I don’t know maybe I’m crazy but I find the article below to be a perfect example of men working the legal system to benefit themselves by misusing the common sense body of matrimonial laws that were crafted to protect women (who were more financially vulnerable) during the early periods of our history. These laws are basically holdovers from the time when women did not work outside the home, when husbands controlled any property she had, while her primary focus was on raising the children and/or running the household for the benefit of her family, including her husband. Clearly when women were in that situation, you had to have laws for equitable divisions of assets and/or spousal support.
Also these laws made sense in the context of a society where women faced the additional problem of discrimination in hiring if we did wish to work outside of the home. Men NEVER faced this work discrimination situation just because they were men; nor did they stay at home with the children running the household and missing out on educational and professional opportunities due to focusing on their family.
Thus, I believe we should rarely, if ever, consider spousal support for a man and place stricter limits on division of marital assets for everyone. This division should depend upon what each spouse actually contributed to the assets of the household or the negative impact their contribution to their family had on their own career or professional advancement and that it occurred during the life of the marriage.
For example, a man obtained a professional degree in a lower-paying profession, worked in that profession for years obtaining a fair salary, paid into a TDA for retirement, took no time off from work for family-related matters: sickness, child care, etc., He spends most of his money putting it into his own investments/retirement account or buying cars or other expensive electronics gizmos for himself such as big-screen televisions to watch the game on or some expensive hobby for himself. One example: he decides to buy a ‘working farm’ that he can putter around on every weekend claiming it’s a vacation home for the family. Even though every other member of the family hates it but him and never wants to go there.
Remember, even though women spend more on shopping what are we shopping for most of the time? Usually we aren’t shopping for expensive gizmos for our own use, but food, clothing for our families (including our husbands as I shopped for my ex-husband ALL the time buying his clothes), pharmaceuticals and other household related items.
So can someone explain to me WHY a man who does what I outlined above should get HALF of the marital assets (as he didn’t add anything to those assets spending MOST of his salary on himself) or why he’s entitled to spousal support (since he already has a professional career, albeit a lesser paying one then his ex-wife and took no time off from work to raise his kids or run the household) Thus, his marriage had NO negative impact on his earning power whatsoever?
Basically unless he can make the case that he spent time on his family and out of the job market which hurt his career/earning capacity OR maybe he saved some money for the higher earner spouse by being home with the kids and avoiding the payment of a maid/nanny for a substantial period of time, then he should get out of the marriage just what he contributed, his own salary, investment/retirement account and whatever clothes, cars/gizmos he purchased over the years.
After carefully reviewing this article, there was no mention of ANY of these men helping with children or tending the household while their wives worked. Or any sacrifice any of these men made for their families which might have been a mitigating factor entitling them to spousal support or even a 50/50 division of the family’s assets, mostly contributed by their ex-wives.
Additionally only ONE of the women in the article, who was forced to give 50% of her assets to a man, was a high earner in my opinion. Most of them inherited their assets or had invested in a home BEFORE marriage, which they were then forced to sell their one asset (which they obtained before marriage) in order to pay off an ex-husband with no mention of what these men sacrificed for their family that might have contributed to the lesser earning power or assets for these men.
Also, as I said above, I don’t consider a teacher to be a low-paying profession that need to be compensated by a spouse that is an attorney just because one profession pays more then the other. A teacher is a professional position (at least in the US) paying anywhere from $40,000 to $65,000 depending upon the district you are employed in. The purpose of spousal support is NOT, nor should it be, to be used as a means of income transfer from one spouse to another just because one person chose a high-paying profession then the other one. Spousal support is supposed to be used to support a spouse who would have no income or a much lesser one (ie., a clerk in an office or a cashier/waitress in a restaurant) precisely BECAUSE they devoted themselves to their home and family and thus, didn’t have the time or money to devote to education and becoming a professional. Generally this would apply to a stay-at-home parent (usually a mother) who devoted herself to bearing the children of the marriage and then stayed home to raise them. I don’t have any sense in this article that any of these men getting awarded these settlements did ANY of this…
One of them is described as a teacher, who just chose a professional that made less money then his lawyer wife. There is no mention of him devoting any additional time to any children of the marriage or to the family in anyway; that might have impacted his earnings ability. Another is a man who clearly worked and made good money but then chose to spend most of it on expensive cars. Another was in a short-term marriage for three years to an actress who was working as an actress before she married him. A third was just married for seven years (another short-term marriage) and then his wife was forced to pay him out of an inheritance she received from a family member.
Child support, of course, is a differing situation but I heard no mention of this in the article.
So based upon all these observations, these are outrageous examples of men who worked the system and got undeservedly enriched.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2157953_1,00.html
The Sunday Times
April 30, 2006
Superwomen pay price in divorce court
John Elliott
HIGH-FLYING career women are discovering a costly downside to their success — divorce settlements that force them to pay out huge sums to their less wealthy ex-husbands.
Law firms are reporting an increasing number of cases in which men earn windfalls through divorce as women outperform their husbands in the workplace.
One London law firm, Mishcon de Reya — which handled the divorce of Diana, Princess of Wales — is currently dealing with 10 cases where the wife earns more than the husband.
Sandra Davis, head of family law, said the wives were “serious players, businesswomen who are going to have to pay money to their spouses”.
Dawsons, another London law firm, is dealing with six divorces in which the woman is earning well into six figures. Suzanne Kingston, head of family law, said: “There’s the possibility of a spousal maintenance order to the husband . . . most women don’t imagine they would be liable for this, so it surprises them.”
The rate of change has been rapid. “Twenty years ago there were no reported cases of men obtaining money from their wives on divorce — now it is routine,” said Simon Bruce, head of family law at Farrer & Co, the Queen’s solicitors.
Among the high earners who have paid out to ex-husbands is Kate Winslet, the actress. A payment of about £500,000 was agreed to finalise her divorce in 2001 from Jim Threapleton, her husband of three years.
For Susan Singleton, a mother of five from Pinner, Middlesex, her divorce three years ago meant handing over nearly £900,000 to her ex-husband Martin after 20 years of marriage. As a lawyer, her earnings are over £200,000 and dwarf those of her former husband, a teacher and organist.
Singleton’s divorce settlement forced her to remortgage the £1.9m family home for £1.1m, and she also pays school and university fees of £50,000 a year. “I’m in the same position as a lot of men who work very hard, earn a lot of money, and then the person they happen to have been married to gets a share of that, even though they haven’t really built it up,” she said. “Why should the spouse who earns less get a share of the higher-earning one’s income?” Martin Singleton said: “I was urged to get more by my solicitor but settled for less so she didn’t have to sell the family home. I wouldn’t want to seem greedy, I only got what I was entitled to.
Financial experts predict that in coming decades more women will have to pay out former husbands, as greater numbers are promoted to top jobs. Last year the number of female millionaires in the 18-44 age bracket overtook the number of men — 47,355 compared with 37,935, according to a study by the Centre for Economics and Business research. Women will own 60% of the UK’s personal wealth by 2025, up from 48% now, the researchers found.
In a divorce, women can also be required to hand over money inherited from their parents, as Barbara Dowell, a 48 year-old marketing executive from Rutland, discovered last year. Dowell, who has one child, said she inherited £500,000 in 2000, only to hand over about half of it to her husband on divorce, after 14 years together.
To fund this the family home was sold for about £300,000, and she lives in a rented house and pays school fees for their son, whose residence is shared.
Dowell said: “I am now funding him (the husband) through my inheritance. It makes me extremely angry.”
Her former husband was not available for comment.
Liz Haskell, 56, from Woodbridge, Suffolk, said she paid her ex-husband £50,000 last autumn after seven years of marriage ended. Haskell, who said she inherited her assets, said: “It was a slap in the face — I feel cheated by the system.
So often it’s just rich men you read about having to pay off women with their millions.”
Her former husband was also not available for comment.
One divorcee from Berkshire in her late fifties, who asked not to be named, described her former husband as a “creature” whom she hoped encountered anthrax. “He only married me for what he could get out of me,” she said. “He squandered his own earnings on Porsches and Jaguars (and) didn’t contribute to the family.”
The mother of two, who said she had inherited her wealth and owned the family home outright before she met her husband, said she had been forced to sell up for £700,000 and split the proceeds. The woman, who married 22 years ago and divorced in the late 1990s, added: “He abandoned the children . . . we’re living in a house the size of a postage stamp now.”
Nicola Horlick, the City fund manager and mother of five, now divorced from her husband Tim, argues that divorce law needs reviewing. “There are an awful lot of people getting upset,” she said. “Fathers who don’t believe they have enough access to children; men who believe they have paid out too much — and wives who believe they have paid out too much.”
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Saturday, April 29, 2006
Copy of Proposed New York State Presumptive Joint Custody Bill
A00330 Summary:
BILL NO A00330
SAME AS Same as Uni. S 291
SPONSOR Weisenberg
COSPNSR Galef, McEneny, Ignizio, Casale, O`Mara, Aubertine, Finch, Hooker, Quinn, Ortiz, Mayersohn, Alessi
MLTSPNSR Benjamin, Boyland, Burling, Calhoun, Canestrari, Crouch, Destito, Dia, R, Fitzpatrick, Hooper, Kolb, Koon, Lupardo, Magee, McDonald, McDonough, Miller, Mosiello, Oaks, Perry, Pretlow, Reilich, Reilly, Schroeder, Sweeney, Tonko, Townsend
Amd SS70 & 240, add S240-d, Dom Rel L
Establishes the presumption in matrimonial proceedings for awarding shared parenting of minor children in the absence of an allegation that shared parenting would be detrimental to the best interests of the child; establishes an order of preference in awarding custody; defines shared parenting and parenting plan.
A00330 Actions:
BILL NO A00330
01/12/2005 referred to judiciary
02/11/2005 reference changed to children and families
01/04/2006 referred to children and families
A00330 Votes:
A00330 Memo:
BILL NUMBER: A330
TITLE OF BILL: An act to amend the domestic relations law, in relation to establishing a presumption of shared parenting of minor children in matrimonial proceedings:
PURPOSE: To create a statutory presumption of joint custody for all minor children whose parents are no longer married, so that both parents can continue to share in the responsibilities and duties of the children`s upbringing.
SUMMARY OF PROVISIONS: Section 1 of the bill sets forth the legislative intent for creating a presumption of joint custody in proceedings where the custody of minor children is at issue. It further states that continuing contact with both parents through shared parenting is in the best interests of minor children.
Section 2 of the bill amends S 70(a) of the Domestic Relations Law to require the court to award custody to both parents in the absence of allegations that shared parenting would be detrimental to the child.The burden of proof that shared parenting would be detrimental is placed upon the parent requesting sole custody.
Section 3 of the bill amends S 240(1) of the Domestic Relations Law to establish an order of preference for the awarding of custody of minor children in the case of divorce. The first preference is for joint custody to be awarded by the court. If the court opts not to award joint custody it must state its reasons for denial. The order of joint custody may be amended by the court if it is shown that it would be in the best interests of the child. The second preference would be toeither parent based on the court`s determination of the best interests of the child. The third preference would be to the person with whom the child has been living in a wholesome and stable environment. The final preference would be to another person the court deems suitable.
Section 4 of the bill adds a new S 240(d) to the Domestic Relations Law to create a definition of shared parenting. Under this definition both parents would remain legally responsible and in control of their children so that both parents share in the care and upbringing of their children. It also sets forth requirements of a "parenting plan."
Section 5 of the bill establishes the effective date.
EXISTING LAW: Currently, there is no preference for shared parenting in New York. The court may award joint custody, but in practice rarely does so.
JUSTIFICATION: Whether the parents are married or not, each should be assumed to have equally important responsibilities in child rearing. In families of divorce, as in households where the parents live together, the social attitude concerning the alleged primacy of maternal influence in the lives of children is an unbalanced perspective and is potentially damaging to children. Current psychological studies,including state sponsored projects spanning 38 states, reveal convergent findings that children of all ages have better adjustment after divorce when they have full parenting participation from both parents. Custody decisions that exclude or narrowly limit the participation of either parent tend ultimately to have negativeimpact on children.
According to reports by the National Institute of Mental Health, custody arrangements which effectively remove one parent from a child`s life interferes with the child`s normal development. Although nothing in current law prohibits a court of competent jurisdiction from awarding shared parenting of a child to bothparents, it is rarely done by the courts, or only in instances where it is requested by both parents. Statistics have shown that in more than 95% of divorce or separation cases, the mother was awarded sole custody of the child, with the father limited to rights of visitation.
A shared parenting arrangement would allow the child to enjoy continued contact with both parents and the extended family on each side. Presumptive shared parenting protects and shifts the litigation burden away from the cooperative parent, and fosters a context for mediation to the child`s advantage. Because presumptive shared parenting reduces litigation and re-litigation, it will also reduce the stress inherent in the divorce process. To the extent that policy is driven by conflict reduction, shared parenting is the obvious starting point. Joint physical custody also satisfies the top positive predictor of child support compliance, which is involvement in parenting. Most importantly, it recognizes that children are not property or bargaining chips. It reassures the child that both parents are equal. As this law would assure that neither parent is demoted in the children`s eyes, it affirms to the children what they need to feel, that both parents are equal.
FISCAL IMPLICATIONS: None
LOCAL FISCAL IMPLICATIONS: None.
EFFECTIVE DATE: This act shall take effect November first next succeeding the date on which it shall have become a law and shall apply to actions and proceedings commenced on and after such date.
*********************************************************************************
Some people had emailed me regarding a copy of this bill, so here it is.
They are still debating it up in Albany as far as I know...
Of course the authors of the bill (obviously from that sad, envious group of people, so jealous of mothers) had to do the obligatory 'drive by shooting' at mothers by coming up with this distortion of the truth in the body of the bill:
"...the social attitude concerning the alleged primacy of maternal influence in the lives of children is an unbalanced perspective and is potentially damaging to children..."
This, of course, is another distortion of the truth from men and gender neutralized feminists.
