted by the big lobbyists and Wall Street insiders, but you may assume that at least the third branch of government - the courts - are still following the rule of law and protecting the little guy.
Unfortunately, the American system of justice is also under attack.
I'm not talking simply about judicial corruption. True, as I pointed out on February 17, 2009:
Senior judges in Pennsylvania have pleaded guilty to falsely convicting and imprisoning hundreds of youths (they got kickbacks from the prisons).
***
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court refused to hear a case regarding the corrupt judges. A month later, only after the judges confessed to criminal wrongdoing, did the Supreme Court change its mind and take any interest
In fact, I'm talking about something much more disturbing than simple corruption. I am talking about abandoning the very foundations of our judicial system.
For example, as I noted on July 21, 2009:
The New York Times is providing important coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court's May 18, 2009 decision in the case known as Ashcroft v. Iqbal:
The lower courts have certainly understood the significance of the decision, Ashcroft v. Iqbal, which makes it much easier for judges to dismiss civil lawsuits right after they are filed. They have cited it more than 500 times in just the last two months.
“Iqbal is the most significant Supreme Court decision in a decade for day-to-day litigation in the federal courts,” said Thomas C. Goldstein, an appellate lawyer with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington.
Why is Iqbal such an important case?
As the Times notes:
For more than half a century, it has been clear that all a plaintiff had to do to start a lawsuit was to file what the rules call “a short and plain statement of the claim” in a document called a complaint. Having filed such a bare-bones complaint, plaintiffs were entitled to force defendants to open their files and submit to questioning under oath.
This approach, particularly when coupled with the American requirement that each side pay its own lawyers no matter who wins, gave plaintiffs settlement leverage. Just by filing a lawsuit, a plaintiff could subject a defendant to great cost and inconvenience in the pre-trial fact-finding process called discovery...
Information about wrongdoing is often secret. Plaintiffs claiming they were the victims of employment discrimination, a defective product, an antitrust conspiracy or a policy of harsh treatment in detention may not know exactly who harmed them and how before filing suit. But plaintiffs can learn valuable information during discovery.
The Iqbal decision now requires plaintiffs to come forward with concrete facts at the outset, and it instructs lower court judges to dismiss lawsuits that strike them as implausible.
“Determining whether a complaint states a plausible claim for relief,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the five-justice majority, “requires the reviewing court to draw on its judicial experience and common sense.”
Note those words: Plausible. Common sense.
So what is the real world effect of the Supreme Court's decision?
The Times provides some hints:
“It obviously licenses highly subjective judgments,” said Stephen B. Burbank, an authority on civil procedure at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. “This is a blank check for federal judges to get rid of cases they disfavor.”
Courts applying Iqbal have been busy. A federal judge in Connecticut dismissed a disability discrimination suit this month, saying that Iqbal required her to treat the plaintiff’s assertions as implausible. A few days later, the federal appeals court in New York dismissed a breach of contract and securities fraud suit after concluding that its account of the defendants’ asserted wrongdoing was too speculative.
Indeed, the Plaintiff in Iqbal himself, was a Pakistani Muslim working and living in Long Island, who claims he was arrested 2 months after 9/11 and then beaten and tortured. But the court didn't want to hear about it:
Justice Kennedy said Mr. Iqbal’s suit against two officials had not cleared the plausibility bar. All Mr. Iqbal’s complaint plausibly suggested, Justice Kennedy wrote, “is that the nation’s top law enforcement officers, in the aftermath of a devastating terrorist attack, sought to keep suspected terrorists in the most secure conditions available.”
In other words, the Court found the allegation that an innocent person was tortured as "implausible". It has become apparent to everyone, however, that many innocent people were tortured.
The Iqbal decision is - literally - an assault by the Supreme Court on the American system of justice. For it prevents plaintiffs from having their day in court if either:
1. The judge doesn't want to hear the case; or
2. The defendant has hidden the evidence of wrongdoing, so that the plaintiff cannot provide the details of defendant's wrongdoing without the use of the formal discovery process which only starts once litigation has commenced
People may ask "the Supreme Court interprets and enforces the American justice system, so how can it gut that system?
Well, Congress members and the President are supposed to represent the interests of the American people. Have they always done so?
Judges - like people in the White House and Congress - are human beings with political and personal viewpoints. Some stick to the case precedent while others - no matter how high and mighty - abandon it for political or personal reasons. That is the dirty little secret that those who work inside the justice system know.
In rendering the Iqbal decision, the Supreme Court abandoned some of the fundamental principals of justice, leaving a system which only pays lip service to that word.
Several Supreme Court justices dissented with the majority's opinion in Iqbal. As Raw Story writes:
Departing Justice David H. Souter sided with the minority in this case, expressing dismay in his dissent and suggesting the decision could “upend,” said the Times, the federal civil litigation system. He argued that complaints should be accepted “no matter how skeptical the court may be,” so long as the accusations are not “sufficiently fantastic to defy reality as we know it.”
“[Claims] about little green men, or the plaintiff’s recent trip to Pluto, or experiences in time travel,” he said, should be the bar for disqualification.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed, suggesting the court had “messed up the federal rules” for civil suits.
Now, Chris Floyd and Yves Smith point out another worrisome Supreme Court decision:
If the president or one of his subordinates declares someone to be an “enemy combatant” (the 21st century version of “enemy of the state”) he is denied any protection of the law. So any trouble-maker (which means anyone) can be whisked away, incarcerated, tortured, “disappeared,” you name it. Floyd’s commentary:
After hearing passionate arguments from the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the president’s fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a “suspected enemy combatant” by the president or his designated minions is no longer a “person.” They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever — save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.
It is hard to overstate the significance of this horrid decision. The fact that the Supreme Court authorized this land grab says we no longer have an independent judiciary, that the Supreme Court itself is gutting the protections supposedly provided by the legal system. Per Floyd:
In fact, our most august defenders of the Constitution did not have to exert themselves in the slightest to eviscerate not merely 220 years of Constitutional jurisprudence but also centuries of agonizing effort to lift civilization a few inches out of the blood-soaked mire that is our common human legacy. They just had to write a single sentence.
Now Floyd saw this mainly as an issue of the treatment of enemy combatants and Obama hypocrisy about torture, which is bad enough:
The Constitution is clear: no person can be held without due process; no person can be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. And the U.S. law on torture of any kind is crystal clear: it is forbidden, categorically, even in time of “national emergency.” And the instigation of torture is, under U.S. law, a capital crime. No person can be tortured, at any time, for any reason, and there are no immunities whatsoever for torture offered anywhere in the law.
And yet this is what Barack Obama — who, we are told incessantly, is a super-brilliant Constitutional lawyer — has been arguing in case after case since becoming president: Torturers are immune from prosecution; those who ordered torture are immune from prosecution….let’s be absolutely clear: Barack Obama has taken the freely chosen, public, formal stand — in court — that there is nothing wrong with any of these activities.
Yves here. The implications are FAR worse. Anyone can be stripped, with NO RECOURSE, of all their legal rights on a Presidential say so. Readers in the US no longer have any security under the law.
