Category: Blog

December 23, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

A recent appellate court decision in Kentucky casts doubt on the future of parental rights for unmarried same-sex partners.

Teri Whitehouse and Tammie Delaney were partners. The mutually agreed that Delaney would become pregnant via a sperm donor.

In her Circuit Court ruling, Judge McDonald had found that Teri Whitehouse and Tammie Delaney were in a romantic relationship and both fully participated in the decision to have a child, jointly chose a sperm donor, and held themselves out to the public as the child’s parents. The women had a commitment ceremony after the birth of the child, who referred to Whitehouse as “Momma.”

So Delaney was biologically related to the child, but Whitehouse was not. On that slender reed, Whitehouse was ruled to have no parental rights to custody or parenting time.

A previous Kentucky case, Mullins vs. Pickelsimer, established that, in unmarried same-sex relationships, the person with no biological connection to the child has no parental rights unless the other person’s behavior constitutes a waiver of his/her rights to exclusive custody and 100% parenting time.

In other words, Mullins leans strongly toward a biological parent’s having full parental rights while the other person has none. Although the trial court judge ruled that Whitehouse had done enough to establish the waiver on Delany’s part, the appellate court disagreed, giving sole custody to Delaney.

Now, to say the least, Mullins looks like an odd duck. How it makes sense for a child to be denied the love and care of one person because she doesn’t (a) have a biological relationship with the child and (b) the biological parent managed to thwart the other’s efforts at parenting is a mystery insoluble by me. After all, plenty of people – adoptive parents, stepparents – who raise kids don’t have a biological relationship to them.

But what most strikes me is the elephant in the room – Kentucky’s passage of a law that presumes equal parenting to be in the best interests of children. It says nothing about the sex of the parents or distinguishes between same-sex and opposite-sex relationships. And of course it says nothing about married vs. unmarried parents. Its purpose is to establish in law the importance of children having meaningful relationships with the adults who brought them into the world and who care for them. The child in the Delaney-Whiteside case called Whiteside “Momma,” doubtless because she saw her that way. That the appellate court disagrees shouldn’t be what decides the child’s ability to maintain a relationship with the woman she considers one of her parents.

I fully understand that it’s at least theoretically possible that a same-sex couple could produce a child and the non-biological parent could simply move on and, at some later date, demand parental rights. It would be appropriate in such a case to deny him/her. But Whiteside clearly wasn’t one of those people. At least the child didn’t think so.

Clearly, it’s the policy of the State of Kentucky to back equal parenting of children. This case and Mullins are at odds with that policy and should be reviewed in light of it.

December 21, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Leave it to The Guardian to make the domestic violence situation worse, not better (The Guardian, 12/4/18). The type of virulent misandry on parade in the linked-to piece belongs in the ash heap of history, but The Guardian is nothing if not a throwback to older, less-informed times. It’s one of the troglodytes of the British press, the only silver lining to the cloud being that its readership has declined for years until today it’s next to nothing.

The article’s premise is that men commit domestic violence, women don’t, women are victims, men aren’t and therefore, the only way to reduce the incidence of DV is for men to be, well, different.

“Because domestic violence is a man’s problem,” [actor Patrick] Stewart tells me before the event. “We are the ones who are committing the offences, performing the cruel acts, controlling and denying. It’s the men.”

That of course is simply false. Indeed, I think it’s not too much to call it a lie on Stewart’s part. A lie is something one states as true knowing it not to be. Of course it’s possible that Stewart is so profoundly ignorant of his topic that he knows none of the data on the subject, none of the studies, none of the sets of statistics compiled yearly by governmental and other organizations. But I doubt it. I think he knows and is riding the horse named Misandry for other reasons. Would The Guardian publish his remarks if he told the truth?

Ryan and Luke Hart, themselves apparently victims of their father’s violence, have taken to speaking publicly about DV.

“I’d like to talk to more men, but there isn’t that forum,” says Luke. “Men still don’t understand the problems well enough and they don’t come to hear.”

It’s always amusing to hear a person who doesn’t understand the problem excoriate others for not understanding the problem. Why does he believe men don’t understand the problem when he doesn’t interact with them? The one man Ryan cites who did attend one of their appearances made a valid point.

Ryan adds, with a wry smile: “Recently, one man from the handful in the audience had only come to say: ‘Yeah, but what about all the male victims?”

Indeed, what about them? Alas, that’s almost the last we hear about male victims in The Guardian’s lengthy piece.

For that matter, what about the female perpetrators? They’re a no-show too. Neither male victims nor female perpetrators have any place in The Guardian’s narrative and that of course is why that narrative stands to make the DV situation worse, not better.

The facts about DV in the English-speaking world are no longer subject to serious dispute. Men and women commit DV equally and women are more likely to initiate violence than are men. Last year’s data out of Canada show that women committed about 55% of the intimate partner violence, and that lesbian relationships reported about twice the incidence of DV that heterosexual relationships did and over three times that of gay male relationships. Women tend to be more controlling in their intimate relationships than are men. And we shouldn’t forget the kids who are all too often the victims of their parents’ violence. Mothers commit twice the abuse and neglect of children that fathers do. That’s seldom called DV, but that’s what it is.

Amazingly, the article pulls exactly that sleight of hand regarding adult violence.

Another campaigning voice in this wilderness is David Challen, the son of Sally Challen, who killed her controlling husband in Surrey in 2010 and is serving a life sentence for murder. 