There is nothing anywhere in the world that would lead sane people to believe that mothers who function, as the best and most natural guardians and caretakers for the young in every species as well as our own, do this due to any "social attitude". Unless lions, and tigers and bears along with other members of the animal kingdom suddenly started showing 'social attitude' in the way they raise their young. Which, believe it or not, mothers are the primary caretakers who raise the young of these species as well, just like human mothers do...and it's been going on that way for millions of years, all without the assistance of a group of self-righteous jackasses up in Albany.
So in fact, there is nothing unbalanced or damaging to children to be in the sole care, custody and control of their mothers.
Nothing.
This is more bullcrap, propaganda and lies from gender neutralized feminists and mens' rights advocates.
In fact, if it were the case that mothers were the most natural guardians and best caretakers of children ONLY because of social attitudes; then believe me, the selfishness of men would have put a stop to this "social attitude" a LONG TIME ago and claimed that for their own as well, along with everything else they have grabbed in the world for themselves. Which is everything btw...
The truth is that women in their role as mothers have been selected for that role by God, evolution, nature, whatever, since humanity first crawled out of the primary mists. It is not something anybody, NOT men, NOT feminists, NOT a family court Judge have given us, as it is not something in their power to give.
Nor, conversely should it be the right of anyone to take away from mothers either.
As I have said before, I do agree that this bill should become law in New York State. Not because I agree with it's premise; however, but because I see it as the lesser of many, many, many evils that could happen to mothers and children if we do NOT agree to it.
It's that simple, the lesser of horrors that could (and regularly are) foisted off upon mothers and their children by gender neutralized feminists and mens' rights advocates.
Thus I support it...
Sunday, April 23, 2006
More Propaganda and Lies from the Media Regarding Fathers
Watching “Family Minefields” with Diane Sawyer on ABC Primetime the other night I was struck with how they totally ignored the actual mother of the troubled teenage girl featured and instead focused the entire show on her father and his second wife.
The girl’s actual mother was barely acknowledged as even existing.
Not only did Primetime ignore the primary person who was responsible for this girl’s existence; but they spent the entire show trying to paint her father’s second wife as a horrible, abusive step person and the reason this teenage girl was so troubled.
Thus, it was with horror that I observed almost 2/3s of the way through the show an assault and battery committed on nationwide tv by this young girl's father against her. From the way everyone kept painting the step person throughout the entire show, I was fully expecting her to be the abusive one. Instead I’m lying down in bed watching an argument taking place within this family over homework and suddenly, with no physical provocation whatsoever from his daughter, her father leaps across the coffee table and begins punching his young daughter in the face, neck and head.
I actually was so shocked I sat bolt upright in my bed while watching this and perched on the edge horrified waiting for someone to break this up as the entire event was being videotaped by the crew. Instead I believe they changed the camera angle so you couldn’t see the blows landing on this young girl, but you could see by the way the girls’ lower legs curled up that she had gone into a fetal position to protect her head and face while her father rained punches down on her. Actually from the way his arm was moving up and down you could see he was attacking her with a closed fist, as it wasn’t the back and forth movement of an open handed slap. If you had walked in on this unexpectedly, you would have thought her father was fighting with another man, there appeared to be no recognition whatsoever that he was punching his young daughter, a 14/15 year old about a third of his size.
Unbelievable.
I was actually so upset as I said by the suddenness of his assault and the unexpected savagery of it, I was on the edge of my bed not able to lay down again until I was assured the girl was out of danger.
Thank God it finally ended, but they moved the camera away so you couldn’t see if any injury had been done to this poor kid after that vicious assault. She, of course, wasn’t sent to live with her mother, since you could hear the father claiming he had the mother on tape as not wanting her daughter (like he didn’t orchestrate that comment from her mother) but instead she was sent to live with her grandparents…
Who appear to be a lovely couple except for the fact that they spend the entire ending of the show, along with Diane Sawyer, claiming how this young girl was living with them because she was so terrified of her father’s second wife…but she would love to live with her father again (who was shipped off to Iraq, instead of the nearest county lockup where he belonged) if ONLY the step person wasn’t around.
Let me put it this way, she better be damn glad that step person was in the room when this assault took place, as I could easily have seen this guy beating his daughter to death if they were alone.
Totally unbelievably, this entire show was the most obvious piece of brainwashing and propaganda against women and mothers that I had seen in a while.
That piece of crap who assaulted his daughter needs to be dragged back from Iraq with a choke chain around his neck like a dog and charged with assault and battery. That girl’s mother needs to be contacted about what has been happening to her daughter, so appropriate action can be taken by her to assure her child's safety. AND that Diane Sawyer needs to keep in mind that she better watch her step because if that kid had gotten hurt, she would have been responsible: as an assault on a young girl should NEVER be permitted to continue in order to boost ratings.
That’s a little bit much even for reality tv.
The girl’s actual mother was barely acknowledged as even existing.
Not only did Primetime ignore the primary person who was responsible for this girl’s existence; but they spent the entire show trying to paint her father’s second wife as a horrible, abusive step person and the reason this teenage girl was so troubled.
Thus, it was with horror that I observed almost 2/3s of the way through the show an assault and battery committed on nationwide tv by this young girl's father against her. From the way everyone kept painting the step person throughout the entire show, I was fully expecting her to be the abusive one. Instead I’m lying down in bed watching an argument taking place within this family over homework and suddenly, with no physical provocation whatsoever from his daughter, her father leaps across the coffee table and begins punching his young daughter in the face, neck and head.
I actually was so shocked I sat bolt upright in my bed while watching this and perched on the edge horrified waiting for someone to break this up as the entire event was being videotaped by the crew. Instead I believe they changed the camera angle so you couldn’t see the blows landing on this young girl, but you could see by the way the girls’ lower legs curled up that she had gone into a fetal position to protect her head and face while her father rained punches down on her. Actually from the way his arm was moving up and down you could see he was attacking her with a closed fist, as it wasn’t the back and forth movement of an open handed slap. If you had walked in on this unexpectedly, you would have thought her father was fighting with another man, there appeared to be no recognition whatsoever that he was punching his young daughter, a 14/15 year old about a third of his size.
Unbelievable.
I was actually so upset as I said by the suddenness of his assault and the unexpected savagery of it, I was on the edge of my bed not able to lay down again until I was assured the girl was out of danger.
Thank God it finally ended, but they moved the camera away so you couldn’t see if any injury had been done to this poor kid after that vicious assault. She, of course, wasn’t sent to live with her mother, since you could hear the father claiming he had the mother on tape as not wanting her daughter (like he didn’t orchestrate that comment from her mother) but instead she was sent to live with her grandparents…
Who appear to be a lovely couple except for the fact that they spend the entire ending of the show, along with Diane Sawyer, claiming how this young girl was living with them because she was so terrified of her father’s second wife…but she would love to live with her father again (who was shipped off to Iraq, instead of the nearest county lockup where he belonged) if ONLY the step person wasn’t around.
Let me put it this way, she better be damn glad that step person was in the room when this assault took place, as I could easily have seen this guy beating his daughter to death if they were alone.
Totally unbelievably, this entire show was the most obvious piece of brainwashing and propaganda against women and mothers that I had seen in a while.
That piece of crap who assaulted his daughter needs to be dragged back from Iraq with a choke chain around his neck like a dog and charged with assault and battery. That girl’s mother needs to be contacted about what has been happening to her daughter, so appropriate action can be taken by her to assure her child's safety. AND that Diane Sawyer needs to keep in mind that she better watch her step because if that kid had gotten hurt, she would have been responsible: as an assault on a young girl should NEVER be permitted to continue in order to boost ratings.
That’s a little bit much even for reality tv.
Saturday, April 22, 2006
Authorities need to ensure this child's mother actually left the country
Police need to thoroughly check this man's story to make sure this child's mother actually left the country. Generally speaking mothers won't just up and leave an 18 month old baby like that, in spite of the many lies and propaganda put out by the media day and night acting like we do...
This baby's mother could have been murdered by this idiot. Actually this won't be the first time that a father has put out this lie saying his child's mother ran off or returned to her country of origin, when in fact, he murdered her...
I won't say it's common, but if you watch Court TV as I do, you know it happens often enough that you need to check these stories out carefully when a mother just up and disappears like that...
Children are worth money today as this story demonstrates, they are a valuable asset. So mothers, as their natural guardians, are always at risk to be swept aside when the unscrupulous look to profit from our kids...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12428975/?GT1=7938
Man tries to sell baby daughter, police say
Father wanted $7,000 for 18-month-old to fund home improvements
Updated: 12:15 a.m. ET April 22, 2006
APPLETON, Wis. - A man raising his 18-month-old daughter alone tried to sell the little girl for $7,000 so he could make improvements to his house, police said Friday.
The Ashwaubenon man tried to sell his daughter to a Grand Chute couple, who helped authorities in the investigation, Grand Chute police Chief Ed Kopp said.
“He was having difficulties raising the child alone and wanted to use the money for some home remodeling,” Kopp said.
Danny Vu, 37, was charged Friday with unauthorized adoption placement, a felony that carries up to six years in prison.
The daughter showed no signs of physical abuse, Kopp said. Brown County officials will probably place her in temporary foster care.
The man wanted to sell the girl “and didn’t want anything to do with the baby after that,” Outagamie County District Attorney Carrie Schneider said.
The man owns a nail salon in Green Bay. A salon employee told the man he knew a Grand Chute woman who was looking to adopt a baby, and the man and the Grand Chute woman were introduced, police said. A friend of the woman later called police.
Wanted deal off the books
Schneider said the couple wanted to contact attorneys and follow legal adoption procedures, but the man did not want to involve attorneys.
Police arrested the man after the Grand Chute woman called police to say he was on his way to their home with the girl Wednesday night, Kopp said.
“We obviously had some concern about the child and what condition she was in, so we made the decision to intercept him,” he said.
The girl’s mother left the area several months ago and is not in the country, Schneider said.
Vu was jailed in lieu of a $10,000 cash bond.
Defense attorney Eugene Bartman said Vu, who was born in Vietnam but is a U.S. citizen, has never been in trouble with police or in jail before.
Vu “understands what’s going on and thinks it’s very unfair,” Bartman said.
This baby's mother could have been murdered by this idiot. Actually this won't be the first time that a father has put out this lie saying his child's mother ran off or returned to her country of origin, when in fact, he murdered her...
I won't say it's common, but if you watch Court TV as I do, you know it happens often enough that you need to check these stories out carefully when a mother just up and disappears like that...
Children are worth money today as this story demonstrates, they are a valuable asset. So mothers, as their natural guardians, are always at risk to be swept aside when the unscrupulous look to profit from our kids...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12428975/?GT1=7938
Man tries to sell baby daughter, police say
Father wanted $7,000 for 18-month-old to fund home improvements
Updated: 12:15 a.m. ET April 22, 2006
APPLETON, Wis. - A man raising his 18-month-old daughter alone tried to sell the little girl for $7,000 so he could make improvements to his house, police said Friday.
The Ashwaubenon man tried to sell his daughter to a Grand Chute couple, who helped authorities in the investigation, Grand Chute police Chief Ed Kopp said.
“He was having difficulties raising the child alone and wanted to use the money for some home remodeling,” Kopp said.
Danny Vu, 37, was charged Friday with unauthorized adoption placement, a felony that carries up to six years in prison.
The daughter showed no signs of physical abuse, Kopp said. Brown County officials will probably place her in temporary foster care.
The man wanted to sell the girl “and didn’t want anything to do with the baby after that,” Outagamie County District Attorney Carrie Schneider said.
The man owns a nail salon in Green Bay. A salon employee told the man he knew a Grand Chute woman who was looking to adopt a baby, and the man and the Grand Chute woman were introduced, police said. A friend of the woman later called police.
Wanted deal off the books
Schneider said the couple wanted to contact attorneys and follow legal adoption procedures, but the man did not want to involve attorneys.
Police arrested the man after the Grand Chute woman called police to say he was on his way to their home with the girl Wednesday night, Kopp said.
“We obviously had some concern about the child and what condition she was in, so we made the decision to intercept him,” he said.
The girl’s mother left the area several months ago and is not in the country, Schneider said.
Vu was jailed in lieu of a $10,000 cash bond.
Defense attorney Eugene Bartman said Vu, who was born in Vietnam but is a U.S. citizen, has never been in trouble with police or in jail before.
Vu “understands what’s going on and thinks it’s very unfair,” Bartman said.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Another Bait and Switch Scheme to Steal Infants from their Mothers
http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/14353722.htm
Mothers in domestic violence shelters face losing their children
By Valarie Honeycutt Spears
HERALD-LEADER STAFF WRITER
Domestic violence shelter directors say the state is increasingly taking children away from women who have done nothing more than move to a shelter to escape a violent home.
In the past year, the Cabinet for Health and Family Services has removed the children of about 50 women served by the Bluegrass Domestic Violence Program, said Darlene Thomas, the program's director. The program covers Fayette and 16 surrounding counties.
Some Cabinet workers have been telling women that shelters aren't an appropriate atmosphere for children, said Kentucky Domestic Violence Association executive director Sherry Currens. Currens and other domestic violence victim advocates worry that the trend could dissuade victims from seeking help.
"You don't have to hurt the baby or neglect it; at this point, being an abused woman who shows up at a shelter is often enough grounds to take a child," Thomas said.
That's a shift from the past, when child-protection workers applauded mothers who fled abusive partners and took their children to shelters.
Shelters provide a safe, structured environment for families and also offer programs designed for the children, Thomas said.
A recent child advocacy report suggested that officials could be removing more children of domestic violence victims as part of a broader push to increase adoptions from state foster care in order to get federal financial bonuses for the state.
The Cabinet disputes that.
"It has nothing to do with federal enticements or raising adoption numbers. Our motivation is to protect the child," said Tom Emberton Jr., commissioner of the Department for Community Based Services. "There is no policy that children of domestic violence victims are removed. We look at each case."
