Category: Blog

St. Paul, Minnesota–Since the Republican Vice Presidential nomination of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin last week, the media has been buzzing over Palin”s politics, personal life, and how the two mix.

One issue that has seen some press involves Palin, Alaskan State Trooper Mike Wooten and the dismissal of Alaska”s Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan.

Trooper Wooten was involved in a bitter custody battle with Palin”s sister, Molly McCann. Palin hired a private investigator to observe Wooten in order to determine whether Wooten was a threat to McCann and the rest of the family. The private investigator brought forth several accusations, including domestic violence, drunk driving and using a taser on a 10-year-old-child.

Based on these accusations, the State Troopers began an investigation into Wooten. They upheld several accusations and did not substantiate many more. This resulted in a five day suspension from the force and a warning that Wooten would get only one more chance as a State Trooper.

Once Palin was elected Governor, Walter Monegan was added to the mix. As the Public Safety Commissioner, Monegan had the power to fire State Troopers–a power that he felt pressured by Palin to use. According to Monegan, Palin asked him to fire Wooten. He refused, and Palin fired him instead. Palin stated that she fired him for reasons unrelated to Wooten, while Monegan claims that Wooten was in fact the cause of his firing.

The dismissal of Monegan came as a shock to many in the political realm, including Alaska politician Andrew Halcro who stated Monegan”s firing was an abuse of power and questioned Palin”s true motives. However, Halcro, who ran against Palin during the 2006 race for Governor, may not be an objective source on the matter. To read Halcro”s statement, click here.

After reviewing numerous articles on Governor Sarah Palin, Fathers & Families cannot conclude that Palin knowingly made false allegations against Mr. Wooten.

Los Angeles, CA–“Where husband earned a fixed annual salary that was half of what husband had previously earned, with a possible discretionary bonus up to 150 percent of that amount, support agreement requiring husband to pay nearly all his take-home pay in support payments and borrow for living expenses…was a miscarriage of justice…”–Metropolitan News Enterprise, summarizing opinion in re Marriage of Mosley [emphasis added] This recent decision by California’s Fourth Appellate District Division Three in re Marriage of Mosley (8/14/08) speaks volumes about the way the child support system manhandles fathers.  The court wrote:  

Dawn and Paul Mosley, both lawyers, dissolved their marriage. At the time of dissolution, Paul was a real estate partner at a large law firm and had a hefty income, and Dawn was the stay-at-home mother of their five children. Several years later, with the downturn in the real estate market, the law firm decided to pare down its real estate practice and Paul was terminated. He then took an in-house position with a homebuilder that paid a fraction of his former income as a base salary, together with the possibility of a substantial year-end bonus. Because a significant portion of Paul”s income was paid, if at all, as a discretionary year-end bonus, Paul sought a modification of the existing spousal and child support orders on the basis of a change in circumstances. The court denied the request and Paul appeals. The evidence showed that the year after he left the law firm, Paul still had a large total income, given his base salary, year-end bonus and a one-time signing bonus, and also that he paid very substantial spousal and child support to Dawn that year. However, where he once made $447,150 per year with the possibility of a bonus, he now made $205,000 per year with the possibility of a bonus–a discretionary bonus to be paid if at all by a homebuilder grappling with a depressed real estate market. The evidence also showed that almost all of Paul”s net monthly take-home pay from his base salary was required to pay the existing support obligations, and that he had to borrow his monthly living expenses for most of the year, in the hopes of receiving a year-end bonus that would permit him to repay the debt, before embarking on the same desperate cycle again the subsequent calendar year. The court”s finding that there was no change in circumstances, and thus no basis for a modification of support obligations, was not supported by substantial evidence. Under the particular circumstances of this case, it was an abuse of discretion   We reverse the findings and order after hearing and remand the matter for a redetermination of support obligations consistent with the views expressed herein, taking into consideration Paul”s current base salary as well as the possible imputation of income to Dawn, who is a licensed attorney and whose children are nearly grown. While the total amount of spousal and child support that Paul pays ultimately may be the same as it was previously, he should not be left to borrow 11 months of the year.

A father had to fight a big, expensive case just to get the courts to set his child support obligation on what he earns as opposed to what the court feels he might be able to earn. Read the text here or an article about it here.