Roman citizens enjoyed a right to a trial, a right of appeal, and could not be tortured, whipped, or executed except if found guilty of treason, and anyone charged with treason could demand a trial in Rome. We have regressed more than 2000 years with this appalling ruling.
Is America still a nation of laws? Or is it a nation in which judges get to throw out cases soon after filing because the plaintiffs claims go against the judge's belief system or world view and the President can decide that someone is entitled to no legal protection whatsoever?
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Time To Rant: Banksters Blowing Out Country
The posts here are about men being raped by family courts, or by laws constructed by a male-hating class of radical feminists (cough, Pelosi, cough). But this post is about what's happening on a much larger economic scale.
Most people are simply wildly ignorant of what's actually happening. I'm a complete nerd who does nothing but research random economic theories and the general study of finance, politics, sociology, psychology, and history, so allow me to fill you in.
The country is on the path to complete ruin. That's right mom and dad: THIS ONE. YOUR country. I'm not talking about Zimbabwe here. I'm talking about the good 'ole U.S. of A. If anyone lost count, we've committed some 20-odd Trillion to the financial crisis between bailout and promises. The Government is now holding up three industries with its bare hands, BORROWED money and re-structured laws that encourage accounting fraud and racketeering. That 700 billion we gave away to multi-million dollar-swallowing, self-aggrandizing banksters last year? Yeah, we didn't have that stuffed down the front of our pants. That money is being borrowed in the bond market, a massive fixed-income debt market that could hold 10 stock markets in its back pocket.
Let me be as plain as I can - insiders report that the normal issuance of T-bills (debt issued by the Feds that they promise YOU and me will pay back), is about 20 billion a week. Sound like a lot? That's because it is. And what do they issue these days? Try 200 billion per week. That's insane. That's beyond the pale. Even with people and sovereigns (that's foreign governments) fleeing into the bond market to buy, the buyers are COMPLETELY overwhelmed by the massive issuance of U.S debt. So what? So this is a freaking problem. Here's why. The interest rate on bonds determine the interest rate we pay on the national debt. If that interest rate gets just a TAD too high, we're effed. We don't pay down national debt - we just roll it over - borrow anew to pay off the people we owe - PLUS INTEREST. As the amount of interest we have to pay - JUST the interest - will get so large, the country won't be able to make its debt payments - at that point the United States, the beacon of financial stability - must either default on its debt (cataclysmic) or else, MONETIZE the debt (that's a big fancy word for printing dollars out of thin air and using them to pay the nation's debts). So what are they doing? (They being the boneheads "in charge.") They're printing money like Hell and using it to purchase the T-bills being issued. Get it? The Federal Reserve board uses PRINTED money to purchase DEBT issued by the U.S. Treasury. Cute, eh? It keeps the purchases of T-bills up and interest rate paid on them down (rates and prices on bonds move in opposite directions). Its often referred to as a PONZI SCHEME. Its highly risky and ALWAYS collapses.
Check the value of the dollar lately? DXY is the dollar index. Its getting slaughtered - go figure. The Chinese, Japanese, South Koreans, and Germans are less than thrilled with us printing them into OBLIVION. You see those people hold MASSIVE amounts of U.S. dollars (T-bills) and if we're printing like crazy, the dollar value will crash (more printed dollars means the dollars currently in circulation are worth much less); that's something john q. public is finally starting to figure out as well. Prices of everything are rising thanks to the print-fest being run by the private Federal Reserve Board.
Bottom line is that there's no way out of this but to kill the big banks (as they tried to kill themselves). Bailing them out is causing the Feds to print to avoid defaulting on their debt, but all the printing is killing the value of the dollar, which will increase consumer prices, and make the Fed back off their printing. They wind down T-bill purchases and the like by October and mortgage security purchases, asset-backed securities and the like by year end. That could allow deflation to take hold again and drive the value of the dollar up (oh no), which makes interest rates rise, and anything priced in dollars (including houses) fall. That's a good thing for nearly everyone but the big banks, who will order the Fed to go back to printing immediately (The Federal Reserve board is private, not public, they can do whatever they like), re-pressuring the dollar again, raising consumer (yours) and producer (your boss) prices all over again. This will repeat for as long as 4-10 years or until the weight of our debt and interest payments CRUSH us.
Think it can't happen? Interest is an exponential function. Do some math. We're not getting out of this alive unless the big banks stop being the black hole of our money that they are. And given that the banks OWN congress.... WE ARE UP THE PROVERBIAL CREEK.
For more info:
www.zerohedge.com
www.institutionalriskanalytics.com
www.market-ticker.denninger.net
www.bigpicture.typepad.com
www.nakedcapitalism.com
Rememeber, there is no government that stands FOR YOU OR FOR US - THEY STAND FOR THEMSELVES AND THOSE THAT PAY THEM. THAT IS ALL. WAKE UP AMERICA. YOU'VE BEEN SOLD LIKE SLAVES.
Most people are simply wildly ignorant of what's actually happening. I'm a complete nerd who does nothing but research random economic theories and the general study of finance, politics, sociology, psychology, and history, so allow me to fill you in.
The country is on the path to complete ruin. That's right mom and dad: THIS ONE. YOUR country. I'm not talking about Zimbabwe here. I'm talking about the good 'ole U.S. of A. If anyone lost count, we've committed some 20-odd Trillion to the financial crisis between bailout and promises. The Government is now holding up three industries with its bare hands, BORROWED money and re-structured laws that encourage accounting fraud and racketeering. That 700 billion we gave away to multi-million dollar-swallowing, self-aggrandizing banksters last year? Yeah, we didn't have that stuffed down the front of our pants. That money is being borrowed in the bond market, a massive fixed-income debt market that could hold 10 stock markets in its back pocket.
Let me be as plain as I can - insiders report that the normal issuance of T-bills (debt issued by the Feds that they promise YOU and me will pay back), is about 20 billion a week. Sound like a lot? That's because it is. And what do they issue these days? Try 200 billion per week. That's insane. That's beyond the pale. Even with people and sovereigns (that's foreign governments) fleeing into the bond market to buy, the buyers are COMPLETELY overwhelmed by the massive issuance of U.S debt. So what? So this is a freaking problem. Here's why. The interest rate on bonds determine the interest rate we pay on the national debt. If that interest rate gets just a TAD too high, we're effed. We don't pay down national debt - we just roll it over - borrow anew to pay off the people we owe - PLUS INTEREST. As the amount of interest we have to pay - JUST the interest - will get so large, the country won't be able to make its debt payments - at that point the United States, the beacon of financial stability - must either default on its debt (cataclysmic) or else, MONETIZE the debt (that's a big fancy word for printing dollars out of thin air and using them to pay the nation's debts). So what are they doing? (They being the boneheads "in charge.") They're printing money like Hell and using it to purchase the T-bills being issued. Get it? The Federal Reserve board uses PRINTED money to purchase DEBT issued by the U.S. Treasury. Cute, eh? It keeps the purchases of T-bills up and interest rate paid on them down (rates and prices on bonds move in opposite directions). Its often referred to as a PONZI SCHEME. Its highly risky and ALWAYS collapses.