Emberton said he is aware of the concerns by the victim advocates and that the Cabinet is looking into them.
Thomas said the domestic violence professionals on her staff agreed that the Cabinet removals were appropriate in only about five of the 50 cases, in which mothers had other problems, such as drug addiction, in addition to domestic violence.
Thomas said she knows of three cases in the 17-county area in which the state found new adoptive families for infants who were taken from domestic violence victims at the hospital immediately after birth.
Currens said officials at shelters statewide are concerned about the trend. She said Cabinet workers and courts are sending mixed messages to victims: They could lose custody if they don't leave an abuser; but they are viewed as unstable if they flee to a shelter.
Currens said some domestic violence workers are so concerned that they have provided information for a state inspector general's investigation into foster care adoptions.
David Richart, executive director of the Louisville-based National Institute on Children, Youth and Families Inc., said shelter employees have come to him with concerns that victims were losing their children -- especially infants and toddlers who looked like "Gerber babies."
"I'm very concerned about what appears to be a trend," Thomas said. "I don't know why it's happening. I can't pretend to have the big picture."
Mothers in domestic violence shelters face losing their children
By Valarie Honeycutt Spears
HERALD-LEADER STAFF WRITER
Domestic violence shelter directors say the state is increasingly taking children away from women who have done nothing more than move to a shelter to escape a violent home.
In the past year, the Cabinet for Health and Family Services has removed the children of about 50 women served by the Bluegrass Domestic Violence Program, said Darlene Thomas, the program's director. The program covers Fayette and 16 surrounding counties.
Some Cabinet workers have been telling women that shelters aren't an appropriate atmosphere for children, said Kentucky Domestic Violence Association executive director Sherry Currens. Currens and other domestic violence victim advocates worry that the trend could dissuade victims from seeking help.
"You don't have to hurt the baby or neglect it; at this point, being an abused woman who shows up at a shelter is often enough grounds to take a child," Thomas said.
That's a shift from the past, when child-protection workers applauded mothers who fled abusive partners and took their children to shelters.
Shelters provide a safe, structured environment for families and also offer programs designed for the children, Thomas said.
A recent child advocacy report suggested that officials could be removing more children of domestic violence victims as part of a broader push to increase adoptions from state foster care in order to get federal financial bonuses for the state.
The Cabinet disputes that.
"It has nothing to do with federal enticements or raising adoption numbers. Our motivation is to protect the child," said Tom Emberton Jr., commissioner of the Department for Community Based Services. "There is no policy that children of domestic violence victims are removed. We look at each case."
Emberton said he is aware of the concerns by the victim advocates and that the Cabinet is looking into them.
Thomas said the domestic violence professionals on her staff agreed that the Cabinet removals were appropriate in only about five of the 50 cases, in which mothers had other problems, such as drug addiction, in addition to domestic violence.
Thomas said she knows of three cases in the 17-county area in which the state found new adoptive families for infants who were taken from domestic violence victims at the hospital immediately after birth.
Currens said officials at shelters statewide are concerned about the trend. She said Cabinet workers and courts are sending mixed messages to victims: They could lose custody if they don't leave an abuser; but they are viewed as unstable if they flee to a shelter.
Currens said some domestic violence workers are so concerned that they have provided information for a state inspector general's investigation into foster care adoptions.
David Richart, executive director of the Louisville-based National Institute on Children, Youth and Families Inc., said shelter employees have come to him with concerns that victims were losing their children -- especially infants and toddlers who looked like "Gerber babies."
"I'm very concerned about what appears to be a trend," Thomas said. "I don't know why it's happening. I can't pretend to have the big picture."
It's probably happening to 'feed' the growing adoption market for blonde, blue-eyed babies as more and more professional women decide to follow the gender neutralized feminists' prescription for living the good life. First get a professional degree and establish yourself in your field THEN try to find a husband and have children.
Sadly by the time you accomplish all that you are probably in the situation of a Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Ann Coulter, Maureen Dowd, Condi Rice, Harriet Miers, etc., which means you either have to do a single parent adoption or spend your remaining fertile years sniffing around college campus looking for some young college girl (desperate for money) to sell you her eggs OR hang around a shelter in a poor southern state looking to STEAL some other young mother's baby...
Either way it's a disgusting scenario.
Go have your own kids and quit trying to steal either the eggs or baby 'chicks' of other mothers.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
More Statistical Lies Put Out by Our Men
Like the “missile gap” between the US and the Soviet Union that scared the American public into pouring more money into the military, starving our public sector of desperately required funds for other goods and services. Or the infamous “weapons of mass destruction” that tricked us into Iraq causing the on-going deaths and crippling of thousands of American soldiers, these fathers of lies never get tired of spinning the truth, no matter the cost to others.
Just as many of us suspected right along there is NO CRISIS FOR MOST BOYS AND/OR MEN in western civilization. It is total and complete bullcrap made up by our men trying to get MORE resources for themselves, when they already have so much already; but always grasping for more as is the nature of the male of every species as well as our own. Or should I say ESPECIALLY our own, since let’s face it the men of western civilization have made an art form of the statistical lie to justify getting their own way.
If you need any more evidence of this just look at the way men have manipulated the statistics against mothers ever since high child support guidelines became mandatory.
Now those statistical lies have morphed into an excuse to instigate a custody fight at every opportunity painting themselves as soooo concerned about children. How coincidental that this concern never manifested itself earlier when it could have done some real good for children in dire situations such as all the children they propagated on slave women over the centuries or the thousands of homeless boys abandoned on the streets of every major city at the turn of the last century.
Instead a man with NO KIDS (a priest) had to start a social movement to help those homeless boys, that's why Boy's Town was created. How come no father ever thought to do that when all these poor boys were homeless on the streets? THEN they said nothing, when a fathers' movement could have done some real good to help children, but NOW they are concerned and of course, their concern has led them to fighting for custody.
AND, of course, it's probably just a coincidence that men are then allowed to use these kids to get tax benefits/credits, housing subsidiaries, medical and food supplements as well as child support from the child's mothers using imputed income, and a 101 other public benefits for their own fat, greedy selves...
I predict that if the men in western civilization continue their attempts to use statistical lies in order to amass more resources for themselves, at the expense of everyone else including their own women and children, they will wind up destroying us all.
If they continue…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/07/AR2006040702025.html
The Myth of 'The Boy Crisis'
By Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Chait Barnett
Sunday, April 9, 2006; Page B01
It was the early 1900s, and boys were supposedly in crisis. In monthly magazines, ladies' journals and books, urgent polemics appeared, warning that young men were spending too much time in school with female teachers and that the constant interaction with women was robbing them of their manhood. In Congress, Sen. Albert Beveridge of Indiana railed against overeducation. He urged young men to "avoid books and in fact avoid all artificial learning, for the forefathers put America on the right path by learning completely from natural experience."
What boys needed, the experts said, was time outdoors, rubbing elbows with one another and learning from male role models. That's what led -- at least in part -- to the founding of the Boy Scouts in 1910.
Now the cry has been raised again: We're losing our boys. The media have been hyping America's new "boy crisis" in magazine cover stories, a PBS documentary and countless newspaper articles. Boys, these reports lament, are falling behind in academic achievement, graduating from high school at lower rates than girls, occupying fewer seats in college classrooms, displaying poorer verbal skills.
This time, experts are calling for a complete overhaul of American education based on gender, saying that boys are wired differently from girls, learn in different ways and may just need their own schools. Boys, they say, are at a disadvantage in the many classrooms headed by female teachers, who are supposedly hostile to their sex. One male high school student in Massachusetts has even filed a federal lawsuit claiming that his school is biased against males.
But are American boys in academic free fall? Not really, if we look closely. Nor do they need special boys-only classrooms to teach them in ways tailored for their unique brains.
The boy crisis we're hearing about is largely a manufactured one, the product of both a backlash against the women's movement and the media's penchant for continuously churning out news about the latest dire threat to the nation. The subject got a big boost last year when first lady Laura Bush announced that she was going to turn her attention to the problems of boys.
But those problems are hardly so widespread. The alarming statistics on which the notion of a crisis is based are rarely broken out by race or class. When they are, the whole picture changes. It becomes clear that if there is a crisis, it's among inner-city and rural boys. White suburban boys aren't significantly touched by it. On average, they are not dropping out of school, avoiding college or lacking in verbal skills. Although we have been hearing that boys are virtually disappearing from college classrooms, the truth is that among whites, the gender composition of colleges is pretty balanced: 51 percent female and 49 percent male, according to the National Education Association. In Ivy League colleges, men still outnumber women.
One group of studies found that although poor and working-class boys lag behind girls in reading when they get to middle school, boys in the wealthiest schools do not fall behind, either in middle school or in high school. University of Michigan education professor Valerie Lee reports that gender differences in academic performance are "small to moderate."
When it comes to academic achievement, race and class completely swamp gender. The Urban Institute reports that 76 percent of students who live in middle- to higher-income areas are likely to graduate from high school, while only 56 percent of students who live in lower-income areas are likely to do so. Among whites in Boston public schools, for every 100 males who graduate, 104 females do. A tiny gap.
But among blacks, for every 100 males who graduate, 139 females do. Florida's graduation rates among all students show a striking picture of race and class: 81 percent for Asians, 60 percent for whites, 48 percent for Hispanics and 46 percent for blacks.
A peculiar image of the "typical" boy has emerged in many media reports: He's unable to focus, can't sit still, hates to read, acts up in class, loves sports and video games, gets in trouble a lot. Indeed, such boys exist -- it has long been established that boys suffer more from attention deficit disorder than girls do -- and they need all the help they can get. But research shows this is not the typical boy. Boys, in fact, are as -- or more -- different from one another as they are from girls.
Nonetheless, some are advocating boys-only classrooms in which boys would be taught in boot-camp fashion. In a recent Newsweek cover story, Houston neurologist Bruce Perry described today's co-ed classes as a "biologically disrespectful model of education." In the New Republic, Richard Whitmire wrote of a "verbally drenched curriculum" that is "leaving boys in the dust." New York Times columnist David Brooks suggested that boys ought to be given books about combat, to hold their interest. (Forget Julius Caesar, give them GI Joe?)
There's actually not much evidence that most boys lack verbal skills. In 2005, University of Wisconsin psychologist Janet Hyde synthesized data from 165 studies on verbal ability and gender. They revealed a female superiority so slight as to be meaningless. And psychologist Diane Halpern of Claremont McKenna College looked at many studies of verbal and math abilities and found that, overall, the gender differences were remarkably small.
This research casts doubt on the idea, championed by author Michael Gurian ("The Wonder of Boys") and others, that boys' and girls' brains are so different that they must be taught in very different ways. Although there are indeed some structural differences in the brains of men and women, we don't know what they mean. Perhaps very little. In the 19th century, scientists thought that the greater size of the male brain meant that men were a lot smarter. We now know how off the mark that was.
The Massachusetts student who has brought the discrimination suit against his high school wants boys to be given credit for sports and to be excused from the school's community service requirement. But might that not send the message to boys that they are inherently too dumb to get academic credit and too insensitive to be concerned about community issues?
Many, perhaps most, boys would be bored to tears in the kind of classroom that is now being described as "boy-friendly" -- a classroom that would de-emphasize reading and verbal skills and would rely on rote learning and discipline -- because it is really a remedial program in disguise. That's great for boys who need it, but most boys, especially those in affluent suburban schools, don't.
Still, as Newsweek reported, educators "are reviving an old idea: separate the girls from the boys." We may see a rush to single-sex classrooms that won't really be good educational policy. California tried such classrooms in the 1990s under Gov. Pete Wilson, but they did not succeed in boosting academic achievement. In fact, according to a 2001 Ford Foundation report, the academic success of both girls and boys is influenced more by small classes, strong curricula and qualified teachers than by single-sex settings.
The Department of Defense offers a better model. DOD runs a vast network of schools on military bases in the United States and abroad for more than 100,000 children of service members. And in those schools, there is no class and race gap. That's because these schools have high expectations, a strong academic focus, and hire teachers with years of classroom experience and training (a majority with master's degrees). Of course, this solution costs money, and has none of the sex appeal of the trendy single-sex-school quick fix.
Obsessing about a boy crisis or thinking that American teachers are waging a war on boys won't help kids. What will is recognizing that students are individuals, with many different skills and abilities. And that goes for both girls and boys.
mailto:Caryl@bu.edu
Caryl Rivers is a professor of journalism at Boston University. Rosalind Chait Barnett is a senior scientist at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University.
Just to be clear historically ALL WOMEN in our society of every race and ethnic background faced the same discriminatory educational and employment issues. ALL...no matter how much money their families had or how important or well connected their family was. For instance, none of the ivy leagues used to admit women until fairly recently. This doesn't sound like a big deal today but then it probably meant even women from elite families were denied opportunities to enter the prestigious fields of law, medicine, or politics as these schools were the engine that fed many of those fields.
Additionally it probably meant that the only outlet for most women to express themselves in any really significant way or participate in society in some manner was through a marriage and children, as what else existed for them? Sadly if you look at the resume of most famous women they all start with either her father or her husband, sometimes a brother or a son, being a man of distinction and she piggybacked to some greatness through this important boost.
Anyway, this policy of the ivies I believe is really even the genesis of the gender gap in college today. Since many of the 'sister' colleges these all male ivies started became schools for JUST women and pretty much remain so (unofficially) today, ie., Vassar, Barnard, etc.,...
Actually where I work this has definitely been the genesis of a gap between the number of men and women attending the college. As what happened is the all-women 'sister' school, which was started to allow women to attend classes without getting rid of the all-men admissions policy, well their sister decided NOT to merge into the all-male college in the 80s after it became co-ed. The 'sister' school felt it had already established it's own identify and wanted to keep it. So now they have the sister school (an all-woman college) and their own college (both 50% men and 50% women now since the 80s) attending classes together...so this, of course, means MORE WOMEN then men in classes.