Los Angeles, CA–I’m often made the point that the injustices being perpetrated against men and fathers often stem as much from traditional chivalrous views of gender as from anti-male feminist ones. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, radio talk show host, author, speaker, and columnist, is a good example.  As evident from the article below, the good Rabbi has never seen a problem he couldn’t manage to blame on men. I was on his radio show a few years ago debating a feminist rape expert on the Kobe Bryant case, and he had the same attitude.  He was fair enough to Bryant, if I remember correctly, but real big on blaming men.  The title of one of his books —Hating Women: America”s Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex — gives you an idea. He seems like a nice, thoughtful guy, but he just isn’t looking at the world closely enough. In Invisible fathers at the Olympic Games (Huffington Post, 8/18/08), Boteach writes:

The most memorable scenes of the Beijing Olympics are not what Michael Phelps accomplished in the pool but what he did right after emerging with yet another gold medal after every swim. Here, a 23-year-old athletic superstar took his flowers from the medal podium, climbed over benches and photographers and handed them to his beaming mother…Debbie Phelps is no ordinary mother, but the single mom who alone raised Michael and his two sisters, Whitney and Hillary, from the time Michael was nine.   As a child of divorce who was raised by a single mother from about the same age, I can attest to the fact that the feat is never forgotten. Children retain a lifelong debt of passionate gratitude toward a mother who sacrifices all on their behalf. They will move heaven and earth to show appreciation for a mother who made her children her entire universe… [F]ew indicators of the falling stature of the American male are as potent as the receding influence of men in their sons’ lives, as they are slowly replaced by mothers of unbreakable devotion. Whereas once this may have been true of areas where women carry special insight, such as in, say, vetting a girlfriend or giving advice about love and relationships, today it is true in the area one where we would least expect it, sports.   Which begs the question, aside from the moment of conception, are men even necessary? If a single mother can produce the greatest Olympic champion of all time, do we even need dads? An increasing number of women are saying no, we don’t. They are choosing to have children on their own, or remain single and raise their kids by themselves long after they have divorced. Dads are becoming a luxury. I thought of this scary development as I took a day trip with my children recently. What was it that I, as their father, gave them that their mother could not? Was I, as a man, superfluous? To be sure, there were the obvious things that I contribute. I help support the family. I take my kids to synagogue, study Judaism with them and teach them about our ancient tradition. I attempt to inspire them with talks about character and I remain the principal disciplinarian in the home. But surely these were all things that my wife, if God forbid forced to, could do on her own. Was there anything that required me and only me? And then I remembered. Yes, there was one big thing. I alone could love their mother. That was not something she could do on her own. I could teach my children by means of living example the glories of devotion to a special woman who sacrifices so much on all of our behalf. I could show my children that love was not a fantasy concocted in Hollywood or invented in a novel. I alone could demonstrate to my children that their mother was precious and that love was real. No one could do this but me. I was necessary after all, as was every other father and husband. In other words, the greatest gift a man gives his children is to love their mother. By doing so, he imparts the lesson that there are things in life more glittering than gold and more precious than rubies.

Boteach seems to view fathers as mostly just the helpmates of the real parent–moms. To read the full column, click here. To comment, scroll to the bottom of the link provided.

Laconia, NH–Here’s another wonderful example of the absolute disregard our family law system has for fathers as anything but wallets.

In this case, a distraught/disturbed man shot himself in the face and ended up disabled, perhaps crippled. Yet, according to the Associated Press, the man can’t get a reduction on his child support because the “Laconia Family Court had ruled that Calvin Dunn should be considered voluntarily underemployed because his injury was self-inflicted.”

Yeah, smart judge there–Dunn shot himself in the face to try to get out of child support, but our clever jurist smoked out the deadbeat’s scam.

Mercifully, the New Hampshire Supreme Court has now overruled this. According to the AP:

The New Hampshire Supreme Court says a man who shot himself in the face in a failed suicide attempt shouldn’t be considered voluntarily underemployed when it comes to paying child support.

Under state law, a parent who purposely takes a low-paying job to avoid paying more child support can be ordered to pay based on his or her past earnings. But the provision doesn’t apply to someone who is physically or mental incapacitated.

A Laconia Family Court had ruled that Calvin Dunn should be considered voluntarily underemployed because his injury was self-inflicted. But the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday that how someone becomes incapacitated is irrelevant.

It reminds me of the Francis Borgia case in Kentucky a few years ago. To hear my radio commentary on it, click here.