Check the value of the dollar lately? DXY is the dollar index. Its getting slaughtered - go figure. The Chinese, Japanese, South Koreans, and Germans are less than thrilled with us printing them into OBLIVION. You see those people hold MASSIVE amounts of U.S. dollars (T-bills) and if we're printing like crazy, the dollar value will crash (more printed dollars means the dollars currently in circulation are worth much less); that's something john q. public is finally starting to figure out as well. Prices of everything are rising thanks to the print-fest being run by the private Federal Reserve Board.
Bottom line is that there's no way out of this but to kill the big banks (as they tried to kill themselves). Bailing them out is causing the Feds to print to avoid defaulting on their debt, but all the printing is killing the value of the dollar, which will increase consumer prices, and make the Fed back off their printing. They wind down T-bill purchases and the like by October and mortgage security purchases, asset-backed securities and the like by year end. That could allow deflation to take hold again and drive the value of the dollar up (oh no), which makes interest rates rise, and anything priced in dollars (including houses) fall. That's a good thing for nearly everyone but the big banks, who will order the Fed to go back to printing immediately (The Federal Reserve board is private, not public, they can do whatever they like), re-pressuring the dollar again, raising consumer (yours) and producer (your boss) prices all over again. This will repeat for as long as 4-10 years or until the weight of our debt and interest payments CRUSH us.
Think it can't happen? Interest is an exponential function. Do some math. We're not getting out of this alive unless the big banks stop being the black hole of our money that they are. And given that the banks OWN congress.... WE ARE UP THE PROVERBIAL CREEK.
For more info:
www.zerohedge.com
www.institutionalriskanalytics.com
www.market-ticker.denninger.net
www.bigpicture.typepad.com
www.nakedcapitalism.com
Rememeber, there is no government that stands FOR YOU OR FOR US - THEY STAND FOR THEMSELVES AND THOSE THAT PAY THEM. THAT IS ALL. WAKE UP AMERICA. YOU'VE BEEN SOLD LIKE SLAVES.
Sunday, September 06, 2009
Ain't it Wonderful to Come Home Exhausted to the Kids Everyday!
[Let me summarize for everyone who has never been married or had kids - YOU CANNOT HAVE IT ALL - NOT WITHOUT A LOT OF PAIN. Couples who both work and try to raise their kids too, are exhausted, don't have sex, and waste the extra money on crap they don't need such as luxury cars. Couples with one person - EITHER MAN OR WOMAN - staying home with the kids are going to have a cleaner house with better food to eat and healthier children who receive more attention and probably get better grades, don't drink, smoke, or abuse drugs and don't get pregnant at 15.
BUT, that means one parent will have to feel a bit left out of the career world and you will not drive a Mercedes. Its called SACRIFICE. Families sacrifice. That means EVERYONE. Guess what? Hubby may be doing a job he hates because THE FAMILY needs the money and he's ignoring the new, sexy secretary, and gives his paycheck every week to the bank for mortgage, credit card payments, after-school clothes, and car payments. He does this because he loves his wife and children, but somehow this never counts as a sacrifice, or as an honorable thing to do. Its ASSUMED and its taken FOR GRANTED. EVERYONE sacrifices in a family. Its how families function. Get used to it. Selfish people get divorced or get used by other selfish people. Jesus Christ. Look around and grow up, already, people.]
Having it all is a myth girls, so just make sure your daughters marry rich men
After years of fighting, it is not the glass ceiling but working mothers’ dreams that have shattered. Is there a new way forward?
India Knight
When it comes to mothers and work, the question I would most like to be answered is: “Would you like your daughter to have a life like yours?” If you asked a man the same thing about his son, the answer would probably be: “Yes, give or take the odd thing.” But for mothers the case is usually different. For an increasing number of women, the answer now seems to be a resolute: “Absolutely not.”
This was certainly the answer I got from a friend last week — an ultra-successful, glass-ceiling-busting woman with an enviable job — when I asked her about her two little girls and what she’d like them to do when they grow up. “I’d like them to marry rich men and do a little light charity work,” she said. Of course, it seemed laughable. But she was deadly serious.
Last Sunday, in the pages of this newspaper’s Magazine, Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen, the likeable and apparently sane presenter, and his daughter Cecile did the Relative Values column. Cecile, a spirited 13-year-old, said: “Daddy . . . says, ‘You’re not clever’, which is pretty much true, I’m not very bright, but I love fashion. Daddy says that if everything goes wrong with fashion I’ve always got a safety net, which is to marry a rich man.”
Admittedly, two hard-working, successful individuals wishing nothing more than haut-bourgeois domesticity for their daughters does not exactly constitute a sea change: perhaps they’ve both gone temporarily insane. But the idea that clever girls crave domestic bliss, too, seems to be gathering momentum. The other week saw the publication in America of Smart Girls Marry Money, which “challenges the ideals and assumptions women have blindly accepted about love and marriage, and shows how they’ve done so at their own economic peril”.
“Mercenary marriages,” the authors claim, “make the most sense for future happiness.”
So I asked some of my friends who work in offices if they hoped their daughters’ professional lives would end up being like theirs. “What?” said one. “See your babies for about 45 minutes a day, like I did for years? I don’t wish that for my daughter.”
But, but, but . . . “I’m just being honest,” she continued. “We have a very nice life and I’d like her to have a very nice life too, obviously, but not like this.”
It’s not that my friends don’t support the advances women have made. “I want to say yes,” said another, “but I can’t. You’re asking me if I want my daughter to have a life governed by compromise and guilt. No, is the short answer.”
Another summed matters up neatly: “When my daughter was little, her school friends thought her nanny was her mother. I’d turn up to the nativity play and 10 little children would say, ‘Who are you?’ That would be a pretty weird thing to wish on my own child.”
There was a little more joy from the stay-at-home-mother camp, but not much. “I’d like her to spend as much time with her children as I have with mine,” said one woman, “but I’d also like her not to wake up in the middle of the night wondering what happened to her brain, her life, her ambitions, her dreams. Not wondering, really: panicking.”
“I would like her to have a life like mine,” said another. “Except I’d like her to be in a civilised world where going back to work is an easily achievable goal. I feel I’ve been put out to pasture and I’m only 36.”
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
Alpha Males Extinct
[I love this article. Apparently it doesn't dawn on the author to examine how the academic curriculum in schools has changed in the past decade and how this might affect boys' grades and test scores!?!?!?!?
Does anyone realize boys are being asked to read Jane Eyre in HIGH SCHOOL?!?!?! I love the Bronte's. I read a collection of their work - WHEN I WAS 28 - and I have a degree in English. I'm a reader's reader. I read Shakespeare and old English poetry. But I didn't get into 19th Century English Literature until College and didn't truly appreciate it until my mid-to-late 20s. So I'm guessing your standard Engineering, math-centric, 17 year-old boy MAY NOT YET BE READY for old-English romance novels - JUST MAYBE? Hmmmmmmm?]
Now that women also earn money"—in many cases, more money than guys—"men may feel that their role is diminishing."