I think this is what they refer to as 'blowback'...
Anyhow, we see the same sort of thing in employment. Since some women did manage to get an education but then no one would hire them in the established industries, law, medicine, newspapers, etc., after graduation. So what did they do...they started their own employment industry the 'settlement house movement'.
This was really the genesis of the entire social/public services industry that so dominates the many urban areas employment scene today. Everything from classes in English to personal hygenie and housekeeping were offered to women. All of this was largely financed through private contributions from sponsors (ie., family and friends of these women) and later when it was shown to be a useful aid into integrating newly immigrated families into the mainstream some small government funding followed. AND the same sort of funding patterns are obvious today in many non-profit groups, that followed in the footsteps of these earlier women.
If you ever have the opportunity to walk through the streets of the lower east side of Manhattan you will see the tributes to these early pioneer women celebrated in the names of the buildings as memorials to them.
For instance, Jane Addams, who originally brought the settlement house movement over from England. She opened Hull House in Chicago, which still exists today and still adheres to the original mission of providing services to the surrounding community.
Lillian Wald, founder of the Henry Street Settlement. Again, this stands as a tribute to her, even today. Actually the NAACP was founded there at the Henry Street Settlement. I just walked past the place yesterday and I was impresssed with the range of its activities as it is STILL working within the community but now with the homeless, children and teenagers.
Margaret Sanger, yes I know it's conventional wisdom to hate her today...she was a racist, eugenist, etc., YET remember one thing many of these women were from the elite classes or at the very least, like Sanger, associated and used the language of the elite. So what we assume was racist language and thinking was very common then and many others "clearly identified with the broader issues of health and fitness that concerned the early 20th-century eugenics movement". So it wasn't JUST about racism as many people try to tar her with today. It also concerned mothers being fit and healthy to bear children.
Additionally many of the 'shanty' Irish and recent Italian immigrants were Margaret Sanger's patients. She was on-call for her patients day and night, often working alone and lugging heavy bags of medical instruments up steep tenement stairs in order to help women deliver babies or treat them when they were ill. So that doesn't sound like someone who hated these people. She also worked with many African American groups in the rural South who recognized that "uncontrolled fertility represented the greatest burden to the poor".
Eventually she too started an organization that exists to this day, Planned Parenthood which is NOT just about abortion but about OB/GYN exams, well-baby care in some of its locations, as well as birth control for women including but not limited to abortion.
Anyway my main point here is that ALL women suffered discrimination no matter their race or social class. Otherwise these women would probably have been working in medicine, law or even government and we would never have had a settlement house movement or any of the other organizations that were begun during this period. I, at least, think our society would have been the poorer due to this so I'm glad these women were't siphoned off into more conventional employment areas. I love walking through that area btw and seeing all those names/places, etc., and realizing what good women accomplished by being outside the mainstream.
But back to my main point, ALL men have NOT suffered discrimination like ALL women have. So this makes it very offensive for ALL men to use the statistics of mostly African-American men to get special benefits and considerations for themselves.
Quite frankly, it's disgusting.
Now, I know that this 'special privileges' for certain victim groups has gotten out of control, I know that. But let's attack that problem directly...not divert energy from it by attempting to paint more of us as bigger victims...
Like the “missile gap” between the US and the Soviet Union that scared the American public into pouring more money into the military, starving our public sector of desperately required funds for other goods and services. Or the infamous “weapons of mass destruction” that tricked us into Iraq causing the on-going deaths and crippling of thousands of American soldiers, these fathers of lies never get tired of spinning the truth, no matter the cost to others.
Just as many of us suspected right along there is NO CRISIS FOR MOST BOYS AND/OR MEN in western civilization. It is total and complete bullcrap made up by our men trying to get MORE resources for themselves, when they already have so much already; but always grasping for more as is the nature of the male of every species as well as our own. Or should I say ESPECIALLY our own, since let’s face it the men of western civilization have made an art form of the statistical lie to justify getting their own way.
If you need any more evidence of this just look at the way men have manipulated the statistics against mothers ever since high child support guidelines became mandatory.
Now those statistical lies have morphed into an excuse to instigate a custody fight at every opportunity painting themselves as soooo concerned about children. How coincidental that this concern never manifested itself earlier when it could have done some real good for children in dire situations such as all the children they propagated on slave women over the centuries or the thousands of homeless boys abandoned on the streets of every major city at the turn of the last century.
Instead a man with NO KIDS (a priest) had to start a social movement to help those homeless boys, that's why Boy's Town was created. How come no father ever thought to do that when all these poor boys were homeless on the streets? THEN they said nothing, when a fathers' movement could have done some real good to help children, but NOW they are concerned and of course, their concern has led them to fighting for custody.
AND, of course, it's probably just a coincidence that men are then allowed to use these kids to get tax benefits/credits, housing subsidiaries, medical and food supplements as well as child support from the child's mothers using imputed income, and a 101 other public benefits for their own fat, greedy selves...
I predict that if the men in western civilization continue their attempts to use statistical lies in order to amass more resources for themselves, at the expense of everyone else including their own women and children, they will wind up destroying us all.
If they continue…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/07/AR2006040702025.html
The Myth of 'The Boy Crisis'
By Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Chait Barnett
Sunday, April 9, 2006; Page B01
It was the early 1900s, and boys were supposedly in crisis. In monthly magazines, ladies' journals and books, urgent polemics appeared, warning that young men were spending too much time in school with female teachers and that the constant interaction with women was robbing them of their manhood. In Congress, Sen. Albert Beveridge of Indiana railed against overeducation. He urged young men to "avoid books and in fact avoid all artificial learning, for the forefathers put America on the right path by learning completely from natural experience."
What boys needed, the experts said, was time outdoors, rubbing elbows with one another and learning from male role models. That's what led -- at least in part -- to the founding of the Boy Scouts in 1910.
Now the cry has been raised again: We're losing our boys. The media have been hyping America's new "boy crisis" in magazine cover stories, a PBS documentary and countless newspaper articles. Boys, these reports lament, are falling behind in academic achievement, graduating from high school at lower rates than girls, occupying fewer seats in college classrooms, displaying poorer verbal skills.
This time, experts are calling for a complete overhaul of American education based on gender, saying that boys are wired differently from girls, learn in different ways and may just need their own schools. Boys, they say, are at a disadvantage in the many classrooms headed by female teachers, who are supposedly hostile to their sex. One male high school student in Massachusetts has even filed a federal lawsuit claiming that his school is biased against males.
But are American boys in academic free fall? Not really, if we look closely. Nor do they need special boys-only classrooms to teach them in ways tailored for their unique brains.
The boy crisis we're hearing about is largely a manufactured one, the product of both a backlash against the women's movement and the media's penchant for continuously churning out news about the latest dire threat to the nation. The subject got a big boost last year when first lady Laura Bush announced that she was going to turn her attention to the problems of boys.
But those problems are hardly so widespread. The alarming statistics on which the notion of a crisis is based are rarely broken out by race or class. When they are, the whole picture changes. It becomes clear that if there is a crisis, it's among inner-city and rural boys. White suburban boys aren't significantly touched by it. On average, they are not dropping out of school, avoiding college or lacking in verbal skills. Although we have been hearing that boys are virtually disappearing from college classrooms, the truth is that among whites, the gender composition of colleges is pretty balanced: 51 percent female and 49 percent male, according to the National Education Association. In Ivy League colleges, men still outnumber women.
One group of studies found that although poor and working-class boys lag behind girls in reading when they get to middle school, boys in the wealthiest schools do not fall behind, either in middle school or in high school. University of Michigan education professor Valerie Lee reports that gender differences in academic performance are "small to moderate."
When it comes to academic achievement, race and class completely swamp gender. The Urban Institute reports that 76 percent of students who live in middle- to higher-income areas are likely to graduate from high school, while only 56 percent of students who live in lower-income areas are likely to do so. Among whites in Boston public schools, for every 100 males who graduate, 104 females do. A tiny gap.
But among blacks, for every 100 males who graduate, 139 females do. Florida's graduation rates among all students show a striking picture of race and class: 81 percent for Asians, 60 percent for whites, 48 percent for Hispanics and 46 percent for blacks.
A peculiar image of the "typical" boy has emerged in many media reports: He's unable to focus, can't sit still, hates to read, acts up in class, loves sports and video games, gets in trouble a lot. Indeed, such boys exist -- it has long been established that boys suffer more from attention deficit disorder than girls do -- and they need all the help they can get. But research shows this is not the typical boy. Boys, in fact, are as -- or more -- different from one another as they are from girls.
Nonetheless, some are advocating boys-only classrooms in which boys would be taught in boot-camp fashion. In a recent Newsweek cover story, Houston neurologist Bruce Perry described today's co-ed classes as a "biologically disrespectful model of education." In the New Republic, Richard Whitmire wrote of a "verbally drenched curriculum" that is "leaving boys in the dust." New York Times columnist David Brooks suggested that boys ought to be given books about combat, to hold their interest. (Forget Julius Caesar, give them GI Joe?)
There's actually not much evidence that most boys lack verbal skills. In 2005, University of Wisconsin psychologist Janet Hyde synthesized data from 165 studies on verbal ability and gender. They revealed a female superiority so slight as to be meaningless. And psychologist Diane Halpern of Claremont McKenna College looked at many studies of verbal and math abilities and found that, overall, the gender differences were remarkably small.
This research casts doubt on the idea, championed by author Michael Gurian ("The Wonder of Boys") and others, that boys' and girls' brains are so different that they must be taught in very different ways. Although there are indeed some structural differences in the brains of men and women, we don't know what they mean. Perhaps very little. In the 19th century, scientists thought that the greater size of the male brain meant that men were a lot smarter. We now know how off the mark that was.
The Massachusetts student who has brought the discrimination suit against his high school wants boys to be given credit for sports and to be excused from the school's community service requirement. But might that not send the message to boys that they are inherently too dumb to get academic credit and too insensitive to be concerned about community issues?
Many, perhaps most, boys would be bored to tears in the kind of classroom that is now being described as "boy-friendly" -- a classroom that would de-emphasize reading and verbal skills and would rely on rote learning and discipline -- because it is really a remedial program in disguise. That's great for boys who need it, but most boys, especially those in affluent suburban schools, don't.
Still, as Newsweek reported, educators "are reviving an old idea: separate the girls from the boys." We may see a rush to single-sex classrooms that won't really be good educational policy. California tried such classrooms in the 1990s under Gov. Pete Wilson, but they did not succeed in boosting academic achievement. In fact, according to a 2001 Ford Foundation report, the academic success of both girls and boys is influenced more by small classes, strong curricula and qualified teachers than by single-sex settings.
The Department of Defense offers a better model. DOD runs a vast network of schools on military bases in the United States and abroad for more than 100,000 children of service members. And in those schools, there is no class and race gap. That's because these schools have high expectations, a strong academic focus, and hire teachers with years of classroom experience and training (a majority with master's degrees). Of course, this solution costs money, and has none of the sex appeal of the trendy single-sex-school quick fix.
Obsessing about a boy crisis or thinking that American teachers are waging a war on boys won't help kids. What will is recognizing that students are individuals, with many different skills and abilities. And that goes for both girls and boys.
mailto:Caryl@bu.edu
Caryl Rivers is a professor of journalism at Boston University. Rosalind Chait Barnett is a senior scientist at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University.
Just to be clear historically ALL WOMEN in our society of every race and ethnic background faced the same discriminatory educational and employment issues. ALL...no matter how much money their families had or how important or well connected their family was. For instance, none of the ivy leagues used to admit women until fairly recently. This doesn't sound like a big deal today but then it probably meant even women from elite families were denied opportunities to enter the prestigious fields of law, medicine, or politics as these schools were the engine that fed many of those fields.
Additionally it probably meant that the only outlet for most women to express themselves in any really significant way or participate in society in some manner was through a marriage and children, as what else existed for them? Sadly if you look at the resume of most famous women they all start with either her father or her husband, sometimes a brother or a son, being a man of distinction and she piggybacked to some greatness through this important boost.
Anyway, this policy of the ivies I believe is really even the genesis of the gender gap in college today. Since many of the 'sister' colleges these all male ivies started became schools for JUST women and pretty much remain so (unofficially) today, ie., Vassar, Barnard, etc.,...
Actually where I work this has definitely been the genesis of a gap between the number of men and women attending the college. As what happened is the all-women 'sister' school, which was started to allow women to attend classes without getting rid of the all-men admissions policy, well their sister decided NOT to merge into the all-male college in the 80s after it became co-ed. The 'sister' school felt it had already established it's own identify and wanted to keep it. So now they have the sister school (an all-woman college) and their own college (both 50% men and 50% women now since the 80s) attending classes together...so this, of course, means MORE WOMEN then men in classes.
I think this is what they refer to as 'blowback'...
Anyhow, we see the same sort of thing in employment. Since some women did manage to get an education but then no one would hire them in the established industries, law, medicine, newspapers, etc., after graduation. So what did they do...they started their own employment industry the 'settlement house movement'.
This was really the genesis of the entire social/public services industry that so dominates the many urban areas employment scene today. Everything from classes in English to personal hygenie and housekeeping were offered to women. All of this was largely financed through private contributions from sponsors (ie., family and friends of these women) and later when it was shown to be a useful aid into integrating newly immigrated families into the mainstream some small government funding followed. AND the same sort of funding patterns are obvious today in many non-profit groups, that followed in the footsteps of these earlier women.
If you ever have the opportunity to walk through the streets of the lower east side of Manhattan you will see the tributes to these early pioneer women celebrated in the names of the buildings as memorials to them.
For instance, Jane Addams, who originally brought the settlement house movement over from England. She opened Hull House in Chicago, which still exists today and still adheres to the original mission of providing services to the surrounding community.
Lillian Wald, founder of the Henry Street Settlement. Again, this stands as a tribute to her, even today. Actually the NAACP was founded there at the Henry Street Settlement. I just walked past the place yesterday and I was impresssed with the range of its activities as it is STILL working within the community but now with the homeless, children and teenagers.