See what I mean? He was “controlling,” she murdered him, so who gets the sympathy? And who, by extension is the perpetrator of DV? We already know the answers? The dead man was the perpetrator because “We are the ones who are committing the offences, performing the cruel acts, controlling and denying. It’s the men.” What could be clearer? Men are never victims and when they are, they aren’t. Simple.

The DV establishment likes things just the way they are. The idea that we might actually take steps to ameliorate the problem of domestic violence has always been an anathema to DV activists. They all too often sideline real issues in favor of an anti-male narrative that then finds voice in rags like The Guardian.

Here are some basic facts: men and women are equally violent in domestic settings. They’re usually that way because their families were that way when they were growing up. DV is a learned thing and as such, it can be unlearned. Mental health professionals are now pretty adept at providing the help that’s needed to unlearn the behavior and the mindset that assumes that violence is an acceptable response to domestic issues.

But of course none of that can happen as long as the DV establishment’s narrative of male corruption and female innocence holds sway. As long as it does, where does a female perpetrator go to get help for her problem? Where does a male victim go? Who would believe him if he did pipe up?

We now teach that DV is perpetrated by men and the only way to get them to change is to acquaint them with their need to control women through violence and, armed with that wisdom, in some way, change. That none of that is true in the overwhelming majority of DV cases bothers DV activists and publications that channel their false narrative not at all.

As I said, they like things just the way they are and, having garnered the lion’s share of public discourse on the subject of DV, they’re not about to change or to let facts get in the way of their funding sources. Then, having blocked the road of salutary change, they can then shout to the world “See? There’s still an epidemic of DV!”

When will someone point out that, if the problem is still a serious one and the DV
establishment’s been in charge of solving it for over 40 years, maybe it’s time for a change of direction?

December 20, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

It’s a truism that bad facts make bad law and nothing reaffirms it like this case (Express, 12/7/18).

A judge in England has ruled that a child may be adopted without ever letting the father know of its existence. The reason? Dad’s a bad person.

Now, Dad was only 14 years old when he had sex with a girl he’d met at school. She was 13. She says she didn’t know she was pregnant until she went into labor. Whatever the case, Dad doesn’t know he has a child and, according to Judge Cohen, he never will.

The facts are worse than that, though.

“In particular, [the mother] is convinced that the father will harass her and her family. The combination of factors does not make it appropriate for the father to be informed.”

The father has abused drugs and alcohol, is permanently excluded from school and is the subject of 15 police child concern reports.

In short, this kid seems to be a bad actor. My guess is that he himself doesn’t have a father in his life. Being “permanently excluded from school” pretty clearly means that he’s anti-social and likely on a one-way path toward prison. I can’t envision a situation in which he could provide a healthy family atmosphere for a child. Terminating his parental rights and placing the child for adoption look like the best solution to this regrettable situation.

But…

The idea that the way to accomplish that is to simply ignore his parental rights and keep him and his family in complete ignorance about his daughter is an outrage. I’m not the only one who thinks so.

But leading social commentator Caroline Farrow said the ruling “smacks of state overreach”.

She added: “I am extremely uneasy with this decision.

“Just as every single human being has the right to discover their biological parentage, so too do individuals have the right to know that they have fathered a child.

That last of course is not true. The idea that men “have the right to know that they have fathered a child” is simply false. It has no basis in American law and I’ve never seen it asserted in British law. Perhaps she means that, in adoption cases, fathers are to be informed. But as a general principle and in most adoption cases, mothers can decide to keep Dad in the dark forever if they choose. No legal consequences attend their doing so. None.

Of course, if Mom chooses to withhold knowledge of a child from Dad and later decides she needs his money, she can, at any time file suit for child support and, no questions asked, get it. That can happen when little Andy or Jenny is one month old or 18 years old. Dad’s rights are firmly in Mom’s hands.

Judge Cohen’s ruling is scary. To say that it’s a slippery slope is to understate the matter considerably. How many other mothers might be willing to call the father of their child a drug and alcohol abuser? How many fathers have a criminal record? How many mothers might say they’re nervous about Dad knowing about his child?

The answers are obvious. What’s apparently true about this minor father is true of countless other men and boys. Are they now to be denied any knowledge of their progeny? Under this judge’s reasoning, I don’t see why not.

In a coda to the Express article, Dr. Alan Mendoza makes the point.

But this is no isolated case. It is a microcosm of broken Britain.

Towns long forgotten by those elected to Westminster have faced more than gradual decline in recent years.

There are places where unemployment is the norm and deprivation is endemic.

Nowhere is this truer than the North-east, where this saga is thought to have taken place. This proud region bore the brunt of economic change wrought by the collapse of British manufacturing, and was then condemned to stagnation as the Blair Government built a benefits system that made some people worse off for working.

In short, there are countless fathers just like the one under discussion.

There’s a lot of sentiment abroad these days for the diminution of due process of law. We’ve been fighting the battle for due process of law for at least 4,000 years when the presumption of innocence in criminal cases first made its appearance in the Code of Hamurabi. Beyond all reason, we still are. In this case, a judge suspended the father’s due process rights just because he wanted to.

Due process would have meant informing the father that he has a child. He would then have the opportunity to claim his parental rights. If he’s as bad a person as he appears, terminating those rights and finalizing the adoption would proceed apace. Whether he is or isn’t though, he’d have the chance to prove his case, which is much the point of due process. If, as I suspect would happen, he chose not to assert his rights, then the adoption would proceed.