Los Angeles, CA–I’m accustomed to advice columnists giving men short shrift but Salon.com columnist Cary Tennis’ man-blaming in the tragic case below is mind-numbing. In “My mom left my dad in a nursing home and lied about his chances of coming home: He thought he’d be returning home to die. But she just strung him along until he was gone,” a young woman tells Tennis the sad story of how her father was betrayed. She writes:

Dear Cary:

My mother said keeping up some sort of illusion of his eventual return was a way to keep him busy there, but it ended up being something that seemed so cruel in reality. With that “return” in mind, my father would plan to the best of his ability in order to be prepared for the big day. For instance, my mother would keep telling him he would have to do an increasing number of stair climbs to be allowed home, so he would do as she said — working up to 20, 50, finally 100 and more, as many as she required — and talk excitedly about how, when he had met her goals, he would get to go home.

For my part, I just felt like a coward in this whole situation. I had no power of attorney and no decision-making authority in any of this, and my mother had the legal power to place him straight from the hospital, even though I offered to try to find in-home care if anyone felt it was needed for any rehabilitation. I feel that she charged ahead with the nursing home plan, in part because she was bitter that he had frequently left her alone when he traveled for his job and she had found an ideal, ironic opportunity to get back at him (a lonely divorce-by-nursing-home: something his nurses told me was more common than anyone would believe).

My father never complained, but he would sometimes ask me if I knew when exactly he was going home. I always said that he would have to ask Mom (who never visited, but spoke with him on the phone about his “progress” and whether it was good enough for him to return). But I was just too weak to say anything else.

My father finally died after two years in the nursing home, having received the best care possible from his nurses, but never having heard the truth from us. Would he have been better off knowing he’d never go home again?
I hope I’m not the only one affected by this dilemma, and that others may be helped by your advice. On the other hand, it would be nice if I really were the only one who has had to deal with something like this. Thanks.

Powerless Daughter

Tennis manages to spit out one sentence of sympathy for the poor guy out before he launches into blaming the man for his own victimization. Tennis writes:

[I]n this story can be heard the laughter of the gods…Day after day a dying man dreams of going home. He wants to die among his loved ones, near his daughter, his wife, his family and his cherished possessions…One day he finally understands: He’s not going anywhere. He never was. This is where he has been taken to die.
 
The true horror of it strikes him. One day, she used to say, she’d … one day! She wasn’t kidding, was she! He always dismissed her complaints about his work-related travel. True, some of it was required, but some trips he could have turned down; at times he took the trips as a welcome respite from a difficult home life. And he lied to her about those. Of course he did…

Amid his horror at what she has done comes a flicker of admiration. She has done it! I should have known she would! She has finally done it! She’s having her revenge!…

In the end, it all comes home to him.

You see, her betrayal and cruelty is his fault. Why? Because (gasp) he was working hard to support his family and sometimes had to be away from her. As the daughter explained, his wife “found an ideal, ironic opportunity to get back at him.”

Yet Tennis doesn’t condemn this, but instead portrays her betrayal as something arguably worthy of “admiration.” Tell me, if a husband lied to his wife and brought her to this bitter, sad end, would anybody have one iota of sympathy for him?

And if anybody thinks this all too common ethic of excuse-whatever-mom-does-and-who-cares-how-dad-feels doesn’t have any bad consequences in the real world, you’ve never been in family court.

To comment on Tennis’ article in www.Salon.com, click here. To write Tennis directly, click on info@carytennis.com.

Thanks to Eric, a reader, for the story.

Washington D.C.–While I am critical of Senator Joe Biden’s (D-Del) role as the principle architect of misguided federal domestic violence policy, I do him credit for the admirable way he raised his two young boys after his wife and infant daughter were killed in a tragic car accident. One biography of Biden explains:

Joe Biden never works on Dec.18.

It was one week before Christmas 1972, and the senator-elect from Delaware awaited his first term. There was plenty to celebrate as his wife and three kids left home to find a Christmas tree.

Biden was already in Washington. It was his sister Val who took the phone call, her face drained of color when she hung up and told him of “a slight accident.”

Biden thought immediately of his wife, Neilia. “She’s dead, isn’t she?” the politician asked.

She was.

As the Bidens were driving home in the family station wagon, their tree picked out, they were broad sided by a tractor-trailer. Neilia was killed, along with 13-month-old daughter, Naomi.