Margaret Sanger, yes I know it's conventional wisdom to hate her today...she was a racist, eugenist, etc., YET remember one thing many of these women were from the elite classes or at the very least, like Sanger, associated and used the language of the elite. So what we assume was racist language and thinking was very common then and many others "clearly identified with the broader issues of health and fitness that concerned the early 20th-century eugenics movement". So it wasn't JUST about racism as many people try to tar her with today. It also concerned mothers being fit and healthy to bear children.
Additionally many of the 'shanty' Irish and recent Italian immigrants were Margaret Sanger's patients. She was on-call for her patients day and night, often working alone and lugging heavy bags of medical instruments up steep tenement stairs in order to help women deliver babies or treat them when they were ill. So that doesn't sound like someone who hated these people. She also worked with many African American groups in the rural South who recognized that "uncontrolled fertility represented the greatest burden to the poor".
Eventually she too started an organization that exists to this day, Planned Parenthood which is NOT just about abortion but about OB/GYN exams, well-baby care in some of its locations, as well as birth control for women including but not limited to abortion.
Anyway my main point here is that ALL women suffered discrimination no matter their race or social class. Otherwise these women would probably have been working in medicine, law or even government and we would never have had a settlement house movement or any of the other organizations that were begun during this period. I, at least, think our society would have been the poorer due to this so I'm glad these women were't siphoned off into more conventional employment areas. I love walking through that area btw and seeing all those names/places, etc., and realizing what good women accomplished by being outside the mainstream.
But back to my main point, ALL men have NOT suffered discrimination like ALL women have. So this makes it very offensive for ALL men to use the statistics of mostly African-American men to get special benefits and considerations for themselves.
Quite frankly, it's disgusting.
Now, I know that this 'special privileges' for certain victim groups has gotten out of control, I know that. But let's attack that problem directly...not divert energy from it by attempting to paint more of us as bigger victims...
What Kind of a Human Being Would be Trying to Separate a 4 Year Old From her Mother
Can you imagine what kind of a human being would be trying to get custody of a 4 year old away from it’s mother? Especially a black child with the history in this country of black children being sold away from their mothers for financial gain…Even some of the language used by the US marshals “who are best known for hunting down fugitives” hunting this poor mother and child reminded me of those ads slave owners used to put in newspapers offering rewards for the return of runaway slaves…
US marshals should stick to their original mission and keep their noses out of the affairs of mothers and their children.
I just vomited all over my keyboard just thinking about what this poor mother must of gone through over the years afraid at any time that a US marshal could show up and steal her child away from her.
This is why we must ALL be careful about getting involved and helping this National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as it appears to have morphed into another tool to exploit mothers and children for financial gain in this ever-expanding custody war that men have instigated…This National Center is going to lose ALL credibility with mothers if they continue their pattern of getting involved on the side of men in custody fights.
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/LegalCenter/story?id=1844217&page=1&WNT=true
Father and Daughter to be Reunited After 13 Year
Girl was missing since mother abducted her at age 4
April 14, 2006 — Carl Dodd, a Washington, D.C., transit worker, says he has had a hole in his life since his 4-year-old daughter, Marilyn, disappeared 13 years ago.
Marilyn was gone without a trace after her mother took off during a custody battle.
"I felt like a piece of my heart had been taken away from me, not knowing if I would ever see her again," Dodd said.
On five different occasions, authorities told Dodd that they had found his daughter. But each time they were wrong.
Finally this week, pain turned to exhilaration after Dodd got a call from the U.S. Marshals Service that they had solved the oldest parental abduction case. This time they were right.
"I started feeling chills running through my body," he said. "It's about to happen."
In December, the Center for Missing and Exploited Children decided to team up with the FBI and the U.S. Marshals, who are best known for hunting down fugitives. The marshals began a painstaking investigation of every lead in the case, every friend, every relative.
"We were able to gain information in the D.C. area," said Marshal David Thomas. "They believed that she moved somewhere up the coast. A lot of addresses were pointing towards Wilmington, Del."
A Painstaking Process
But Marilyn Byrd would be 17 years old now. What would a 4-year-old look like as a young adult?
The marshals relied on the center's age-enhancement technology, which estimated her growth rate and how her features would change over 13 years.
"We brought in some subtle maturity into the area of the eyes, into the area of the nose," said Glenn Miller, supervisor for the Forensic Services Unit at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "These are again slow changes, very small, but we have to be conscious of that when we do the age progression."
Thomas said the result was startlingly accurate. "The picture was dead on with what she looked like," he said. "Our deputies were able to notice her right away with this photograph."
Most abducted children are eventually found. Dodd will finally get to see his daughter Monday. He is nervous.
Can you imagine what kind of a human being would be trying to get custody of a 4 year old away from it’s mother? Especially a black child with the history in this country of black children being sold away from their mothers for financial gain…Even some of the language used by the US marshals “who are best known for hunting down fugitives” hunting this poor mother and child reminded me of those ads slave owners used to put in newspapers offering rewards for the return of runaway slaves…
US marshals should stick to their original mission and keep their noses out of the affairs of mothers and their children.
I just vomited all over my keyboard just thinking about what this poor mother must of gone through over the years afraid at any time that a US marshal could show up and steal her child away from her.
This is why we must ALL be careful about getting involved and helping this National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as it appears to have morphed into another tool to exploit mothers and children for financial gain in this ever-expanding custody war that men have instigated…This National Center is going to lose ALL credibility with mothers if they continue their pattern of getting involved on the side of men in custody fights.
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/LegalCenter/story?id=1844217&page=1&WNT=true
Father and Daughter to be Reunited After 13 Year
Girl was missing since mother abducted her at age 4
April 14, 2006 — Carl Dodd, a Washington, D.C., transit worker, says he has had a hole in his life since his 4-year-old daughter, Marilyn, disappeared 13 years ago.
Marilyn was gone without a trace after her mother took off during a custody battle.
"I felt like a piece of my heart had been taken away from me, not knowing if I would ever see her again," Dodd said.
On five different occasions, authorities told Dodd that they had found his daughter. But each time they were wrong.
Finally this week, pain turned to exhilaration after Dodd got a call from the U.S. Marshals Service that they had solved the oldest parental abduction case. This time they were right.
"I started feeling chills running through my body," he said. "It's about to happen."
In December, the Center for Missing and Exploited Children decided to team up with the FBI and the U.S. Marshals, who are best known for hunting down fugitives. The marshals began a painstaking investigation of every lead in the case, every friend, every relative.
"We were able to gain information in the D.C. area," said Marshal David Thomas. "They believed that she moved somewhere up the coast. A lot of addresses were pointing towards Wilmington, Del."
A Painstaking Process
But Marilyn Byrd would be 17 years old now. What would a 4-year-old look like as a young adult?
The marshals relied on the center's age-enhancement technology, which estimated her growth rate and how her features would change over 13 years.
"We brought in some subtle maturity into the area of the eyes, into the area of the nose," said Glenn Miller, supervisor for the Forensic Services Unit at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "These are again slow changes, very small, but we have to be conscious of that when we do the age progression."
Thomas said the result was startlingly accurate. "The picture was dead on with what she looked like," he said. "Our deputies were able to notice her right away with this photograph."
Most abducted children are eventually found. Dodd will finally get to see his daughter Monday. He is nervous.
Thursday, April 13, 2006
I'll go for fining women who go to college and use up anywhere from four to six years of society's scarce capital and then become stay-at-home mothers who never work IF they also fine women who never contribute any "human capital" otherwise known as children to their societies either...
http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=13858
Online
Human Events
The National Conservative Weekly Since 1944
Social & Domestic Issues
Traditional Mothers Face Discrimination
By Joseph A. D’Agostino
Posted Apr 10, 2006
Thus the logic of feminism: A prominent female member of the Dutch parliament has proposed fining college-educated Dutch women who choose to be homemakers rather than work. Sharon Dijksma, deputy chairwoman of the Dutch Labor Party, provides yet more evidence that feminism was never about giving women choices but about destroying the family in order to enhance the power of the state.
"A highly-educated woman who chooses to stay at home and not to work -- that is destruction of capital," Dijksma said, according to the English-language Brussels Journal on March 31.
"If you receive the benefit of an expensive education at society's expense, you should not be allowed to throw away that knowledge unpunished." In the
Thus, too, the logic of socialism: The people are taxed heavily, then provided with "free" services, and then, because the government has deigned to return some of the people's tax money back to them, politicians and bureaucrats get to run the people's lives. Just as feminism here in the states has advanced to where feminist leaders openly criticize the Bush Administration for promoting marriage to single mothers and the fathers of their children, prominent feminists in Western Europe are now openly hostile toward homemakers.
Dijksma wants to extract some of the cost of their college education from the women who love their children more than paid work, and who are fortunate enough to have husbands who can enable them to stay home. This despite the continued rise of women's labor force participation in the
You would think Dutch leaders would want to encourage child-rearing, and homemakers are far more likely to have more than one child than full-time career women. Currently, Dutch women average 1.7 children over their lives, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. The large Muslim population of the nation has a disproportionately large number of children, and given most European Muslims’ attitudes toward women's education, few Muslim wives are likely to be affected by Dijksma's proposal. Yet Dijksma wants to promote a policy that will drive down the native Dutch population’s birthrate even further.
She might consider that having a relatively small proportion of prolific homemakers could raise the Dutch birthrate. If 20% of Dutch women had four children each and the rest averaged 1.5, the
Our own country has many forms of discrimination against traditional mothers. Institutionalized discrimination against men (called "affirmative action for women") harms not only men, but those homemaking women married to them and their children, who suffer because the husband and father of the family loses a job or a promotion because of a quota.
It also harms those many women, and their children, who work part-time and depend on their husbands' careers for their future security. The federal tax code grants breaks for day care but none for homemakers. Those who home-school must pay full taxes for public schools anyway.
It's not as if American women didn’t want to be homemakers: 77% of working mothers say they’d rather be home.
Yet feminists, so enamored of choice when it comes to abortion and homosexuality, aren't trying to help these three-quarters of working mothers achieve their desires. Quite the opposite. Don't think that Dijksma's plan comes from a marginal Dutch political faction. "In the municipal elections earlier this month, the PvdA [Dutch Labor Party] became the biggest party in the
Needless to say, having an educated women with her children all day is not a waste of anything.
Mr. D'Agostino, former associate editor of HUMAN EVENTS, is vice president for Communications at the Population Research Institute.
Friday, April 07, 2006
So-called Progressive Court Rulings Undermining Rights of All Women...
Virago, I was looking for some old posts of mine on how adoption of western legal systems in both Japan and Lebanon have been negatively impacting mothers and children in custody cases and I came across this...and I thought I'd re-post it...
I'm still searching for those other posts and the one on the Columbia University research...
But this one was interesting.
More of the On-going Manipulations of Men in their Never-Ending Attempts to be in Charge of Everything Again
Court hands sisters over to mother's lesbian lover
By Nick Britten
(Filed: 07/04/2006)
Two young sisters at the centre of a bitter custody battle were taken from their biological mother yesterday and sent to live with her former lesbian lover following a landmark court ruling.
The Court of Appeal ruled that although the natural mother had blood ties to the girls, that would no longer be deemed an advantage when both parties had brought the children up.
Because of their joint involvement they might both be considered the "natural parent", Lord Justice Thorpe said. The girls would be unable to distinguish between them on biological grounds.
The ruling marks a shift from the traditional view that the biological parent holds an advantage in custody battles.
The judge said: "We have moved into a world where norms that seemed safe 20 or more years ago no longer run. In the eyes of the child, the natural parent may be a non-biological parent who, by virtue of long settled care, has become the psychological parent."
The girls' natural mother, referred to as CG, had a seven-year relationship with her girlfriend, referred to as CW. She gave birth to the seven- and four-year-old sisters, known as A and B, via artificial insemination.
None of the parties can be identified to protect the girls' anonymity.
The court heard that the relationship broke down in 2002 and CG moved to a neighbouring house until she found a new lesbian partner in Leicester. They recently "married" in a civil partnership.
CW, 47, was denied access and any parental responsibility by a county court judge but this was overturned by the Court of Appeal last April and she was granted shared contact.
The judges said shared responsibility was "vital" for the girls' psychological health.
But as the children spent their summer holidays with CW, CG, a "headstrong and selfish" teacher, and her new partner secretly sold their house in Leicester and bought one in Cornwall, registering the children in a new school, a move the judges called "an appalling decision made in an afternoon". It was "a flagrant breach of the court's control of the arrangements for the children and an elaborate deception of CW".
When the family was tracked down, the High Court granted primary care of the children to the former partner, a decision ratified by the Court of Appeal yesterday.
Lord Justice Thorpe, dismissing the appeal, said that same-sex partners should have the same rights as estranged heterosexual couples, and that the child's views on which partner was the psychological parent should be considered.
Lady Justice Hallet said she dismissed the appeal but "with a degree of hesitation".
"I am very concerned at the prospect of removing these children from the primary care of their only identifiable biological parent who has been their primary carer for most of the young lives and in whose care they appear to be happy and thriving."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=SJGG2NJVRAPTFQFIQMGCFGGAVCBQUIV0?xml=/news/2006/04/07/nlesbian07.xml
Well it’s nice to see that this woman Lady Justice Hallet, had doubts, YET went along with the ruling anyway. How many ways can we say useless in English?
Once again demonstrating to mothers that putting other women into positions of power is no guarantee of any mercy being shown either to us or our children. Since some of the most vicious custody rulings against mothers have been handed down by other women.
Anyway, people are acting so stunned about this ruling but it’s nothing new, at least not in the US anyway and generally whatever we do here eventually finds it way to UK and every other country in western civilization.
So it was just a question of time before this lastest gender neutralized feminist fad hit British shores as well.