But a judge ruling by fiat that a father can’t know about his child because of past bad behavior, indeed is a case of judicial overreach. It’s an outrage that should find no support in civilized society.

December 19, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The way-past-its-sell-by-date comedy, Saturday Night Live, has recently outraged fathers and those who care about them everywhere with two of its skits.  And the estimable Barbara Kay doesn’t like it one bit (National Post, 12/18/18).  The two pieces were so bad that the usually restrained Kay called the first one “an act of vile misandry.”  Just so.

Here’s her description of the piece:

The skit begins with two adolescent children enjoying a warm and festive Christmas with their mature, beautifully groomed and loving divorced mom. Then they are shown in an alternate Christmas scenario — with “Christmas Dad,” i.e. an allegedly generic divorced father.

Christmas Dad lives in a sad-looking home somewhere in interior Florida (wink wink: deplorables territory). The kids arrive to find a bimbo in residence, introduced only by her first name. Both she and Dad chain-smoke in the house. The kids are unhappy, expressing longing for the “rules” their mother imposes. If ever a comedy routine was written to bludgeon its audience with contempt for an identifiable group, this is it.

Nice.

What’s all the more remarkable is that, having received such a backlash against Anti-Dad Skit No. 1 SNL pulled it from their YouTube account, they came up with Anti-Dad Skit No. 2.  Kay describes ADS2 this way:

It wasn’t long before SNL was back at it again with yet more male mockery. Last weekend’s show featured a skit, the Westminster Daddy Show, in which “daddies” — i.e. sugar daddies, divorced men in their 40s and 50s who trade their prestige or wealth for sexual access to younger women — are portrayed as show dogs, and judged according to their daddy attractiveness. There’s Golf Daddy and Tweedy Daddy and Wall Street Business Daddy, whose fat billfold is fingered with approval by the female judge. The winner — “Best in Show” — turns out to be “Pedigree Broadcast Daddy,” played by show host Matt Damon.

That’s particularly despicable of Damon who certainly doesn’t need the money or the face time.  Damon needs to be more careful about the roles he chooses.  Either that or he needs to become “woke” to the realities of fatherhood in the U.S.

I’m all for comedy.  It’s necessary leavening to the tedium of everyday life.  But there’s a fundamental law of comedy – don’t hit someone when they’re down.  It’s just not funny.  We don’t mock disabled people for that very reason and we shouldn’t mock divorced dads.  Anyone with a clue about the realities of divorce and child custody for fathers would know that simple truth.  So I suppose that lets us know the level of ignorance of SNL writers.

And of course “down” is exactly where fathers, particularly divorced ones, are in this society.  They’re about as low as anyone can get.  Indeed, society, pop culture and the law miss no opportunity to let fathers of all sorts know just how unimportant, how despised a class, they are.

Whatever your stance on abortion, its unambiguous message to fathers is “you don’t matter.”  Do you passionately want a child?  Too bad, you have no say.  Do you passionately not want a child?  Too bad, you have no say.  How much clearer does it have to be?

Should a man father a child, he has no right to even know of its existence.  No law anywhere imposes the obligation on mothers to simply inform the father of their children that little Andy or Jenny has come into the world.  And in the U.K. at least, a majority of mothers think Dad should have no role in raising his own offspring.

All states have Baby Moses laws that allow parents to abandon children at fire or police stations, hospitals, etc. consequence free within a certain time after its birth.  But that right is extended only to mothers in 44 of those states.

The Supreme Court has said unequivocally that fathers have parental rights, but the exercise of those rights is routinely placed not in his hands, but in hers.  If she wants to tell him about his child, she can; if she doesn’t she doesn’t have to.  So much for his rights, but what about his obligations?  Mom can bring those into being any time she wants simply by demanding child support.  She’ll get it too even though she denied him his right to form a relationship with his child.

Does Mom want to place little Andy or Jenny for adoption?  She can and most states won’t require her to reveal Dad’s identity.  If she says she doesn’t know who the father is, in those states that’s all that’s required to remove him from the adoption process.

Does Mom abuse the child?  If so and CPS learns of it, the child may be taken into foster care.  Why foster care and not father care?  Because CPS agencies routinely ignore fathers as possible placements for their abused kids.  Yes, one federal circuit has ruled that failing to notify Dad constitutes a violation of his civil rights, but the practice continues unabated.

Then of course there’s child support.  Child support calculations bear little resemblance to what it actually costs to raise a child.  Daily we read about “child support” orders for tens of thousands of dollars per month.  That’s flagrantly Mom support, but let anyone raise the issue and he’s shouted down as someone who – you guessed it – doesn’t care about his child, i.e. much like the dad in SNL’s Anti-Dad Skit No. 1.

And, speaking of SNL, pop culture offers a steady stream of misandry directed at fathers.

The point of all this is that our culture and society treat fathers like dirt.  In so doing, they promote single motherhood and fatherless children to the detriment of all.  I’ll end with the ending to Barbara Kay’s piece.

Loving fathers, disenfranchised of their parenting rights by mother-friendly family courts, are amongst the most anguished people you can imagine. Spiking divorce-related suicide rates for men prove that. These men are legion, but culturally invisible. Does any of this strike you as funny?