Sons Beau and Hunter, toddlers themselves, were critically injured. With their father’s constant care and attention, both recovered…

Biden, suddenly a single parent, devoted himself to the two boys. He took the Senate oath of office at their hospital bedsides in 1973 – at a time when Barack Obama was only a few years older than Biden’s sons. His dead wife’s father held the Bible he was sworn in on.

As the two boys grew up, doting dad Biden became known for taking the train home nightly from Washington to Delaware.

Biden eventually found love again, marrying schoolteacher Jill Tracy Jacobs in June 1977.

Daughter Ashley was born four years later.

Life went on, but Biden never forgot. The senator never works on Dec. 18.

Biden is pictured above as a young single father, with each of his boys in tow.

Below are some recent articles and items of interest from Fathers & Families’ latest News Digest.

NH court overturns child support order (Associated Press, 8/22/08)

Support amnesty offered (Cincinnati Enquirer, 8/22/08)

Daughter provides will to live (Victoria Advocate, 8/23/08)

New Wisconsin agency focuses on children, families (Chicago Tribune, 8/23/08)

Arizona News: Endangered Child Taken From Arizona Rescued (Arizona Reporter, 8/25/08)

Domestic Violence Officer Accused Of Assaulting Husband (News Channel 5, 8/25/08)

Stimulus checks boost child support collections (Tennessean, 8/26/08)

Strahan’s child support to be recalculated (Associated Press, 9/26/08)

Domestic violence cited in Marshall slaying (The Huntsville Times, 9/26/08)

George Lazenby speaks of Pam Shriver divorce pain (Telegraph.co.uk, 8/26/08)

Tacoma, WA–“The dad vs. stepdad debate is no mere academic question, but instead an issue which has serious ramifications in family law. Advocates of sole or primary custody for mothers often insist that children do fine with ‘father-figures’ instead of their fathers.”

My new co-authored column, Media Misreports Study: Stepdads Better than Dads? Not so Fast (Tacoma News-Tribune, 8/13/08), details the way the media has distorted a recent study about fathers.

To write a Letter to the Editor of the Tacoma News-Tribune, a 140,000 circulation newspaper in Tacoma, Washington, regarding Stepdad study doesn”t tell the truth about parenting, click here.

The column, co-authored with Mike McCormick, Executive Director of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, is below.

Media Misreports Study: Stepdads Better than Dads? Not so Fast
By Mike McCormick and Glenn Sacks

“Stepdads beat biological fathers in parenting, study says.’ “Stepdads do better than real dads in ‘fragile’ families.’ “Stepfathers make better parents.’ This is how dozens of major newspapers and media outlets are reporting a new study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family which compares stepfathers to biological fathers.

Conventional wisdom says that biological fathers are more committed to their children than stepfathers are to their stepchildren. While media accounts of the study claim that research contradicts this wisdom, a closer look at the study shows that this simply isn”t true. Moreover, the study”s misconstrued findings could have a harmful impact on family law and child custody cases.

For one, the researchers did not study fathers as a whole, but only a limited cohort–“fragile families,” defined as “low-income urban families prone to nonmarital births.’ Also, fathers were not studied independently–all assessments of them were based entirely on the children”s mothers” reports.

Moreover, the study did not find that stepdads were generally superior to biological dads. What researchers found was that stepfathers were more “cooperative’ with mothers than biological fathers. To say this makes stepdads “better’ than biological fathers is questionable, to say the least.

“Cooperation’ with mothers can be a great thing. It can also mean nothing more than that things are being done mom”s way. This is no surprise–stepfathers have a much more tentative, fragile role in children”s lives than biological fathers. It follows that they would generally be more “cooperative.’

Conflict over parenting methods and strategies within couples is often a positive for children, not a negative. Having two different, competing viewpoints weeds out bad ideas and helps preserve good ones. One reason why children in single parent homes don”t do as well as children who live with both parents is that in single parent homes ideas and parenting strategies are implemented without consultation.

Numerous studies document maternal gate-keeping–mothers” belief that their parenting style should be shared and followed by the children”s father. Psychologist Ron Taffel says that when fathers feel “supervised and judged’ by mothers, they tend to back away from their children. Yet fathers” styles are just as important for children as mothers”. When dad feels he can only do it mom”s way–as is more common with stepfathers than with biological fathers–children miss out on valuable male parenting.

Another of the study”s limitations is that researchers studied families where the children were only five-years-old. This greatly skews the data in favor of stepdads.