DWINDLING ALPHA MALES
by Grant Stoddard
Is the Alpha Male in Danger of Extinction?
As more and more guys seem to lose their drive and females become increasingly ambitious, women wonder what this means for their lives. An investigation yields some startling consequences--and they aren't all bad.
Grant Stoddard
Having a penis used to mean something. From the time our species got its start until very recently, being a guy came with a codified set of behaviors and responsibilities: hunting large, dangerous mammals, charging into battle, subjugating would-be usurpers. Men who displayed prowess in these areas quickly rose in status within the group and increased their popularity with the ladies.
One reason for their success: For heterosexual women, sexual attraction is sparked by a collection of encrypted biological signals that offer vital clues about whether a man can protect and provide for a prospective family. And on a gut level, neuroscientists say, women respond favorably to Alphas—men who exhibit the right genetic stuff in their looks, intelligence, resources, and leadership. In fact, a 2007 study published in Nature Neuroscience demonstrated that when females (well, female mice) were exposed to the pheromones of dominant male mice, their tiny girl-rodent brains actually grew new cells that guided them to choose the Alphas as mates.
But it looks like among us humans, the behavioral Alpha signals men can emit—machismo, cockiness, the aggressive protection of their place at the front of the pack—are getting progressively weaker and less common as women's roles in relationships, jobs, and the economy become stronger and more central. With their traditional dominant, moneymaking position eroding, where does that leave men? Consider what might happen if the peacock didn't bother to fan his spectacular plumage, if the ram could no longer muster the will to clash horns, if the mighty lion neglected his patrolling duties. Can humankind handle the diminishment of the Alpha Male?
An uneven playing field
Right now, a woman's chances of finding a man who is as educated and financially secure as she is are small and, according to recent studies, dwindling. Women earn a greater share of high school diplomas as well as associate's, bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees. Significantly fewer men enroll in college than women, and an even smaller percentage graduate.
Those statistics suggest that men are both lazy and quitters, bringing to mind recent pop-culture depictions of dudes enjoying a prolonged adolescence of beer and PlayStation3 marathons—think Knocked Up and numerous other Judd Apatow and Seth Rogan films—and freeloading off Mom and Dad (even before this recession, twice as many men as women ages 24 to 34 were living with their parents).
In his book Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men, Leonard Sax, M. D., Ph. D., identifies a maelstrom of factors heralding an era of arrested male development, including video games, environmental toxins, and what he describes as "our culture's neglect of the transition to manhood." Sax notes that this phenomenon is not solely confined to Western cultures, and he disagrees that it's a consequence of women's achievements. "Think of Qatar, where women are still oppressed— yet a growing proportion of boys and men there are unmotivated."
Whatever the causes of men's waning drive, the women outperforming them in academia will surely have an impact on the future job market. But that market is already shifting radically along gender lines. While women working full-time still earn only 77.8 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts, the recent economic downturn has highlighted the diametrically opposed trajectories of our work lives: The male-dominated construction and manufacturing sectors have taken a huge hit, whereas the overwhelmingly female-staffed professions of education and health care have been relatively insulated. From November 2008 through last April, employment among men declined by 2.5 million, while among women it was down by fewer than 700,000 jobs. And some economics experts think that women are better suited to the new "knowledge economy," in which such traits as sensitivity, intuition, and collaboration are valued over typically Alpha jockeying-for-power games.
This new female-centric model may in fact signal a return to gender equilibrium rather than a break from tradition. For much of human history, being a skilled provider wasn't tied so closely to earning money—it also meant hunting; farming; gathering materials for food, clothing, and shelter; and protecting one's goodies from covetous neighbors. "During most of our ancestral past, individuals in a family had to produce all the material and social goods," says Elizabeth Pillsworth, Ph. D., an evolutionary anthropologist at UCLA's Center for the Study of Women. "This created an interdependence between men and women."
Once our society became centered on a wage economy, she continues, "if you had cash, you simply purchased all the goods you needed. As men became wage earners, they assumed the role of sole provider. Now that women also earn money"—in many cases, more money than guys—"men may feel that their role is diminishing."
Does anyone realize boys are being asked to read Jane Eyre in HIGH SCHOOL?!?!?! I love the Bronte's. I read a collection of their work - WHEN I WAS 28 - and I have a degree in English. I'm a reader's reader. I read Shakespeare and old English poetry. But I didn't get into 19th Century English Literature until College and didn't truly appreciate it until my mid-to-late 20s. So I'm guessing your standard Engineering, math-centric, 17 year-old boy MAY NOT YET BE READY for old-English romance novels - JUST MAYBE? Hmmmmmmm?]
Now that women also earn money"—in many cases, more money than guys—"men may feel that their role is diminishing."
DWINDLING ALPHA MALES
by Grant Stoddard
Is the Alpha Male in Danger of Extinction?
As more and more guys seem to lose their drive and females become increasingly ambitious, women wonder what this means for their lives. An investigation yields some startling consequences--and they aren't all bad.
Grant Stoddard
Having a penis used to mean something. From the time our species got its start until very recently, being a guy came with a codified set of behaviors and responsibilities: hunting large, dangerous mammals, charging into battle, subjugating would-be usurpers. Men who displayed prowess in these areas quickly rose in status within the group and increased their popularity with the ladies.
One reason for their success: For heterosexual women, sexual attraction is sparked by a collection of encrypted biological signals that offer vital clues about whether a man can protect and provide for a prospective family. And on a gut level, neuroscientists say, women respond favorably to Alphas—men who exhibit the right genetic stuff in their looks, intelligence, resources, and leadership. In fact, a 2007 study published in Nature Neuroscience demonstrated that when females (well, female mice) were exposed to the pheromones of dominant male mice, their tiny girl-rodent brains actually grew new cells that guided them to choose the Alphas as mates.
But it looks like among us humans, the behavioral Alpha signals men can emit—machismo, cockiness, the aggressive protection of their place at the front of the pack—are getting progressively weaker and less common as women's roles in relationships, jobs, and the economy become stronger and more central. With their traditional dominant, moneymaking position eroding, where does that leave men? Consider what might happen if the peacock didn't bother to fan his spectacular plumage, if the ram could no longer muster the will to clash horns, if the mighty lion neglected his patrolling duties. Can humankind handle the diminishment of the Alpha Male?
An uneven playing field
Right now, a woman's chances of finding a man who is as educated and financially secure as she is are small and, according to recent studies, dwindling. Women earn a greater share of high school diplomas as well as associate's, bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees. Significantly fewer men enroll in college than women, and an even smaller percentage graduate.
Those statistics suggest that men are both lazy and quitters, bringing to mind recent pop-culture depictions of dudes enjoying a prolonged adolescence of beer and PlayStation3 marathons—think Knocked Up and numerous other Judd Apatow and Seth Rogan films—and freeloading off Mom and Dad (even before this recession, twice as many men as women ages 24 to 34 were living with their parents).