December 17, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

Here’s some good, albeit old, news on the alimony front (Money, 11/17/15).

It seems that, with women earning more than in previous decades, more of them are being ordered to pay alimony when they divorce.  And apparently that doesn’t sit well with them, so they’re fighting back.

Now that women are paying alimony more often, they are getting involved in advocating for change.

“It’s unfair for men to pay it, and unfair for women to pay it. But women are much more outraged by it,” said Ken Neumann, a founder of the Academy of Professional Family Mediators.

I hope he’s right.  The more people we have demanding alimony reform, the better.  Of course, as with so many articles of this sort, we’re left to simply believe someone who expresses an opinion.  Neumann cites nothing authoritative for his statement.

Still, I can see how he might be right.  Men tend to assume that they’re the resource providers to spouses and kids and so tend not to object too strenuously when they simply continue playing that role post-divorce.  Women make no such assumption, even when the role falls to them, so it’s no surprise when they have stronger objections to paying alimony than do men.

Meanwhile,

Unlike child support, which is common when divorcing couple has kids, alimony awards have always been very rare, going from about 25% of cases in the 1960s to about 10% today, said Judith McMullen, a professor of law at Marquette University. In one study of Wisconsin cases, she found it was only 8.6%.

That is indeed a noteworthy and salutary trend.  Just why the decline in orders for alimony should have occurred, I can’t say.  Perhaps it has to do with the greater equality in earnings between men and women.  Perhaps there’s now a greater assumption on the part of judges and litigants alike that neither spouse should be required to support the other when they’re not married or living together.  Or perhaps it’s due to an unspoken expectation that every adult needs to be responsible for his/her own needs.  Who knows?

But whatever the case, the article proceeds on assumptions much like points I’ve raised many times about alimony.

To address this, states like Massachusetts, Texas and Kansas restrict most cases to helping lower-earning spouses get back on their feet or get further education. The general consensus is that everyone should work, and the only individuals likely to get a longer-term award are those who are disabled or are in retirement.

 I would add that, in the event divorce occurs when a couple is far-advanced in years and unable to return to the workplace, alimony should be possible.  Plus, I would support an award of alimony of very brief duration to allow one spouse who’s taken time off work to get back to self-supporting earnings.  But those three – disability, old age and short-term orders to allow retraining – should be the only exceptions to a no-alimony rule.

Yet it is still heavily weighted toward men paying women. Only 3% of around 400,000 alimony recipients are male, according to the 2010 census, up 0.5% since 2000. Recipients claimed $9.2 million in payments in 2013 on their tax returns.

A bit of arithmetic tells us that not many people who receive alimony are reporting same on their tax returns.  After all, if there are 400,000 recipients, $9.2 million in receipts would mean that each received $23 per year on average.  So clearly, something’s amiss with the accounting.

I’ve long been interested in how much wealth gets transferred via alimony.  To that end, I’ve emailed Professor McMullen.  I’ll let readers know when I get a response.

In the meantime, it looks as if the alimony situation may be improving, as it should.  It’s an artifact of bygone days and should mostly be scrapped.

December 16, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

“Deadbeat dads” are back in the British news (Independent, 12/13/18).  Oh, the article avoids the term, but the message is the same – fathers don’t care about their kids, so, when Mom divorces Dad, Dad doesn’t want to pay.  We could write the narrative in our sleep.  Needless to say, the article is all of a piece with a thousand others.  Like many of them though, it inadvertently reveals facts about the child support system some would prefer to remain unknown.

It seems that many divorced and separated fathers in the U.K. don’t pay child support or, if they do, don’t pay much.  Or at least that’s what the mothers of their children say.  In keeping with the genre, the survey to which it refers makes no mention of fathers, what their feelings are about the child custody and support systems or indeed anything related to fathers.  Nor does it inquire into non-custodial mothers’ rates of child support.  If the mothers think fathers are anything but walking wallets, there’s no indication of it in the article.

Still,

More than a third of single mothers are in debt because their former partner has failed to pay child maintenance, new research has found.

A quarter of the women surveyed say they do not receive any regular financial help from their child’s father – forcing them to shoulder the cost of raising their child alone.

New research by Slater and Gordon – a UK law firm who specialise in family law – found 11 per cent say they have been forced to depend on food banks to feed their children when their ex-partner has refused to help them financially.

That sounds like bad news indeed.  So what are these mothers missing out on?

The basic rate of maintenance parents not living with their child are required to pay is 12 per cent of their gross income for one child, 16 per cent for two children and 19 per cent for three or more. On an average salary of £27,000 a year, that equates to £3,240 to cover the cost of their child for a year.

In terms of U.S. dollars, that average salary would be about $34,000 per year with about $4,100 going to child support, leaving about $28,900 left over for Dad and whoever else he has to support.

So what the article is saying is that a substantial number of mothers can’t make ends meet because they’re not receiving $340 per month for one child or about $450 for two.  In short, they’re extremely close to not making ends meet regardless.

Those familiar with similar data in the U.S. won’t be surprised by these findings.  The U.S. Census Bureau has found that between one-third and 40% of single mothers live in poverty.  The national poverty rate is about 14% and about 17% of single fathers with child custody fall below the poverty line.  So the data out of the U.K. looks to be in line with that in the U.S.