American Judges have been tossing out the whole notion of the mother/child bond for the last decade or so now and awarding children to live-in boyfriends (Christopher Rhodes perfect example: live in boyfriend who wanted a baby to play with, probably like you pick out a cute puppy at the pet shop), step persons, grandparents, recreational sperm donors missing in action for years. Probably even nannies and/or school teachers, a friendly neighbor will be eligible for custody next. That will be the next logical step in the progression of this mother-envy from a group of jealous male misfits and gender-neutralized feminists determined to destroy the last vestige of the bond between mother and child.
This is just more of the continuing disrespect and envy of men for mothers’ more important role in the bringing forth of life . Men cannot stand not being the center of the universe in something, so this is more of their never-ending attempts to neutralize mothers, more of their attention getting techniques such as this fixation with clown fish, penguins, other nonsense to give themselves a bigger role then merited by their actual real-life contribution.
As I have said in past posts, men are using these lesbian cases to get precedent set which will eventually negatively impact all mothers, both gay and straight.
Lesbians don’t appear to understand that going to court and winning these short-term victories ultimately winds up empowering MEN over WOMEN, each time they win a case.
This will eventually result in mothers having LESS RIGHTS overall, all mothers, BOTH gay and straight. It’s just a question of time before every one of these rulings will backfire on ALL mothers, ALL OF THEM. AND then everyone will be sitting around saying “how did that happen”…Well we can look back to this ruling and a 101 other rulings throughout western civilization that initially appear to be favoring lesbians, but in fact are nothing but men setting the backdrop for a loss of rights, respect, etc., for ALL mothers.
As EACH AND EVERY TIME a Judge tosses aside the biological connection between parent and child (like an old pair of shoes) that’s another nail in all mothers’ coffins as we are the supreme definitive biological connection to children…in spite of the way everyone wishes to paint a mother and father as being exactly alike in every way. In their hearts, I believe men know this to be a lie and this explains why their courts continue throwing out the biological connection to children and painting it as nothing very important. What they should be saying it that it’s not important to men, as their biological connection to children is tenuous, slight; something they sell in Great Britain for 15 lbs., obviously not something very important to them. However, God, evolution and nature obviously decreed only ONE of us to be the bearer of life…and that’s women in her role as mother.
Mother, under natural law, should automatically be deemed the custodian of her children, except in the rare cases of abuse and neglect, however the courts of men will continue to try to defy natural law. Mostly for reasons of envy, jealousy and greediness for the financial gain that comes with having custody of children today.
Additionally, I am going to make a small prediction. In another ten years NO WOMEN will be able to get impregnanted through anonymous insemination. NONE. Actually last year Great Britian made it illegal for a woman to have a child using anonymous insemination and I guarantee that this law will spread. YET now they have the audacity to paint themselves as concerned about lesbian families? This family they just decimated would not have EXISTED today, if it was up to Great Britain. It could NOT have, it would be illegal. Eventually it will probably be deemed some sort of crime to not name a man on the birth certificate of ever child born.
Thus, the gains lesbians thought they were making regarding creating their own families will have disappeared.
YET what will remain behind is the premise that a Judge can decide that the mother/child bond, which has existed since humanity first crawled out of the primal mist, is no longer of very much importance and that the courts of men have the right to hand a mother’s child over to someone else.
That is going to be the lesbian legacy to mothers and children.
Sadly, they are being used by men to pave the way for this continuing war against mothers and children, yet they just don’t see it and continue aiding and abetting these demented, jealous nitwits.
I'm still searching for those other posts and the one on the Columbia University research...
But this one was interesting.
More of the On-going Manipulations of Men in their Never-Ending Attempts to be in Charge of Everything Again
Court hands sisters over to mother's lesbian lover
By Nick Britten
(Filed: 07/04/2006)
Two young sisters at the centre of a bitter custody battle were taken from their biological mother yesterday and sent to live with her former lesbian lover following a landmark court ruling.
The Court of Appeal ruled that although the natural mother had blood ties to the girls, that would no longer be deemed an advantage when both parties had brought the children up.
Because of their joint involvement they might both be considered the "natural parent", Lord Justice Thorpe said. The girls would be unable to distinguish between them on biological grounds.
The ruling marks a shift from the traditional view that the biological parent holds an advantage in custody battles.
The judge said: "We have moved into a world where norms that seemed safe 20 or more years ago no longer run. In the eyes of the child, the natural parent may be a non-biological parent who, by virtue of long settled care, has become the psychological parent."
The girls' natural mother, referred to as CG, had a seven-year relationship with her girlfriend, referred to as CW. She gave birth to the seven- and four-year-old sisters, known as A and B, via artificial insemination.
None of the parties can be identified to protect the girls' anonymity.
The court heard that the relationship broke down in 2002 and CG moved to a neighbouring house until she found a new lesbian partner in Leicester. They recently "married" in a civil partnership.
CW, 47, was denied access and any parental responsibility by a county court judge but this was overturned by the Court of Appeal last April and she was granted shared contact.
The judges said shared responsibility was "vital" for the girls' psychological health.
But as the children spent their summer holidays with CW, CG, a "headstrong and selfish" teacher, and her new partner secretly sold their house in Leicester and bought one in Cornwall, registering the children in a new school, a move the judges called "an appalling decision made in an afternoon". It was "a flagrant breach of the court's control of the arrangements for the children and an elaborate deception of CW".
When the family was tracked down, the High Court granted primary care of the children to the former partner, a decision ratified by the Court of Appeal yesterday.
Lord Justice Thorpe, dismissing the appeal, said that same-sex partners should have the same rights as estranged heterosexual couples, and that the child's views on which partner was the psychological parent should be considered.
Lady Justice Hallet said she dismissed the appeal but "with a degree of hesitation".
"I am very concerned at the prospect of removing these children from the primary care of their only identifiable biological parent who has been their primary carer for most of the young lives and in whose care they appear to be happy and thriving."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=SJGG2NJVRAPTFQFIQMGCFGGAVCBQUIV0?xml=/news/2006/04/07/nlesbian07.xml
Well it’s nice to see that this woman Lady Justice Hallet, had doubts, YET went along with the ruling anyway. How many ways can we say useless in English?
Once again demonstrating to mothers that putting other women into positions of power is no guarantee of any mercy being shown either to us or our children. Since some of the most vicious custody rulings against mothers have been handed down by other women.
Anyway, people are acting so stunned about this ruling but it’s nothing new, at least not in the US anyway and generally whatever we do here eventually finds it way to UK and every other country in western civilization.
So it was just a question of time before this lastest gender neutralized feminist fad hit British shores as well.
American Judges have been tossing out the whole notion of the mother/child bond for the last decade or so now and awarding children to live-in boyfriends (Christopher Rhodes perfect example: live in boyfriend who wanted a baby to play with, probably like you pick out a cute puppy at the pet shop), step persons, grandparents, recreational sperm donors missing in action for years. Probably even nannies and/or school teachers, a friendly neighbor will be eligible for custody next. That will be the next logical step in the progression of this mother-envy from a group of jealous male misfits and gender-neutralized feminists determined to destroy the last vestige of the bond between mother and child.
This is just more of the continuing disrespect and envy of men for mothers’ more important role in the bringing forth of life . Men cannot stand not being the center of the universe in something, so this is more of their never-ending attempts to neutralize mothers, more of their attention getting techniques such as this fixation with clown fish, penguins, other nonsense to give themselves a bigger role then merited by their actual real-life contribution.
As I have said in past posts, men are using these lesbian cases to get precedent set which will eventually negatively impact all mothers, both gay and straight.
Lesbians don’t appear to understand that going to court and winning these short-term victories ultimately winds up empowering MEN over WOMEN, each time they win a case.
This will eventually result in mothers having LESS RIGHTS overall, all mothers, BOTH gay and straight. It’s just a question of time before every one of these rulings will backfire on ALL mothers, ALL OF THEM. AND then everyone will be sitting around saying “how did that happen”…Well we can look back to this ruling and a 101 other rulings throughout western civilization that initially appear to be favoring lesbians, but in fact are nothing but men setting the backdrop for a loss of rights, respect, etc., for ALL mothers.
As EACH AND EVERY TIME a Judge tosses aside the biological connection between parent and child (like an old pair of shoes) that’s another nail in all mothers’ coffins as we are the supreme definitive biological connection to children…in spite of the way everyone wishes to paint a mother and father as being exactly alike in every way. In their hearts, I believe men know this to be a lie and this explains why their courts continue throwing out the biological connection to children and painting it as nothing very important. What they should be saying it that it’s not important to men, as their biological connection to children is tenuous, slight; something they sell in Great Britain for 15 lbs., obviously not something very important to them. However, God, evolution and nature obviously decreed only ONE of us to be the bearer of life…and that’s women in her role as mother.
Mother, under natural law, should automatically be deemed the custodian of her children, except in the rare cases of abuse and neglect, however the courts of men will continue to try to defy natural law. Mostly for reasons of envy, jealousy and greediness for the financial gain that comes with having custody of children today.
Additionally, I am going to make a small prediction. In another ten years NO WOMEN will be able to get impregnanted through anonymous insemination. NONE. Actually last year Great Britian made it illegal for a woman to have a child using anonymous insemination and I guarantee that this law will spread. YET now they have the audacity to paint themselves as concerned about lesbian families? This family they just decimated would not have EXISTED today, if it was up to Great Britain. It could NOT have, it would be illegal. Eventually it will probably be deemed some sort of crime to not name a man on the birth certificate of ever child born.
Thus, the gains lesbians thought they were making regarding creating their own families will have disappeared.
YET what will remain behind is the premise that a Judge can decide that the mother/child bond, which has existed since humanity first crawled out of the primal mist, is no longer of very much importance and that the courts of men have the right to hand a mother’s child over to someone else.
That is going to be the lesbian legacy to mothers and children.
Sadly, they are being used by men to pave the way for this continuing war against mothers and children, yet they just don’t see it and continue aiding and abetting these demented, jealous nitwits.
Thursday, April 06, 2006
|
19 Mar 2006 13:30:08 GMT Source: IRIN |
The study also notes that the divorce rate is almost 25 percent higher in the capital,
"Divorce cases increase in societies that undergo many social changes in a very short time," said sociologist Dr Hazar al-Gindi. "Working women are still considered odd in our society. We still look at women through the traditional perspective; that their role should be confined to raising children and housekeeping."
Meanwhile, divorced women are often left bereft of the financial means to support themselves. In some cases, they are even left without a place to live in. "I actually had to become a maid just to find shelter," said Kinaz al-Samman, 29. Al-Samman divorced after marrying at only 13 years old, not an uncommon practice in
Divorced women also complain that they suffer from popular stigmas associated with marital separation. "'Divorce' is a word easily said by the husband, but it badly affects the woman's life and even tarnishes her image," said 19-year old divorcee Laila Khalil. "Divorced women are treated as if they're guilty, and aren't socially accepted."
Children can also be the unwitting pawns in divorce cases, with husbands sometimes only consenting to give up custody of the child in exchange for financial concessions from the mother. Although the government three years ago gave the mother the right to keep children until they reach 14 years of age, they are often obliged to surrender them to the father due to lack of money to care for them.
What's more, children themselves often experience trauma when parents divorce. According to al-Gindi, most child beggars and thieves in the country are children of divorced parents. A study by UNICEF released in 2003 showed that 85.5 per cent of child labourers in
According to al-Gindi, cultural and media institutions could help improve the lot of divorced women by contributing to "shaping a new, contemporary image for the social role of women".
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/697a57f42c85cad513ec2504c8a4e206.htm
Well what a surprise this is, NOT…
That the nonsense we see going on throughout western civilization, we can also observe in other societies. It’s pretty clear that when children are not worth any financial resources to men, few men bother with them.
Charles Glass mentioned this in his book “Tribes with Flags” back in the 80s. How he observed everywhere he went throughout the middle east, very young girls working as servers at dinner, maids, etc., and he had wondered where they came from. Kept up to all hours of the night so clearly not going to school in the morning, we now know their origins. From some family with a stingy cheapskate for a father who didn’t want to bother taking care of his kids after a divorce. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to hear that many of these cheapskates even steal their kids wages from them, not even letting them have the money they make for their own use.
AND I guarantee you that if they had the same laws regarding child support in the middle east that we have over here, we would see the same sort of endless custody wars going on there as we have here, with men struggling to avoid paying child support and using every trick in the book to work the system.
AND those who don't want to accept that reality, take it up with God, evolution or mother nature...but quit trying to change public policy to separate mothers from their children.
Monday, April 03, 2006
UNPRINCIPLED MONSTER WHO DESTROYED DOZENS OF MOTHERS AND CHILDRENS’ LIVES FINALLY GETTING JUSTICE METED OUT TO HIM
I’m so glad to hear that Judge Gerald Garson had these charges reinstated against him. This is a little known case of a Judge who destroyed dozens of mothers and childrens’ lives by accepting bribes to rule on custody cases for well-heeled business men in
Although the media tried to spin this situation as gender neutral by digging through the mud of this Judge’s case files and coming up with ONE rabbi who bribed the Judge for his daughter’s case, MOST of these cases were business men bribing Judge Garson to rule agianst a child’s mother so they could get custody for themselves. Many of these men did this to avoid paying guideline child support and/or alimony even though MOST of them were prosperous businessmen who could well afford it.
Thus this monster Gerson ensured that many mothers and childrens’ lives were destroyed through greed for money. AND this situation will NOT be remedied, as the DA in
So in essence, the damage Garson has done will never be rectified.
A fitting sentence for this unprincipled monster would be life in prison for the many mothers and childrens lives he helped descimate.
I will be following this news story closely, so mothers can be kept informed of this case since as we can see below the real story here is being given very little coverage. Another example of media propaganda favoring fathers, just as we saw in the Jerica Rhodes case...keeping the real story on the downlow so mothers don’t really see what’s going on…
ONLINE EDITION
http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/61743.htm
6 CHARGES VS. GARSON REINSTATED
By ALEX GINSBERG and MARSHA KRANES
March 31, 2006 -- Six felony bribery charges tossed out last year against former Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Gerald Garson were reinstated yesterday by the state Court of Appeals.