In his book Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men, Leonard Sax, M. D., Ph. D., identifies a maelstrom of factors heralding an era of arrested male development, including video games, environmental toxins, and what he describes as "our culture's neglect of the transition to manhood." Sax notes that this phenomenon is not solely confined to Western cultures, and he disagrees that it's a consequence of women's achievements. "Think of Qatar, where women are still oppressed— yet a growing proportion of boys and men there are unmotivated."
Whatever the causes of men's waning drive, the women outperforming them in academia will surely have an impact on the future job market. But that market is already shifting radically along gender lines. While women working full-time still earn only 77.8 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts, the recent economic downturn has highlighted the diametrically opposed trajectories of our work lives: The male-dominated construction and manufacturing sectors have taken a huge hit, whereas the overwhelmingly female-staffed professions of education and health care have been relatively insulated. From November 2008 through last April, employment among men declined by 2.5 million, while among women it was down by fewer than 700,000 jobs. And some economics experts think that women are better suited to the new "knowledge economy," in which such traits as sensitivity, intuition, and collaboration are valued over typically Alpha jockeying-for-power games.
This new female-centric model may in fact signal a return to gender equilibrium rather than a break from tradition. For much of human history, being a skilled provider wasn't tied so closely to earning money—it also meant hunting; farming; gathering materials for food, clothing, and shelter; and protecting one's goodies from covetous neighbors. "During most of our ancestral past, individuals in a family had to produce all the material and social goods," says Elizabeth Pillsworth, Ph. D., an evolutionary anthropologist at UCLA's Center for the Study of Women. "This created an interdependence between men and women."
Once our society became centered on a wage economy, she continues, "if you had cash, you simply purchased all the goods you needed. As men became wage earners, they assumed the role of sole provider. Now that women also earn money"—in many cases, more money than guys—"men may feel that their role is diminishing."
Monday, August 24, 2009
Marriage: Still the Safest Place For Women and Children
by Robert E. Rector, Patrick F. Fagan, and Kirk A. Johnson, Ph.D.
Backgrounder #1732
The institution that most strongly protects mothers and children from domestic abuse and violent crime is marriage. Analysis of ten years worth of findings from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has conducted since 1973, demonstrates that mothers who are or ever have been married are far less likely to suffer from violent crime than are mothers who never marry.
Specifically, data from the NCVS survey show that:
* Married women with children suffer far less abuse than single mothers. In fact, the rate of spousal, boyfriend, or domestic partner abuse is twice as high among mothers who have never been married as it is among mothers who have ever married (including those separated or divorced).
* Married women with children are far less likely to suffer from violent crime in general or at the hands of intimate acquaintances or strangers. Mothers who have never married--including those who are single and living either alone or with a boyfriend and those who are cohabiting with their child's father--are more than twice as likely to be victims of violent crime than are mothers who have ever married.
Other social science surveys demonstrate that marriage is the safest place for children as well. For example:
* Children of divorced or never-married mothers are six to 30 times more likely to suffer from serious child abuse than are children raised by both biological parents in marriage.
Without question, marriage is the safest place for a mother and her children to live, both at home and in the larger community. Nevertheless, current government policy is either indifferent to or actively hostile to the institution of marriage. The welfare system, for example, can penalize low-income parents who decide to marry. Such hostility toward marriage is poor public policy; government instead should foster healthy and enduring marriages, which would have many benefits for mothers and children, including reducing domestic violence.
Violence Against Mothers
The DOJ's National Crime Victimization Survey collects data on victimization through an ongoing survey of a nationally representative sample of Americans. The survey defines violent crime as rape, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault. Domestic or intimate abuse is defined as violent crimes performed by a spouse, former spouse, boyfriend, or former boyfriend.3
Ten years of NCVS data (from 1992 to 2001) reveal interesting patterns among mothers (ages 20-50) with children under the age of 12.4 Specifically:
*Never-married mothers experience more domestic abuse. Among those who have ever married (those married, divorced, or separated), the annual rate of domestic violence is 12.9 per 1,000 mothers. Among mothers who have never married, the annual domestic violence rate is 26.3 per 1,000.
Thus, never-married mothers suffer domestic violence at more than twice the rate of mothers who have been or currently are married. (See Chart 1).
* Never-married mothers suffer more violent crime. The NCVS provides data on total violent crime against mothers with children under the age of 12. Total violent crime covers rape, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault committed against the mother by any party. Total violent crime covers violence against mothers by former and current spouses and boyfriends as well as by relatives, acquaintances, and strangers.
As Chart 2 shows, ever-married mothers with children suffer from overall violent crime at an annual rate of 38.5 crimes per 1,000 mothers. Never-married mothers with children, by contrast, suffer 81.0 violent crimes per 1,000 mothers.
Thus, never-married mothers experience violent crime at more than twice the rate of ever-married mothers. Based on these data, the institution of marriage best shelters mothers from the specter of violence.
* These differences in crime rates across married versus single mothers are statistically significant.5
Violence Against Children
Rates of victimization of children vary significantly by family structure, and the evidence shows that the married intact family is by far the safest place for children.6 (See Chart 3.) Although the United States has yet to develop the capacity to measure child abuse by family structure, British data on child abuse are available. These data show that rates of serious abuse of children are lowest in the intact married family but six times higher in the step family, 14 times higher in the always-single-mother family, 20 times higher in cohabiting-biological parent families, and 33 times higher when the mother is cohabiting with a boyfriend who is not the father of her children.
When an abused child dies (see Chart 4), the relationship between family structure and abuse gets stronger: It is lowest in intact always-married families, three times higher in the step family, nine times higher in the always-single-mother family, 18 times higher in the cohabiting-biological parents family, and 73 times higher in families where the mother cohabits with a boyfriend.
What Policymakers Should Do
In legislation and social policy, the government should not penalize parents for marrying. Given the rising evidence that non-married mothers and their children are at greater risk of violent crime and abuse, government policy should not encourage--either directly or in unintended ways--single motherhood and cohabitation.
Yet that is what is being done in many of America's means-tested welfare programs. Because mothers and children are safest from harm within a married family, policymakers should begin the work of implementing policies to reduce the bias against marriage in welfare programs and to strengthen marriage as the primary institution for raising children.
Members of Congress should support President Bush's proposal to spend $300 million per year on efforts to rebuild marriage among the poor. It is the first serious proposal in this regard ever to come before Congress. His suggestions, if adopted into law, would begin the necessary work to reconstruct the institution of marriage, which failed welfare policies of the past have undermined. Now that the first stage of welfare reform--rebuilding an ethic of work--is well underway, Congress should support the President as he focuses on the second important stage: rebuilding a culture of marriage in American society.
Members of Congress should begin to reduce and eventually eliminate the penalty against marriage in most means-tested welfare programs. For example, they could issue a joint resolution indicating their intent to achieve this goal. Then they could request that the Department of Health and Human Services submit a list of options that would be good candidates for this reform.
Conclusion
In establishing programs to help those who need assistance, the question before Congress should not simply be whether or not to fund a program, but how much its policies would improve the well-being of adults and children. Social science data clearly show that mothers and children are safest and thrive best in a married family. It is time for the government to adopt policies that reflect this knowledge and rebuild, rather than undermine, the institution of marriage.