And in the U.S., the reason single mothers tend so strongly to be impoverished isn’t because the fathers of their children don’t pay enough child support.  Non-custodial mothers are far less likely to be ordered to pay child support at all, are ordered to pay less when they are ordered to and pay a slightly smaller percentage of what they owe than do non-custodial dads.  And yet custodial fathers have more money than do non-custodial mothers.  If they’re like other men and women, they do that because they work more and at higher paying jobs than do custodial mothers.

I suspect a similar dynamic is at work in the U.K.

Meanwhile, apparently without realizing it, the Independent article suggests the truth about child support.

Ms Cornish said: “People are often shocked by how much they are entitled to when they look at the government calculator. The amount suggested will often not even cover half of the housing costs for a parent and child.”…

There is not enough money for just life generally…

Half of mothers said their ex-partner’s contribution is not enough to pay the bills – meaning they are short of on average of £3,264 a year.

Some 88 per cent say their unstable financial situation means they are anxious about being made homeless due to struggling to find enough money to cover rent or monthly mortgage payments.

Notice that there’s not a word in there about supporting a child.  It seems to be taken as a matter of course that it’s Dad’s job to “cover rent or monthly mortgage payments,” “pay the bills” and for “life generally.”  It’s not.  It might have been his job when the two were married, but no longer.  His job is to pay for a maximum of half the incremental cost of raising the child(ren). 

Attorney Cornish is right; I’m sure mothers are shocked that, for a single child, an ex-husband earning £27,000 per year only pays about £3,240 per year.  But the theory is that he pays half and she pays half, regardless of the custody arrangement.  And, if Dad never claps eyes on the child from one month to the next, i.e. has zero parenting time, that £3,240 per year looks about right.  Again, that’s about $4,100, or about $340 per month.  The State of Texas pays foster parents between $660 and $680 per child per month, so that must be about what it costs to raise a child.

So what’s the problem with a British father paying that amount?  None at all as long as his money is just for child support, so why is anyone shocked?  I suspect it’s because they, along with the article, assume that Dad should be required to do more than just contribute half to the support of his child.

Meanwhile, there’s another issue with which U.S. dads will be familiar.

Some two-thirds said their ex-partner regularly voiced irritation at having to pay for their child and six in 10 said they were often interrogated about how the money was being spent.

Yes, how the money is spent is quite an issue with non-custodial fathers, most of whom have no problem with supporting their children, but cavil at the thought of their money going to enhance Mom’s liquor cabinet or lingerie drawer.  As I’ve written many times, we could fix that fairly easily, but we don’t.

And of course the Independent article ignores the obvious fix for all of this – equal parenting.  When Mom and Dad each has 50% of the parenting time, there’s little need for child support at all.  Better yet, letting Dad do half the parenting, releases Mom to work more, earn more, save more and advance more in her career, obviating in the process all this talk about mothers suffering financial hardship because Dad hasn’t paid.

It’s the obvious solution to the problem, but one the article never even considers.  Reduce Mom’s parenting time obligation from 80% – 100% to 50% and she can do a lot to take care of herself and gain real financial autonomy from the ex she wants nothing to do with anyway.  It’s quite a concept.  It’s a concept that appears neither in the Independent article nor elsewhere in public discourse.

December 14, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

A federal judge in Houston has struck a blow for child abduction, child abuse and violation of law (CBS News, 12/13/18).  On Wednesday, Judge Alfred H. Bennett sentenced Carlos Guimaraes to just three months in prison and his wife Jemima to a mere one month for their part in the abduction of their grandson Nicholas Brann by his mother to Brazil.

I’ve written about the case here and here among others.

Nico’s mother, Marcelle Guimaraes, was married to Houston physician Christopher Brann.  Nico was their only child.  Marcelle filed for divorce in 2012 when Nico was three years old.  A Houston court granted the divorce and ordered the pair to share parenting and custody (more on that later).  Only then did Marcelle abduct Nico to Brazil with the help of her wealthy parents. 

Brann filed suit in Brazil under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction.  Courts there found that Marcelle had taken the boy illegally, but have refused to order his return to his father on the grounds that Nico has acclimated to his life there.

As I’ve said before, that is precisely the opposite of the intention of the Hague Convention to which both the U.S. and Brazil are signatories.  By refusing to order Nico’s return, Brazilian courts have rewarded kidnapping.  In time, any child will get used to his/her surroundings.  Therefore, under the Brazilian courts’ rulings, the longer an abductor can evade the law, the greater the chance the courts will reward the abduction.  The Convention required but one thing of the Brazilian courts – that they determine what country was Nico’s primary place of residence.  Given that he’d lived his entire life in the U.S., that shouldn’t have been difficult.  Brazilian courts failed in their duty to protect an innocent little boy.

Now a U.S. court has done its part.  By giving no meaningful punishment to Mr. and Mrs. Guimaraes, Judge Bennett announced loudly and clearly that, in his courtroom at least, international child abduction is no big deal.  So determined was Bennett to send that message that he substantially deviated from federal sentencing guidelines to do so.  Mr. and Mrs. Guimaraes could have served up to three years behind bars.

Why did Bennett do such a patently unjust thing?

U.S. District Judge Alfred H. Bennett noted that the 2013 kidnapping happened in the wake of a broken marriage that had been volatile and fraught with domestic violence, which swayed him to hand down sentences for both defendants that were well below federal guidelines.