In a 6-1 decision, the state's highest court overruled an Appellate Division finding that Garson could not be prosecuted for violating the Rules of Judicial Conduct because they are not part of state criminal law.
The appellate ruling had left only one bribery charge and two misdemeanor counts remaining in the grand-jury indictment against Garson.
Five of the restored counts accuse Garson of receiving rewards for official misconduct by taking cash referral fees from matrimonial lawyer Paul Siminovsky.
Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes hailed the ruling, saying, "What Garson is charged with goes to the very dignity of the judiciary."
Garson's lawyer, Ronald Fischetti, said the decision "changes nothing with regard to the innocence of Judge Garson. We intend to go to trial on June 15, and I believe he will be vindicated."
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Thank God Women like this Generally Have No Kids, so at Least they Aren't Spreading the Self Hate to the Next Generation
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So what can we -those of us who recognize the emptiness of typical North American white culture- do to sate that desire for a cultural heritage we can be proud of, for a culture we -as progressives- can identify with? I guess I might need to clarify that I'm talking about something more than not hugging our kids here. I'm talking about the legacy of racism, colonialism, imperialism, genocide etc. And I'm certainly not talking about denying these parts of our past. I'm saying 1.) we have to recognize that part of the price we have incurred for what we have done over the years to our brothers and sisters we categorized as different "races" is that we now have a cultural heritage that is incredibly painful and hurtful and embarrassing (to say the least). And 2.) the way to respond to the realities of our culture and cultural heritage (that range from being spiritually empty and meaningless to a very real alienation from an enormous segment of the human population) is NOT to discover ways to dis-claim/deny our whiteness (find that Cherokee grandmother to erase your guilt) and appropriate other people's cultures/spiritualities but instead to recreate our own culture.
History is not over, folks. We white people do have a horrible past, maybe we have a horrible culture but it's not a finished product.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "barb howe" <http://email.email.secureserver.net/addressBookQuickAdd.php?contact=%22barb+howe%22+%3Cgotasdeagua%40lycos.com%3E>
Date: Fri, Mar 31, 2006 5:10 pm
To: NYMOM <http://email.email.secureserver.net/addressBookQuickAdd.php?contact=NYMOM+%3Cnymom%40womenasmothers.info%3E>
You're a moron.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I posted the following excerpt from Lucky White Girl's blog and her subsequent email to me, not because it has anything to do with women in their roles as mothers, but because it was an interesting case study in how people use the blogosphere to distort reality.
The above woman entered a foolish post on her blog insulting all white people…then when she was righteous put in her place; she began attacking others for bringing attention to the post, instead of accepting responsibility for what she posted, apologizing and then making right what she did wrong. She chose to attack other bloggers claiming they were deliberately misreading her post and it was their fault, not hers.
She even went to the extent of erasing a comment I posted to her telling her that ‘her blog was as whitebread and boring” as she accused most white people of being. She then tried to claim she erased it because she didn’t allow personal insults on her blogs; although as you can see from the above email she sent she obviously started the insults first by calling me a moron.
Personally I loathe people like this. Who leech off the good western civilization has provided the world via our technological and other scientific achievements such as medical and agricultural achievements, transportation advances, communications breakthroughs including the telephone and even the internet, which has made it possible for much of the communication breakthroughs we see today bringing distant communities closer. Blogging inself is a gift from the boring white people that this person hates so much. Not to mention our form of representative government which is the model being sought for use by much of the rest of the world. Instead of celebrating all the good that 'white people' have created as represented by western civilization, instead she reaches back 200 or more years and comes up with an evil practice that every single civilization has lived through: slavery. Every single civilization has participated in this. We are no better and no worse then any other civilization. This person effectively tossed all of our other great achievements out the window labeling an entire race as boring, empty and meaningless...
I have a bi-racial grand daughter and I wish her to grow up being proud of BOTH of her heritages, not just one. As this racial bigot would like to see happen by being allowed to put out posts claiming white people steal other's culture because ours is so boring and empty...
Actually next week is Tartan Week in New York City and I'm going to bring my bi-racial grand daughter to an event where she can listen to some scottish music, see men dance in a kilt and dance herself in one I got her last month...because she has a heritage of Scotch-Irish/English and African-American roots. Hopefully I won't run into a hate-filled bigot there like this woman making comments about how people shouldn't be trying to 'steal' other people's cultures...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So what can we -those of us who recognize the emptiness of typical North American white culture- do to sate that desire for a cultural heritage we can be proud of, for a culture we -as progressives- can identify with? I guess I might need to clarify that I'm talking about something more than not hugging our kids here. I'm talking about the legacy of racism, colonialism, imperialism, genocide etc. And I'm certainly not talking about denying these parts of our past. I'm saying 1.) we have to recognize that part of the price we have incurred for what we have done over the years to our brothers and sisters we categorized as different "races" is that we now have a cultural heritage that is incredibly painful and hurtful and embarrassing (to say the least). And 2.) the way to respond to the realities of our culture and cultural heritage (that range from being spiritually empty and meaningless to a very real alienation from an enormous segment of the human population) is NOT to discover ways to dis-claim/deny our whiteness (find that Cherokee grandmother to erase your guilt) and appropriate other people's cultures/spiritualities but instead to recreate our own culture.
History is not over, folks. We white people do have a horrible past, maybe we have a horrible culture but it's not a finished product.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Everytime you post on this blog or make a cell phone call or use a microwave, drive a car, etc., you are benefitting from 'white's people's culture' or whatever you want to call it.
You should be damn grateful for it's existence.
From: "barb howe" <http://email.email.secureserver.net/addressBookQuickAdd.php?contact=%22barb+howe%22+%3Cgotasdeagua%40lycos.com%3E>
Date: Fri, Mar 31, 2006 5:10 pm
To: NYMOM <http://email.email.secureserver.net/addressBookQuickAdd.php?contact=NYMOM+%3Cnymom%40womenasmothers.info%3E>
You're a moron.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I posted the following excerpt from Lucky White Girl's blog and her subsequent email to me, not because it has anything to do with women in their roles as mothers, but because it was an interesting case study in how people use the blogosphere to distort reality.
The above woman entered a foolish post on her blog insulting all white people…then when she was righteous put in her place; she began attacking others for bringing attention to the post, instead of accepting responsibility for what she posted, apologizing and then making right what she did wrong. She chose to attack other bloggers claiming they were deliberately misreading her post and it was their fault, not hers.
She even went to the extent of erasing a comment I posted to her telling her that ‘her blog was as whitebread and boring” as she accused most white people of being. She then tried to claim she erased it because she didn’t allow personal insults on her blogs; although as you can see from the above email she sent she obviously started the insults first by calling me a moron.
Personally I loathe people like this. Who leech off the good western civilization has provided the world via our technological and other scientific achievements such as medical and agricultural achievements, transportation advances, communications breakthroughs including the telephone and even the internet, which has made it possible for much of the communication breakthroughs we see today bringing distant communities closer. Blogging inself is a gift from the boring white people that this person hates so much. Not to mention our form of representative government which is the model being sought for use by much of the rest of the world. Instead of celebrating all the good that 'white people' have created as represented by western civilization, instead she reaches back 200 or more years and comes up with an evil practice that every single civilization has lived through: slavery. Every single civilization has participated in this. We are no better and no worse then any other civilization. This person effectively tossed all of our other great achievements out the window labeling an entire race as boring, empty and meaningless...
I have a bi-racial grand daughter and I wish her to grow up being proud of BOTH of her heritages, not just one. As this racial bigot would like to see happen by being allowed to put out posts claiming white people steal other's culture because ours is so boring and empty...
Actually next week is Tartan Week in New York City and I'm going to bring my bi-racial grand daughter to an event where she can listen to some scottish music, see men dance in a kilt and dance herself in one I got her last month...because she has a heritage of Scotch-Irish/English and African-American roots. Hopefully I won't run into a hate-filled bigot there like this woman making comments about how people shouldn't be trying to 'steal' other people's cultures...
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Interesting Discussion I Posted from Another Site Regarding the Ongoing Debate on a NYS Presumptive Joint Parenting Plan
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Name: NYMOM
Subject: Re: Online Child Support Petition Sent
Tue, Mar 28 2006
Message:
Hi. I posed my message too soon in the previous post, but in essense it was saying that I sent the online child support petition Friday of last week.
I sent it to Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer, both NY senators. It's an interesting time to send it too since NY is currently fighting over a Joint Custody bill in Albany.
Let's see what happens with this.
Name: Mxx xx xxx xxxxx
Subject: NYMOM I have a question....
Wed, Mar 29 2006
Message:
On the flip side of this bill, Do you think that everyone being awarded joint custody will eliminate constant post divorce issues and litigations? (Personally I dont think it will) IMHO unless you have joint custody with slip residential someone will be the residential parent and having a residential parent and one who is non-residential will mirror many of the same problems existing under the current system, no?
In other words the parent with residential has the child the lions share of the time and the non-residential parent, unless they are dealing with a bio parent who truely cooperates with Co-parenting, will still be subjected to the same controlling issues.
Maybe I am way off, I just dont see it as a fix for woman. With or without this law the fathers rights movement will continue to move foward and instead of fathers having Sole legal custody with residential they will prob be awarded joint legal with residential.
Will this bill, if passed reform the support system? If so how? You have to agree that co-parenting can be a nightmare when most couples do not get along, even for the remaining time they are raising their children.
A joint custody bill can not stop the residential parent from relocating away from, lets just say the non-residential mother, if the father can prove that this move is necesary and in the best interests, no?
Again, maybe I am wrong. I am skeptical, forgive me, but it comes from seeing how the courts only support 1 thing....and thats the courts themselves and not the people who turn to them.
Even if I was still a NC mother I would still have concerns because no matter what is passed I think that the non-residential parent is still going to have many of the same problems. I dont mean to be a devils advocate but I know you have done much research on this topic and I just wanted to ask a few questions and maybe with your insite you can help me understand.
I wonder who will benifit most from a joint custody bill since most of the current orders now have the mother having sole custody. That would mean an awful large percent of Sole custody mothers would have that taken from them, giving their ex husbands joint legal/non residential custody. Wouldnt that just put those men 1 step closer to being able to remove the children from the mothers residential care.
We know that there is a money play giving men power to fight woman in court because most mothers make less then their husbands and once divorced, even with support coming in, most sole custody residential mom's struggle to make ends meet and their ex's have more resourses to litigate them to no end.
Maybe I mis-understood the bill, I don't have so much time these days to really read into it, perhaps you can give me some insite.
Name: NYMOM
Subject: Response to Questions - Part I
Thu, Mar 30 2006
Message:
Hi. Thanks for the important questions.
First of all New York (and I think every state) has both Sole and some form of Joint Legal/Physical custody already. Also, I understand that Joint Legal Custody can be equivalent to Sole Custody for the parent being named primary or residential custodian.
I understand that fully.
YET this is something different from what is being proposed now in NYS.
What is being proposed in NY actually has the potential to eliminate even an appearance/ruling from a Judge, as unless abuse or neglect is involved, every family heading to litigate custody is going to be automatically signed up for a joint parenting plan. Thus the ONLY issue to settle is the details of the parenting plan: ie., who gets weekends or days/nights etc., to care for the children.
If it gets approved I eventually foresee, three, maybe four parenting plans being available to the general public and your only choice will be which one of those to pick from and use for your own family...
Of course, I understand that assholes exist. AND most of the women on here might be dealing with those few who will continue trying to undermine and subvert every plan ever made to cut down on litigation YET we must think of what works for MOST of the people. As we can't tailor every policy and law for a few assholes.
Name: NYMOM
Subject: Re: Response to Questions - Part II
Thu, Mar 30 2006
Message:
Regarding most women getting Sole custody already and how this will impact them. This was my only reservation.
Which was basically the assumption that mothers w/o custody are the exception and the mothers with sole custody are the rule. So why hurt the majority of mothers and children to help a small group?
However, that sort of thinking is wrong as non-custodial mothers are just the tip of an iceberg, which if NOT stopped here and now will grow and spread and eventually impact every other mother and child in this country and many others as we lead many other countries by example.
Actually few mothers get sole custody through the courts today. The numbers look high when they are thrown together but breaking them out shows a far different and much more menacing picture to mothers.
Remember generally when they throw that 85% of mothers have sole custody figure out, they are including 20 something years of data from a time when most mothers did get sole custody (in the 80s). Going forward and just including the last 5/10 years of data, the numbers look very different. Plus they don't include within those numbers the 5 million grandparents (many of them paternal grandparents) who have custody of children.
Thus, going forward mothers face a very real threat of losing custody of their children if something is not done to stop this.
Mothers, of course, should have their rights to their children unchallenged under natural law...YET we must deal with the reality which is those rights are only given to us legally today through the courts of men...and in those courts the mother/child bond is not respected or even acknowledged. We are viewed as just another litigant of no more importance in our childrens' lives then a teacher, a grandparent or a friendly neighbor...
So, it's NOT just a small group of non-custodial mothers at issue here, but an ongoing attempt to delegitimatize EVERY mother, those with custody as well as those without. Moreover, it's an attempt to roll back all of the rights women have won, by holding our children hostage if we don't go along with the program.
I mean you yourself can see how much of your life and resources were expended in this years long custody fight for your daughters. How much different would your life have been if this has NOT been permitted to happen to you????
Name: NYMOM
Subject: Re: Re: Response to Questions - Part III
Thu, Mar 30 2006
Message:
Actually it winded up quite accidentally being the perfect time to submit the online child support petition when this joint parenting bill is being debated. As one big fear in NY was how would child support be paid to offset the cost of welfare for parent who are awarded this joint parenting?
So the Colonna vs. Colonna ruling can solve this problem. As it awards child support taking disparities in income into account not who has more parenting time.