Robert E. Rector is Senior Research Fellow in Domestic Policy, Patrick F. Fagan is William H. G. FitzGerald Research Fellow in Family and Cultural Issues, and Kirk A. Johnson, Ph.D., is Senior Policy Analyst in the Center for Data Analysis, at The Heritage Foundation.
Backgrounder #1732
The institution that most strongly protects mothers and children from domestic abuse and violent crime is marriage. Analysis of ten years worth of findings from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has conducted since 1973, demonstrates that mothers who are or ever have been married are far less likely to suffer from violent crime than are mothers who never marry.
Specifically, data from the NCVS survey show that:
* Married women with children suffer far less abuse than single mothers. In fact, the rate of spousal, boyfriend, or domestic partner abuse is twice as high among mothers who have never been married as it is among mothers who have ever married (including those separated or divorced).
* Married women with children are far less likely to suffer from violent crime in general or at the hands of intimate acquaintances or strangers. Mothers who have never married--including those who are single and living either alone or with a boyfriend and those who are cohabiting with their child's father--are more than twice as likely to be victims of violent crime than are mothers who have ever married.
Other social science surveys demonstrate that marriage is the safest place for children as well. For example:
* Children of divorced or never-married mothers are six to 30 times more likely to suffer from serious child abuse than are children raised by both biological parents in marriage.
Without question, marriage is the safest place for a mother and her children to live, both at home and in the larger community. Nevertheless, current government policy is either indifferent to or actively hostile to the institution of marriage. The welfare system, for example, can penalize low-income parents who decide to marry. Such hostility toward marriage is poor public policy; government instead should foster healthy and enduring marriages, which would have many benefits for mothers and children, including reducing domestic violence.
Violence Against Mothers
The DOJ's National Crime Victimization Survey collects data on victimization through an ongoing survey of a nationally representative sample of Americans. The survey defines violent crime as rape, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault. Domestic or intimate abuse is defined as violent crimes performed by a spouse, former spouse, boyfriend, or former boyfriend.3
Ten years of NCVS data (from 1992 to 2001) reveal interesting patterns among mothers (ages 20-50) with children under the age of 12.4 Specifically:
*Never-married mothers experience more domestic abuse. Among those who have ever married (those married, divorced, or separated), the annual rate of domestic violence is 12.9 per 1,000 mothers. Among mothers who have never married, the annual domestic violence rate is 26.3 per 1,000.
Thus, never-married mothers suffer domestic violence at more than twice the rate of mothers who have been or currently are married. (See Chart 1).
* Never-married mothers suffer more violent crime. The NCVS provides data on total violent crime against mothers with children under the age of 12. Total violent crime covers rape, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault committed against the mother by any party. Total violent crime covers violence against mothers by former and current spouses and boyfriends as well as by relatives, acquaintances, and strangers.
As Chart 2 shows, ever-married mothers with children suffer from overall violent crime at an annual rate of 38.5 crimes per 1,000 mothers. Never-married mothers with children, by contrast, suffer 81.0 violent crimes per 1,000 mothers.
Thus, never-married mothers experience violent crime at more than twice the rate of ever-married mothers. Based on these data, the institution of marriage best shelters mothers from the specter of violence.
* These differences in crime rates across married versus single mothers are statistically significant.5
Violence Against Children
Rates of victimization of children vary significantly by family structure, and the evidence shows that the married intact family is by far the safest place for children.6 (See Chart 3.) Although the United States has yet to develop the capacity to measure child abuse by family structure, British data on child abuse are available. These data show that rates of serious abuse of children are lowest in the intact married family but six times higher in the step family, 14 times higher in the always-single-mother family, 20 times higher in cohabiting-biological parent families, and 33 times higher when the mother is cohabiting with a boyfriend who is not the father of her children.
When an abused child dies (see Chart 4), the relationship between family structure and abuse gets stronger: It is lowest in intact always-married families, three times higher in the step family, nine times higher in the always-single-mother family, 18 times higher in the cohabiting-biological parents family, and 73 times higher in families where the mother cohabits with a boyfriend.
What Policymakers Should Do
In legislation and social policy, the government should not penalize parents for marrying. Given the rising evidence that non-married mothers and their children are at greater risk of violent crime and abuse, government policy should not encourage--either directly or in unintended ways--single motherhood and cohabitation.
Yet that is what is being done in many of America's means-tested welfare programs. Because mothers and children are safest from harm within a married family, policymakers should begin the work of implementing policies to reduce the bias against marriage in welfare programs and to strengthen marriage as the primary institution for raising children.
Members of Congress should support President Bush's proposal to spend $300 million per year on efforts to rebuild marriage among the poor. It is the first serious proposal in this regard ever to come before Congress. His suggestions, if adopted into law, would begin the necessary work to reconstruct the institution of marriage, which failed welfare policies of the past have undermined. Now that the first stage of welfare reform--rebuilding an ethic of work--is well underway, Congress should support the President as he focuses on the second important stage: rebuilding a culture of marriage in American society.
Members of Congress should begin to reduce and eventually eliminate the penalty against marriage in most means-tested welfare programs. For example, they could issue a joint resolution indicating their intent to achieve this goal. Then they could request that the Department of Health and Human Services submit a list of options that would be good candidates for this reform.
Conclusion
In establishing programs to help those who need assistance, the question before Congress should not simply be whether or not to fund a program, but how much its policies would improve the well-being of adults and children. Social science data clearly show that mothers and children are safest and thrive best in a married family. It is time for the government to adopt policies that reflect this knowledge and rebuild, rather than undermine, the institution of marriage.
Robert E. Rector is Senior Research Fellow in Domestic Policy, Patrick F. Fagan is William H. G. FitzGerald Research Fellow in Family and Cultural Issues, and Kirk A. Johnson, Ph.D., is Senior Policy Analyst in the Center for Data Analysis, at The Heritage Foundation.
Bob Herbert's Fact-Free Op-ed: Women Uniquely at Risk of Violent Crime
August 10th, 2009 by Robert Franklin, Esq.
It's predictable as the sunrise. No sooner had the echoes of George Sodini's gunshots died away than they were replaced by the diligent tap-tap-tapping of keyboards. Feminists and their apologists leapt as one to their desks and began churning out the same sermon we've heard for years now: George Sodini's brutal slaying of three women in a Pennsylvania exercise class was not the act of a lone deranged man, it was the act of all men; it was the act of a male-dominated culture that so loathes women it turns a blind eye to their injury and death. Women are uniquely victims, uniquely threatened by ravening men who prowl the land searching for the next one who shows a weakness or errs in judgment. Here endeth the lesson.
The latest to commit the requisite public auto da fe is Bob Herbert here (New York Times, 8/8/09). An intelligent space alien, reading his op-ed would never guess that, far from being uniquely targeted by crime, women and girls are uniquely protected from it. A two-minute jaunt through the Bureau of Justice Statistics website shows that 61% of violent crime victims are men. Our space traveller would never imagine that incidents of violent crime of all kinds have been plunging over the past 16 years to their lowest rate since we began gathering data. How would he know that a woman's chance of being raped is one-fifth what it was in 1973?