“Fraught with domestic violence?”  Hardly.  If it had been, we might have expected Marcelle to have said so at some point during the divorce proceedings, but she spoke not a word until it began to seem she’d lose custody of the boy.  Here’s what I wrote about the matter back in June, quoting the transcript of the divorce testimony.

 Brann and Guimaraes were married in February, 2008 and Nico was born in September of the same year.  Christopher was, from the very beginning, a caring and devoted father, despite his demanding career as a practicing physician and professor of medicine.  The couple employed a nanny, Ana Licon, who testified in the divorce and custody case about her day-to-day observations of Christopher’s and Marcelle’s parenting.

“every minute [Dr. Brann] had off . . . [where he] . . . was not working he would dedicate all that time with Nico.”

By comparison, when Marcelle was at home with Nico, it was Licon who cared for him.  About Christopher’s relationship with his son, Licon testified that it was,

“[v]ery close, very intimate.” But when asked the same question about Nico’s relationship with Ms. Guimarães, she merely responded “no.”

Often, Marcelle picked fights with Christopher, during which Nico would cry, but he was never fearful of his father. Licon went on to testify that Marcelle

 “did not nurture the child. She did not take care of him. She didn’t dedicate the time to do it with the child.”

Licon wasn’t the only one who preferred Christopher’s parenting to Marcelle’s.  Court-appointed psychologist Dr. Edward Reitman did too.  He described her as,

“an anxious, insecure, mercurial individual . . . [with] . . . little self-control insofar as her ability to deal with situations or individuals she cannot control…”

“not necessarily an emotionally compassionate . . . [mother] who displays feelings of security, or warmth in her interactions with her son . . . because she is so emotionally needy herself.”

By contrast, Reitman described Christopher this way:

“emotionally easy-going, loving, nurturing, [and a] very positive influence on his son’s life”… “I feel quite strongly that the nurturing, love and care that . . . [Nico] can obtain from his father would be a very positive constructive factor in his future emotional development.”

That was all during the divorce and custody case that Marcelle filed in September, 2012, when Nico was four.  She filed in Harris County, Texas and made no mention of any form of abuse or domestic violence by Christopher.  But clearly, with the testimony of the nanny and Dr. Reitman, the case wasn’t going as Marcelle had hoped…

Her response to her own shortcomings was to fire her lawyer, hire a new one and, for the first time, allege that Christopher had been violent toward her…

In the end, the judge ruled that Marcelle’s claims were not only false, but were made “with malice” and granted the divorce, not on the basis of the usual boilerplate “irreconcilable differences,” but on the basis of “adultery” and “cruelty” on the part of Marcelle.

In short, what’s been found as fact by courts in the U.S. and Brazil – that Marcelle’s claims of abuse were unfounded, was assumed not to be true by Judge Bennett.  Amazing, but true.    

What’s more, a Houston jury did the same, at least by inference.  It was Carlos and Jemima’s defense that they should be found not guilty by the jury due to the domestic violence they claimed their daughter suffered.  But the jury didn’t buy it, finding them guilty of abetting the abduction.

In short, the domestic violence claim doesn’t’ hold water.  Indeed, if anyone’s abused Nico, it’s his mother.  Child abduction has long been understood to be child abuse.  That makes the irony of Judge Bennett’s ruling almost palpable.  He supports child abuse with a false concern about domestic violence.

Again I say “amazing but true.”

December 13, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

The report by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute (DAI) continues from yesterday.

The colloquial term “deadbeat dads” is a common stereotype and colors all aspects of men’s involvement in the adoption process. A Canadian study on attitudes of triad members toward releasing identifying information on adoptees to birthparents found that respondents were much more willing to grant access rights to mothers than to fathers (Sachdev, 1991). The author concludes that members of the adoption community share the prevailing stereotypical views of the birthfather as a “Don Juan” or “phantom father” – that is, little more than a sperm donor.

The “adoption community” of course consists primarily of adoption agencies and lawyers who make their living off of completed adoptions.  Neither gets paid if an adoption doesn’t go through.  It is therefore in the interest of both to complete any given adoption and doing so is made much easier if Dad isn’t involved.  That’s why the “adoption community” pushed so hard for the creation of putative father registries and still does.  Naturally, anyone who views fathers in the negative light referred to by the DAI report is more able to sideline fathers than would be someone more sympathetic.

That same bias seems to extend to mothers and perhaps women generally.

[T]he authors’ analysis of qualitative interviews revealed that women harbor more negative stereotypes and judgmental attitudes about birthfathers than do men. Most adults, but particularly females, also viewed the emotional attachment of a father to his child as primarily learned, whereas mothers were viewed as having an instinctive, biologically predisposed emotional attachment (Miall & March, 2003).

That of course is untrue.  The same hormones that produce parenting behavior in all social mammals, including humans, exist in men and women alike.  Yes, they find receptors in different areas of the brain in women than in men and that produces different parenting behaviors.  And the hormone oxytocin tends to encourage men to be the secondary parent, i.e. to step back and let Mom take the primary role.  But the idea that, in some way, mothers parent “intuitively” while men’s attachment to their children is “learned” has no basis in fact and is contradicted by the known science.

So how does that anti-father bias play out?  Often it results in bypassing him altogether, whether legally or not.