Many men claim this is not about money but about spending time with their children. So fine...they can both spend time with their children YET still pay child support if there are disparities in income between them and the child's mother.
Interestingly enough the Colonna vs. Colonna ruling came about due to a man who was virtually a millionaire trying to avoid paying child support. YET he will impact many low income men, whose childrens' mothers are on welfare, causing them to have joint custody YET these men must still pay child support.
Ironic.
NOw, I do not imagine that this solution will settle EVERY problem regarding custody of children...but it will solve many of them...
Actually I have a feeling many mens' rights representatives see the same thing as many complained in CA when similar measures were taken. Saying that men would be discouraged from picking up their children; if there were no financial incentive for them in having Joint Custody...
Name: Mxx xx xxx xxx
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Response to Questions - Part III
Fri, Mar 31 2006
Message:
Thankyou for such a great resonce!
I have to tell you, from where I sit it is all very scary. I am not afraid to admit being a little paranoid because even after I have won custody back I look back on the yrs it took for me to get where I finally sit today and to think of how much CPS let slide and even when CPS finally indicated the wost case of abuse (overlooking othertimes) the courts KNEW and all they did to my ex was restrain him from moving outside the county.
The court knew what was going on but needed to drag the whole "investigation" out over the course of 2 yrs while those kids were sitting ducks in the same house with their abusive step mother. All the step mother did, once under the watchful eye of the law guardian, was revert from the physical abuse back to what she was originally doing to the kids, emotionally abusing them.
All I can work with is what I know from what I personally have been through, and I am sure there are kids out there living in conditions even worse then mine were in and the thought of that rips my heart out, but I have seen how far CPS and the courts let abuse go before they actually remove kids.
There is whre my fear comes from, what will be considered abuse, I mean I know a grown woman whos mother use to burn her skin with a cigarett when she was little, what will the courts see as abuse?? How abused do kids have to be?
What about all the emotionally abused kids who are being subjected to PAS, look at all the children out there who have been or are being brain washed by one parent. Where will the line be drawn. Is the 1 indicated abuse against my kids step mother, with a recomendation that the children nmot be left alone in her care be enough to keep my ex from regaining joint legal as long as the kids reside with me?
Do you know the nightmare for someone in my shoes if someone like my ex is given equal decision making? The man has gone out of his way from day 1, and continues to do back flips, to make my life and simple things as difficult as he can. This whole divorce thing, I would not wish it one even an enemy, it has been nothing but a heartacke, not just from my standpoint but for my children, it has forever changed their lifes and the way they see the world. I have so little faith in a system that makes court orders but never enforces them.
I cant even get my ex to pay his child support and they are letting him drag me into court dozens of times because as he sees it he has a ton of rights and he wants to punish me for taking away his children.
I hope that they reform more then just parenting plans, that they make the system stricter with enforments for those who refuse to comply. If they dont overhaul more then the custody stuff things will always be difficult because like you said, so many men are big erning asses... Thanks again for all your help,
Name: NYMOM
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Response to Questions - Part III
Fri, Mar 31 2006
Message:
Your ex won't be eligible for this Joint Parenting as it's only for families w/o a history abuse or neglect. So the one founded report will eliminate him...
At least that's my interpretation...
Anyway by the time the kinks get worked out of this law, at least your oldest will probably be 18...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just to let other mothers know who might have similar questions that no plan, law or public policy is going to solve 100% of your problems, especially if you had kids with a world class, 24th carat, abusive asshole...that one-step plan doesn't exist and never will. Well actually it does exist, but we live in a civilized society where the 'one-step guaranted plan to get rid of an abusive asshole' is illegal.
Sorry.
BUT as ex President Clinton once said (and actually this is the ONLY useful idea I feel he contributed for the whole eight years he was in office) "Just because we can't do EVERYTHING doesn't mean we can't do ANYTHING"...
So no, this presumptive Joint Parenting idea is not going to solve EVERY problem, but it can solve many of the common (man/woman's) everyday family issues...
Thus, it will work for many of us but not all.
Again sorry, but as I said previously we can't tailor every law, plan, family policy. etc., to cater to the small group of abusive assholes who exist. It's just not fair to the 99% of the rest of us parents out there.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Name: NYMOM
Subject: Re: Online Child Support Petition Sent
Tue, Mar 28 2006
Message:
Hi. I posed my message too soon in the previous post, but in essense it was saying that I sent the online child support petition Friday of last week.
I sent it to Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer, both NY senators. It's an interesting time to send it too since NY is currently fighting over a Joint Custody bill in Albany.
Let's see what happens with this.
Name: Mxx xx xxx xxxxx
Subject: NYMOM I have a question....
Wed, Mar 29 2006
Message:
On the flip side of this bill, Do you think that everyone being awarded joint custody will eliminate constant post divorce issues and litigations? (Personally I dont think it will) IMHO unless you have joint custody with slip residential someone will be the residential parent and having a residential parent and one who is non-residential will mirror many of the same problems existing under the current system, no?
In other words the parent with residential has the child the lions share of the time and the non-residential parent, unless they are dealing with a bio parent who truely cooperates with Co-parenting, will still be subjected to the same controlling issues.
Maybe I am way off, I just dont see it as a fix for woman. With or without this law the fathers rights movement will continue to move foward and instead of fathers having Sole legal custody with residential they will prob be awarded joint legal with residential.
Will this bill, if passed reform the support system? If so how? You have to agree that co-parenting can be a nightmare when most couples do not get along, even for the remaining time they are raising their children.
A joint custody bill can not stop the residential parent from relocating away from, lets just say the non-residential mother, if the father can prove that this move is necesary and in the best interests, no?
Again, maybe I am wrong. I am skeptical, forgive me, but it comes from seeing how the courts only support 1 thing....and thats the courts themselves and not the people who turn to them.
Even if I was still a NC mother I would still have concerns because no matter what is passed I think that the non-residential parent is still going to have many of the same problems. I dont mean to be a devils advocate but I know you have done much research on this topic and I just wanted to ask a few questions and maybe with your insite you can help me understand.
I wonder who will benifit most from a joint custody bill since most of the current orders now have the mother having sole custody. That would mean an awful large percent of Sole custody mothers would have that taken from them, giving their ex husbands joint legal/non residential custody. Wouldnt that just put those men 1 step closer to being able to remove the children from the mothers residential care.
We know that there is a money play giving men power to fight woman in court because most mothers make less then their husbands and once divorced, even with support coming in, most sole custody residential mom's struggle to make ends meet and their ex's have more resourses to litigate them to no end.
Maybe I mis-understood the bill, I don't have so much time these days to really read into it, perhaps you can give me some insite.
Name: NYMOM
Subject: Response to Questions - Part I
Thu, Mar 30 2006
Message:
Hi. Thanks for the important questions.
First of all New York (and I think every state) has both Sole and some form of Joint Legal/Physical custody already. Also, I understand that Joint Legal Custody can be equivalent to Sole Custody for the parent being named primary or residential custodian.
I understand that fully.
YET this is something different from what is being proposed now in NYS.
What is being proposed in NY actually has the potential to eliminate even an appearance/ruling from a Judge, as unless abuse or neglect is involved, every family heading to litigate custody is going to be automatically signed up for a joint parenting plan. Thus the ONLY issue to settle is the details of the parenting plan: ie., who gets weekends or days/nights etc., to care for the children.
If it gets approved I eventually foresee, three, maybe four parenting plans being available to the general public and your only choice will be which one of those to pick from and use for your own family...
Of course, I understand that assholes exist. AND most of the women on here might be dealing with those few who will continue trying to undermine and subvert every plan ever made to cut down on litigation YET we must think of what works for MOST of the people. As we can't tailor every policy and law for a few assholes.
Name: NYMOM
Subject: Re: Response to Questions - Part II
Thu, Mar 30 2006
Message:
Regarding most women getting Sole custody already and how this will impact them. This was my only reservation.
Which was basically the assumption that mothers w/o custody are the exception and the mothers with sole custody are the rule. So why hurt the majority of mothers and children to help a small group?
However, that sort of thinking is wrong as non-custodial mothers are just the tip of an iceberg, which if NOT stopped here and now will grow and spread and eventually impact every other mother and child in this country and many others as we lead many other countries by example.
Actually few mothers get sole custody through the courts today. The numbers look high when they are thrown together but breaking them out shows a far different and much more menacing picture to mothers.
Remember generally when they throw that 85% of mothers have sole custody figure out, they are including 20 something years of data from a time when most mothers did get sole custody (in the 80s). Going forward and just including the last 5/10 years of data, the numbers look very different. Plus they don't include within those numbers the 5 million grandparents (many of them paternal grandparents) who have custody of children.
Thus, going forward mothers face a very real threat of losing custody of their children if something is not done to stop this.
Mothers, of course, should have their rights to their children unchallenged under natural law...YET we must deal with the reality which is those rights are only given to us legally today through the courts of men...and in those courts the mother/child bond is not respected or even acknowledged. We are viewed as just another litigant of no more importance in our childrens' lives then a teacher, a grandparent or a friendly neighbor...
So, it's NOT just a small group of non-custodial mothers at issue here, but an ongoing attempt to delegitimatize EVERY mother, those with custody as well as those without. Moreover, it's an attempt to roll back all of the rights women have won, by holding our children hostage if we don't go along with the program.
I mean you yourself can see how much of your life and resources were expended in this years long custody fight for your daughters. How much different would your life have been if this has NOT been permitted to happen to you????
Name: NYMOM
Subject: Re: Re: Response to Questions - Part III
Thu, Mar 30 2006
Message:
Actually it winded up quite accidentally being the perfect time to submit the online child support petition when this joint parenting bill is being debated. As one big fear in NY was how would child support be paid to offset the cost of welfare for parent who are awarded this joint parenting?
So the Colonna vs. Colonna ruling can solve this problem. As it awards child support taking disparities in income into account not who has more parenting time.
Many men claim this is not about money but about spending time with their children. So fine...they can both spend time with their children YET still pay child support if there are disparities in income between them and the child's mother.
Interestingly enough the Colonna vs. Colonna ruling came about due to a man who was virtually a millionaire trying to avoid paying child support. YET he will impact many low income men, whose childrens' mothers are on welfare, causing them to have joint custody YET these men must still pay child support.
Ironic.
NOw, I do not imagine that this solution will settle EVERY problem regarding custody of children...but it will solve many of them...
Actually I have a feeling many mens' rights representatives see the same thing as many complained in CA when similar measures were taken. Saying that men would be discouraged from picking up their children; if there were no financial incentive for them in having Joint Custody...
Name: Mxx xx xxx xxx
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Response to Questions - Part III
Fri, Mar 31 2006
Message:
Thankyou for such a great resonce!
I have to tell you, from where I sit it is all very scary. I am not afraid to admit being a little paranoid because even after I have won custody back I look back on the yrs it took for me to get where I finally sit today and to think of how much CPS let slide and even when CPS finally indicated the wost case of abuse (overlooking othertimes) the courts KNEW and all they did to my ex was restrain him from moving outside the county.
The court knew what was going on but needed to drag the whole "investigation" out over the course of 2 yrs while those kids were sitting ducks in the same house with their abusive step mother. All the step mother did, once under the watchful eye of the law guardian, was revert from the physical abuse back to what she was originally doing to the kids, emotionally abusing them.
All I can work with is what I know from what I personally have been through, and I am sure there are kids out there living in conditions even worse then mine were in and the thought of that rips my heart out, but I have seen how far CPS and the courts let abuse go before they actually remove kids.
There is whre my fear comes from, what will be considered abuse, I mean I know a grown woman whos mother use to burn her skin with a cigarett when she was little, what will the courts see as abuse?? How abused do kids have to be?
What about all the emotionally abused kids who are being subjected to PAS, look at all the children out there who have been or are being brain washed by one parent. Where will the line be drawn. Is the 1 indicated abuse against my kids step mother, with a recomendation that the children nmot be left alone in her care be enough to keep my ex from regaining joint legal as long as the kids reside with me?
Do you know the nightmare for someone in my shoes if someone like my ex is given equal decision making? The man has gone out of his way from day 1, and continues to do back flips, to make my life and simple things as difficult as he can. This whole divorce thing, I would not wish it one even an enemy, it has been nothing but a heartacke, not just from my standpoint but for my children, it has forever changed their lifes and the way they see the world. I have so little faith in a system that makes court orders but never enforces them.
I cant even get my ex to pay his child support and they are letting him drag me into court dozens of times because as he sees it he has a ton of rights and he wants to punish me for taking away his children.
I hope that they reform more then just parenting plans, that they make the system stricter with enforments for those who refuse to comply. If they dont overhaul more then the custody stuff things will always be difficult because like you said, so many men are big erning asses... Thanks again for all your help,
Name: NYMOM
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Response to Questions - Part III
Fri, Mar 31 2006
Message:
Your ex won't be eligible for this Joint Parenting as it's only for families w/o a history abuse or neglect. So the one founded report will eliminate him...
At least that's my interpretation...
Anyway by the time the kinks get worked out of this law, at least your oldest will probably be 18...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Just to let other mothers know who might have similar questions that no plan, law or public policy is going to solve 100% of your problems, especially if you had kids with a world class, 24th carat, abusive asshole...that one-step plan doesn't exist and never will. Well actually it does exist, but we live in a civilized society where the 'one-step guaranted plan to get rid of an abusive asshole' is illegal.
Sorry.
BUT as ex President Clinton once said (and actually this is the ONLY useful idea I feel he contributed for the whole eight years he was in office) "Just because we can't do EVERYTHING doesn't mean we can't do ANYTHING"...
So no, this presumptive Joint Parenting idea is not going to solve EVERY problem, but it can solve many of the common (man/woman's) everyday family issues...
Thus, it will work for many of us but not all.
Again sorry, but as I said previously we can't tailor every law, plan, family policy. etc., to cater to the small group of abusive assholes who exist. It's just not fair to the 99% of the rest of us parents out there.
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