The space alien wouldn't know these things because Bob Herbert doesn't mention them. He doesn't because the facts don't fit with the false yarn he's spinning. Herbert seeks to instruct us and he uses mythology to do it.
That's clear enough to even a casual reader, because the facts Herbert relies on to make his case...well...don't. Take a look. The article consists mostly of that time-honored rhetorical crutch of high school students everywhere - the unsupported assertion. For example,
We’ve seen this tragic ritual so often that it has the feel of a formula.
I wrote, at the time, that there would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar.
We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.
We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.
The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny
Really? Killing women and girls is a "cornerstone of our nation's entertainment?" The "barbaric treatment of women and girls" is "more or less expected?" There hasn't been "thunderous outrage" at the Sodini killings? Herbert provides no support for these frankly loony claims for the good and sufficient reason that he has none.
Perhaps realizing that an actual fact might serve his cause, he searches for one, but alas, in vain. He tries the mass murder in 2007 at Virginia Tech University, but even his misrepresentation of the facts of that tragedy don't do the job. The fact that Seung Hui Cho shot both men and women, completely at random, deflects Herbert from his mission not at all. The fact that Cho, at the time of his rampage, had been diagnosed for many years as so mentally ill as to require medication and hospitalization goes unmentioned. Nor does Herbert tell us that the targets of Cho's violent anger were not women, but "rich kids" and "deceitful charlatans," according to Cho's diary.
That Herbert wants us to believe that Cho's slaughter has something to do with misogynistic culture only shows how desperate he is for material. Does it occur to him that, if this culture is as dominated by men who are as violently hateful toward women as he would have us believe, that our misogyny isn't very effective? How does he square those beliefs with the fact that women are now and, as far as our data show, always have been, far less likely to be hurt or killed in any way than are men? I guess men must be as incompetent as the commercials say we are.
Claims of collective guilt for the wrongdoing of single, deranged individuals is a dangerous game indeed. As an African-American male, you'd think Bob Herbert would understand that. How can a man who's appropriately criticized racial profiling by the police, turn on a dime and engage in gender-profiling himself. Herbert wants us to believe that not just George Sodini, but men in general, are guilty for his crime. Someone should remind Herbert that that includes him.
It's predictable as the sunrise. No sooner had the echoes of George Sodini's gunshots died away than they were replaced by the diligent tap-tap-tapping of keyboards. Feminists and their apologists leapt as one to their desks and began churning out the same sermon we've heard for years now: George Sodini's brutal slaying of three women in a Pennsylvania exercise class was not the act of a lone deranged man, it was the act of all men; it was the act of a male-dominated culture that so loathes women it turns a blind eye to their injury and death. Women are uniquely victims, uniquely threatened by ravening men who prowl the land searching for the next one who shows a weakness or errs in judgment. Here endeth the lesson.
The latest to commit the requisite public auto da fe is Bob Herbert here (New York Times, 8/8/09). An intelligent space alien, reading his op-ed would never guess that, far from being uniquely targeted by crime, women and girls are uniquely protected from it. A two-minute jaunt through the Bureau of Justice Statistics website shows that 61% of violent crime victims are men. Our space traveller would never imagine that incidents of violent crime of all kinds have been plunging over the past 16 years to their lowest rate since we began gathering data. How would he know that a woman's chance of being raped is one-fifth what it was in 1973?
The space alien wouldn't know these things because Bob Herbert doesn't mention them. He doesn't because the facts don't fit with the false yarn he's spinning. Herbert seeks to instruct us and he uses mythology to do it.
That's clear enough to even a casual reader, because the facts Herbert relies on to make his case...well...don't. Take a look. The article consists mostly of that time-honored rhetorical crutch of high school students everywhere - the unsupported assertion. For example,
We’ve seen this tragic ritual so often that it has the feel of a formula.
I wrote, at the time, that there would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar.
We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.
We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.
The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny
Really? Killing women and girls is a "cornerstone of our nation's entertainment?" The "barbaric treatment of women and girls" is "more or less expected?" There hasn't been "thunderous outrage" at the Sodini killings? Herbert provides no support for these frankly loony claims for the good and sufficient reason that he has none.
Perhaps realizing that an actual fact might serve his cause, he searches for one, but alas, in vain. He tries the mass murder in 2007 at Virginia Tech University, but even his misrepresentation of the facts of that tragedy don't do the job. The fact that Seung Hui Cho shot both men and women, completely at random, deflects Herbert from his mission not at all. The fact that Cho, at the time of his rampage, had been diagnosed for many years as so mentally ill as to require medication and hospitalization goes unmentioned. Nor does Herbert tell us that the targets of Cho's violent anger were not women, but "rich kids" and "deceitful charlatans," according to Cho's diary.
That Herbert wants us to believe that Cho's slaughter has something to do with misogynistic culture only shows how desperate he is for material. Does it occur to him that, if this culture is as dominated by men who are as violently hateful toward women as he would have us believe, that our misogyny isn't very effective? How does he square those beliefs with the fact that women are now and, as far as our data show, always have been, far less likely to be hurt or killed in any way than are men? I guess men must be as incompetent as the commercials say we are.
Claims of collective guilt for the wrongdoing of single, deranged individuals is a dangerous game indeed. As an African-American male, you'd think Bob Herbert would understand that. How can a man who's appropriately criticized racial profiling by the police, turn on a dime and engage in gender-profiling himself. Herbert wants us to believe that not just George Sodini, but men in general, are guilty for his crime. Someone should remind Herbert that that includes him.
Young Father Fights Long, Hard Battle Against Adoption Agency to Raise His Own Daughter
Babies are often given up for adoption against the father's will or by evasion and deceit, which are often winked at by authorities. Putative Father Registries are often used to circumvent fathers' rights.
Below, Fathers & Families Board Member Robert Franklin, Esq. reports on a particularly egregious case involving a young father. Young fathers are continually vilified for their alleged refusal to take responsibility for their children, but this case provides an excellent example of just how many roadblocks are often thrown up to separate fathers from their children.
Robert writes:
Cody O'dea and Ashley Olea had a brief sexual relationship when they lived in Wyoming. At age 18, she turned up pregnant. Cody immediately told her that he wanted to help raise the child. A few months later, Ashley told Cody that she had miscarried. They split up and he moved to Idaho.
Still more months later, a friend informed Cody that Ashley was then eight months pregnant and making plans to place the child for adoption. She was still in Wyoming, but working with an adoption agency, LDS Family Services, in Montana.
Cody immediately contacted Ashley and reasserted his desire to have custody of the child. He also filed the appropriate form with the Wyoming Putative Father Registry. He also filed with the Montana Putative Father Registry. He wrote a letter to the adoption agency telling them that he would not waive his parental rights.
Cody spoke with two people including a supervisor at LDS Family Services, informing them of his intention to get custody of the child. Eventually, LDS decided to not continue with the adoption process and wrote Cody a letter saying so.