In reality, the extent to which a man can be involved in the adoption process or a parenting decision depends largely on his relationship with the mother at that time. If she has an ongoing, positive relationship with the father, she normally would welcome his involvement; if she does not, however, she may resist his involvement out of fear, desire to control the situation, or for other reasons. The bottom line is that adoption professionals need to work diligently with pregnant women toward the goal of locating fathers, informing them of their rights, and giving them an opportunity to participate in the process.

Doubtless, many adoption agencies do just that.  Just as doubtless, many do not.  Again, the financial incentives are all in favor of removing the father from the process and, as with most other human beings, adoption professionals often aren’t able to resist the siren call of lucre.  Indeed, several years ago, a Utah lawyer, Wes Hutchins, wired up five women and sent them into adoption agencies posing as expectant mothers inquiring about adoption.  The results were unambiguous.  One adoption agency employee explained,

“Birth fathers have zero rights in Utah.”

As I wrote back in 2012,

 [W]hen the women entered the agencies (that remain unnamed in the article), employees with many years of experience blatantly coached them on what to say to make sure the father stays in the dark about what’s going on.  In one case, the employee virtually wrote the mother’s “birth father affidavit” for her, explaining that she should say “he’s not supporting me” and “he doesn’t even tell the truth.”

Hutchins sent women into five adoption agencies, but just two of them did what the DAI says they should regarding fathers.  The other three were plainly in it for the money and would cut any corner to get it.

In some states, mothers’ complete control over fathers’ parental rights in the adoption arena is a matter of explicit state law.

States differ in the extent to which they seek to protect the rights of putative fathers in the adoption process. A fundamental foundation for doing so is identifying the man, locating him, notifying him that an adoption is pending, and explaining his rights. But some states do not even require that a putative father be identified. For example, Idaho’s adoption statute (Title 16, Chapter 15) reads:

The legislature finds that an unmarried mother has a right of privacy with regard to her pregnancy and adoption plan, and therefore has no legal obligation to disclose the identity of an unmarried biological father prior to or during an adoption proceeding, and has no obligation to volunteer information to the court with respect to the father. I.C.,§ 16-1501 A(4)

The assertion, found nowhere in Supreme Court jurisprudence, that a mother’s right of privacy extends to her “adoption plan” that can then, without more, deprive the father of her child of his parental rights, is beyond astonishing.  More blatant anti-father/pro-mother bias is hard to imagine.

Meanwhile,

In New York, the mother can know the father’s identity and state it publicly to adoption professionals and others, but if she does not legally name him in a document or he does not file with the registry, he is not entitled to notice of adoption proceedings. This effectively allows adoption practitioners who want to cut corners to be much less aggressive in their attempts to identify and reach out to birthfathers because it is not required by law.

To be entirely honest, it allows them to ignore the father altogether and to once again artificially and unnecessarily expand the number of children needing adoption, thereby denying other children who do need adoption the parents they so desperately need.  And all of that is accomplished in the name of getting adoption agencies paid.

Adoption – it’s quite a racket.

December 12, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

In my response to the Washington Post’s article on the parental rights of incarcerated parents, I had occasion to skewer claims by two “experts” that taking children from their parents is OK because they can simply be adopted and therefore have a “forever home.”  As I pointed out, the arithmetic regarding adoption definitively refutes that notion.

That encouraged me to consult the best source of information regarding adoption in the U.S., the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute (DAI).  Alas, its website says that DAI has been shuttered since the beginning of this year, but fortunately, its work product is still there.  That means I have the best data available on adoption.

Here are the numbers:

In the U.S., each year there are about 135,000 adoptions completed.  Of those about 13,500 are domestic infant adoptions.  Stepparent adoptions number about 45,000, so non-stepparent adoptions amount to about 90,000.  There are about 53,100 adoptions out of child welfare agencies, i.e. foster care and about 23,400 international adoptions.

As I’ve said before, the paucity of adoptive parents means that there are always far more children needing adoption in this country than are adopted.  Compared to the approximately 425,000 children in foster care who need to be adopted, those 53,100 adoptions don’t look like a lot.  One out of eight kids  finding a home is a far cry from what’s needed.

So to reiterate, we have too many kids who already need adoption and far too few parents to adopt them.  Forcing adoption on kids who don’t need it only adds to the drain on adoptive parents.  From a humanitarian standpoint and from a policy standpoint, doing so makes no sense.

That of course brings me to putative father registries whose primary function is to facilitate adoptions by removing single fathers from the process thereby unnecessarily increasing the number of kids needing adoption.  Ironically, PFRs are invariably described as, in some mysterious way, enhancing fathers’ rights to be involved in the adoption process.  They do no such thing as the DAI report “Safeguarding the Rights and Well-Being of Birth Parents in the Adoption Process” makes abundantly clear.

PFRs require every unmarried man who has sexual intercourse with a woman to file a form with the state claiming paternity of any possible child that may result from the encounter.  Failure to do so means the man waives his right to be notified if Mom places the child for adoption.  PFR enabling legislation invariably justifies such a bizarre requirement by claiming that, well, men are presumed to know that sex makes babies so…

Men of course do know that, but what they don’t know and have no way of knowing is whether (a) conception occurred, (b) abortion or other termination didn’t occur, (c) the child is alive and (d) Mom placed it for adoption.  About all those things, Dad must rely on Mom to inform him.  If she chooses not to, he has no way of finding out if he has a child or not.  As is so often the case, he supposedly has parental rights, just no way to exercise them without her consent.  Or, as the DAI report says it,

In reality, the extent to which a man can be involved in the adoption process or a parenting decision depends largely on his relationship with the mother at that time. If she has an ongoing, positive relationship with the father, she normally would welcome his involvement; if she does not, however, she may resist his involvement out of fear, desire to control the situation, or for other reasons.

Now, he could always file that multitude of forms with the putative father registry, but there’s a catch that I’ve discussed before and the DAI report addresses directly.

There are many problems with the operation of these registries, including that most people do not know of their existence or their specific requirements. Furthermore, some critics maintain it is not in keeping with normative human behavior to expect anyone – man or woman – to register somewhere after every sexual encounter, in case a pregnancy may occur. Their effectiveness has also been called into question because their existence is rarely advertised and they are state-based, so locating a father can be complicated if the mother and father do not reside in the same state or the baby is placed for adoption in a different state.

In my writing about adoption and PFRs, I’ve had many occasions over the years to discuss those points.  For example, back in 2000, when I asked 100 men in Houston (office workers downtown and young men at the University of Houston) if they’d ever heard of the Texas Paternity Registry, not one of them had.  When I asked the state Department of Health what its budget for publicizing the registry was, the answer, like the number of men who’d heard of it, was zero.  Unsurprisingly, just 0.4% of births to unmarried women that year had a father who’d filed forms with the state’s registry.

The point is made far more amusingly here by Erik Smith whose description of his attempts to come to grips with the Ohio PFR in 2003 provide a fine sense of what faces single fathers.  The title of the piece “The Ohio Putative Father Registry – the WHAT?” gives a taste of the whole.

I’ll have more to say on this tomorrow.

December 10, 2018 by Robert Franklin, Member, National Board of Directors, National Parents Organization

I return now to the Washington Post article I wrote about last Friday (Washington Post, 12/3/18).

The article’s a pretty long one and it covers an important issue – that of the parental rights of prison inmates.  Put simply, it reports on a Marshall Project finding that many parents lose their children solely because they’ve gone to prison.  That is, there’s been no finding of abuse or neglect, but only that the parent is in prison, regardless of the length of the sentence. 

To the extent that actually bears out, it’s a problem that needs to be addressed.  The WaPo piece used some suspicious weasel words that make me want to look closer at the actual findings of the Marshall Project.  Still, parental rights are too important to allow a conviction for a minor offense and a short period behind bars to take away.

But that’s the good news about the article.  The bad news is sadly predictable, this being the Washington Post.  The bad news is that, like the system it criticizes, the Post piece all but ignores fathers.  Worse, in doing so, it thwarts its own mission – the reduction of incarceration as a factor in mothers losing their parental rights.

That’s the more remarkable because in just its third paragraph the article refers to a teenaged girl being taken from her prison-bound mother and given to her father.  Ironically, that simple act would solve most of the problems the article raises.

Recall that, back in 2006, the Urban Institute found that, in over half the instances in which a child was taken from its mother by state child welfare authorities due to abuse or neglect, the father wasn’t contacted as a possible placement.  That preference for foster care over father care on the part of CPS is problematic in several ways, including its frank illegality.

First, fathers supposedly have rights and should be considered the very first alternative when Mom loses a child even temporarily.  It is simply not the prerogative of the child welfare system to decide whether or not fathers are allowed to exercise their parental rights.  Fathers should be contacted every time a mother loses a child.  If one can’t provide an appropriate home then the agency can look further afield.

Second, if Dad is a proper placement, the state’s taxpayers save money.  States don’t have to pay fathers a cent for caring for their own children, but pay foster parents around $700 per month per child.

Third, fathers tend to have blood relatives who have an interest in the child and likely provide a much more familiar environment in which the child can live and thrive than would a foster family.  The trauma of being taken from Mom would be lessened and, generally speaking, kinship care is better for kids than is foster care.

Finally, the Court of Appeals for the federal Ninth Circuit has ruled that fathers have a constitutional right to be informed when their children are taken from their mothers due to abuse or neglect.  Indeed, failure to do so by CPS is actionable under federal civil rights statutes.

What the Post failed to notice is that, when Mom goes to prison, the only reason to address the issue of her parental rights is foster care and adoption.  No child whose parents retain their parental rights can be adopted, so the whole point of terminating Mom’s rights is aimed at one thing – adoption. 

But what if Dad were contacted and provided a suitable home?  There’d be no need for foster care and Mom could do her time secure in the knowledge that she didn’t have to fight a termination suit long-distance.  Once she got out, Dad would still have custody, but Mom could make the necessary efforts to rehabilitate herself as a parent in the eyes of the juvenile court and regain at least some contact with little Andy or Jenny.  Indeed, she might be able to regain substantial parenting time.

What’s not to like about that approach to the children of parents in prison?  It saves the state money, maintains contact between the child and its biological parents and frees up one set of adoptive parents to adopt a child who needs adopting rather than one who doesn’t.  As I’ve said many times before, qualified adoptive parents are a scarce resource, nowhere nearly as numerous as the children who need to be adopted.  Every time we force adoption on a child who doesn’t need it (because he/she has a capable parent), we deny adoption to a child who does need it.

Sensible and straightforward as is the idea of simply contacting the fathers of children whose mothers are headed to prison, it escaped the Post altogether.  It seems that, when it comes to certain major news media, the idea of fathers as a benefit to children – or indeed to anyone – is an anathema.