On July 15, 2006, Cody received a strange call from Ashley which, according to him, went as follows:
Ashley: You will listen and you will not speak. First of all I want you to stop harassing me and that includes your mother. I am in Utah. You will not father this child. You will pay child support until the child is in College. You will never see this baby. Do you understand?
Cody: No, I do not understand, does this mean you are planning to keep the child?
Ashley: Do you understand what I’m saying?
Cody: No, I don’t understand, does that mean you are keeping the child and not giving it up for adoption?
Ashley: If you understand what I have told you, that is all I have to say.
Then she hung up. Notice that she mentioned nothing about placing the child for adoption. In fact she strongly suggests the opposite. And the ruse worked. Cody thought that, since he had filed with the registries of Wyoming and Montana, and gotten LDS to back off, that he had successfully blocked the adoption. To him, Ashley's phone call meant that she'd changed her mind and would keep the child.
But that was wrong. Ashley's call was almost certainly prompted by an attorney. Her statement that she was in Utah constituted legal "notice" to him that perhaps an adoption would occur there. Therefore, he then became obligated to file with Utah's registry and begin paternity proceedings. In fact, unknown to him, he had only 20 days to do so.
Despite Cody's repeated efforts to comply with the law and assert his parental rights, a Utah court approved the adoption in 2006. A different agency, the Adoption Center of Choice, provided the adoptive parents. Neither they nor Ashley notified Cody that the adoption had taken place. The Adoption Center of Choice contacted the Wyoming Putative Father Registry and ascertained that Cody had registered there and was asserting his parental rights. Apparently, that made absolutely no difference to the Adoption Center of Choice.
Cody then filed a paternity suit in Utah, but it was too late. His twenty days had passed. The Supreme Court of Utah has just ruled that all his efforts to be a father to his child were meaningless. It was solely his failure to comply with Utah's 20-day period that destroyed any hope he had. He will never see his child; he will never be her father in more than the biological sense.
The United States Supreme Court has called parental rights "far more precious than property rights." But when it comes to a father's rights, those are mostly just words. In the real world of family law, in this case, adoption law, they have next to no meaning.
Let's look at what happened in the Cody O'dea case. His child's mother decided she didn't want the child with whom she was pregnant, so she lied to Cody, telling him that she had miscarried. That Cody discovered her lie, was, for Ashley, an inconvenience, but little more. She shopped for an adoption agency in one state, abandoned that idea and located another in another state. The new agency was willing to overlook the fact that it knew perfectly well that there was a father who wanted custody.
In short, a few well-placed lies, an unscrupulous adoption agency, and an unscrupulous attorney combined with a young father who failed to know the laws of a foreign state, added up to the denial of his parental rights. You remember those; they're the ones that are "far more precious than property rights." But when those rights are placed, not in the father's hands but in the mother's, abrogating them turns out to be simplicity itself.
Robert's piece continues here. Cody's website can be accessed here--it contains many of the case's documents. As for the anti-father bias of adoption agencies, take a look at the second part of paragraph two of this letter from an agency to Cody.
Below, Fathers & Families Board Member Robert Franklin, Esq. reports on a particularly egregious case involving a young father. Young fathers are continually vilified for their alleged refusal to take responsibility for their children, but this case provides an excellent example of just how many roadblocks are often thrown up to separate fathers from their children.
Robert writes:
Cody O'dea and Ashley Olea had a brief sexual relationship when they lived in Wyoming. At age 18, she turned up pregnant. Cody immediately told her that he wanted to help raise the child. A few months later, Ashley told Cody that she had miscarried. They split up and he moved to Idaho.
Still more months later, a friend informed Cody that Ashley was then eight months pregnant and making plans to place the child for adoption. She was still in Wyoming, but working with an adoption agency, LDS Family Services, in Montana.
Cody immediately contacted Ashley and reasserted his desire to have custody of the child. He also filed the appropriate form with the Wyoming Putative Father Registry. He also filed with the Montana Putative Father Registry. He wrote a letter to the adoption agency telling them that he would not waive his parental rights.
Cody spoke with two people including a supervisor at LDS Family Services, informing them of his intention to get custody of the child. Eventually, LDS decided to not continue with the adoption process and wrote Cody a letter saying so.
On July 15, 2006, Cody received a strange call from Ashley which, according to him, went as follows:
Ashley: You will listen and you will not speak. First of all I want you to stop harassing me and that includes your mother. I am in Utah. You will not father this child. You will pay child support until the child is in College. You will never see this baby. Do you understand?
Cody: No, I do not understand, does this mean you are planning to keep the child?
Ashley: Do you understand what I’m saying?
Cody: No, I don’t understand, does that mean you are keeping the child and not giving it up for adoption?
Ashley: If you understand what I have told you, that is all I have to say.
Then she hung up. Notice that she mentioned nothing about placing the child for adoption. In fact she strongly suggests the opposite. And the ruse worked. Cody thought that, since he had filed with the registries of Wyoming and Montana, and gotten LDS to back off, that he had successfully blocked the adoption. To him, Ashley's phone call meant that she'd changed her mind and would keep the child.
But that was wrong. Ashley's call was almost certainly prompted by an attorney. Her statement that she was in Utah constituted legal "notice" to him that perhaps an adoption would occur there. Therefore, he then became obligated to file with Utah's registry and begin paternity proceedings. In fact, unknown to him, he had only 20 days to do so.
Despite Cody's repeated efforts to comply with the law and assert his parental rights, a Utah court approved the adoption in 2006. A different agency, the Adoption Center of Choice, provided the adoptive parents. Neither they nor Ashley notified Cody that the adoption had taken place. The Adoption Center of Choice contacted the Wyoming Putative Father Registry and ascertained that Cody had registered there and was asserting his parental rights. Apparently, that made absolutely no difference to the Adoption Center of Choice.
Cody then filed a paternity suit in Utah, but it was too late. His twenty days had passed. The Supreme Court of Utah has just ruled that all his efforts to be a father to his child were meaningless. It was solely his failure to comply with Utah's 20-day period that destroyed any hope he had. He will never see his child; he will never be her father in more than the biological sense.
The United States Supreme Court has called parental rights "far more precious than property rights." But when it comes to a father's rights, those are mostly just words. In the real world of family law, in this case, adoption law, they have next to no meaning.
Let's look at what happened in the Cody O'dea case. His child's mother decided she didn't want the child with whom she was pregnant, so she lied to Cody, telling him that she had miscarried. That Cody discovered her lie, was, for Ashley, an inconvenience, but little more. She shopped for an adoption agency in one state, abandoned that idea and located another in another state. The new agency was willing to overlook the fact that it knew perfectly well that there was a father who wanted custody.
In short, a few well-placed lies, an unscrupulous adoption agency, and an unscrupulous attorney combined with a young father who failed to know the laws of a foreign state, added up to the denial of his parental rights. You remember those; they're the ones that are "far more precious than property rights." But when those rights are placed, not in the father's hands but in the mother's, abrogating them turns out to be simplicity itself.
Robert's piece continues here. Cody's website can be accessed here--it contains many of the case's documents. As for the anti-father bias of adoption agencies, take a look at the second part of paragraph two of this letter from an agency to Cody.
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