In each one of these cases, the mothers endured a fairly recent breakup with their children”s biological father. Most feel disappointed or hurt or angry with them. Many have been or still are in the middle of contentious battles over child custody and child support.

Into this hurt and disappointment comes stepdad. After mom and dad split, mom thought she was going to have to raise the kids herself–she is understandably grateful for stepdad”s unexpected help. Moreover, the relationship is newer and happier.

By contrast, mothers married to their children”s biological fathers have higher expectations of them, and thus are more likely to be disappointed in their spouses, or to find them less cooperative or helpful than they had expected.

It is not surprising that grateful mothers gave stepdads positive marks–what”s surprising is that the study”s results don”t lean even more towards stepdads.

The dad vs. stepdad debate is no mere academic question, but instead an issue which has serious ramifications in family law. Advocates of sole or primary custody for mothers often insist that children do fine with “father-figures’ instead of their fathers. For example, on the hotly-debated relocation/move-away issue in family law, they claim there should be no obstacles to custodial mothers who wish to relocate children to other states. After all, the kids may miss dad, but they”ll still have mom and the “father figure’ that mom provides.

In family court, judges have wide powers to fashion custody arrangements that are in “the best interests of the child.’ This study–or at least the media reports of it–will be used to mislead courts into believing that biological fathers are easily replaceable, and are not central to children”s best interests.

This column first appeared in the Tacoma News-Tribune (8/13/08).

Mike McCormick is the Executive Director of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children. Their website is www.acfc.org.

Glenn Sacks” columns on men’s and fathers’ issues have appeared in dozens of the largest newspapers in the United States. He invites readers to visit his website at www.GlennSacks.com.

Los Angeles, CA– I appeared on Al-Jazeera’s World News Saturday evening to discuss Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama’s selection of Senator Joe Biden (D-Del) as his vice-presidential candidate.

As many of my readers know, Biden has long been the principle architect of misguided federal domestic violence policy, and spearheaded the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 and its two subsequent re-authorizations.

Biden calls VAWA “What I’m most proud of in my entire career.’

Biden probably means well, but he has consistently misunderstood the domestic violence issue and listened to the wrong people.

While Biden still considers domestic violence to be what he calls a “gender-based crime,” research clearly shows that this is not the case. Women are as likely to initiate an engaging domestic violence as men are, and to a large degree they are able to balance the scales by employing weapons and the element of surprise.

Among other questions, Al Jazeera asked me what everybody is asking — “How much does this help Barack Obama become president?”  My reply was more or less as follows:

Yes, Biden  helps Obama because Obama is (correctly) perceived as inexperienced, particularly on foreign-policy, which is one of Biden’s strong suits. 

On the other hand, what seems odd to me is that so many people are celebrating Biden’s selection, but where were all these people when Biden ran for president in this same election?  Biden did very poorly, garnering less than 1% of the vote at times, and he had to drop out — if he is such a positive, why did he fare so poorly in the primaries?

Also, while everybody is focusing on how Biden helps Obama with foreign-policy, I think there is a gender element here.  I think Biden helps the Democrats win the women’s vote, because of Biden’s long-standing commitment to women’s issues. 

He has helped toughen up child support enforcement, worked on the “wage gap,” and been the architect of the Violence Against Women Act. The Democrats usually do well with women, but this will help them more.

Conversely, the Violence Against Women Act has harmed many innocent men.  American men are being thrown out of their houses and cut off from their children without any real judicial oversight, simply because their wives want them out and tell the court that their husbands threatened them or abused them.  Biden’s legislation has separated many fathers from their children. 

It’s unlikely, but McCain could decide to use this as a vehicle to try to gain men’s votes.

Los Angeles, CA–Kathleen Parker’s Save the Males criticizes the way “men, maleness, and fatherhood have been under siege in American culture for decades.”

In the following excerpt from her chapter “Our Fathers, Our Selves,” Parker discusses the importance of fathers. Parker writes:

For boys, what better way to learn to become men other than by observing the model of their own fathers? A boy watches how his father walks and tries to copy him. “Monkey see, monkey do’ isn”t just a cliché, but one of the most powerful forces of nature. He watches how he ties his shoes, combs his hair, and shaves.

More important, he observes how his father treats his mother and learns in the process how he should treat women. He also learns from his father how to manage his temper, how to laugh at himself, how to get up when he falls down.

Without a father and those lessons in channeling aggression, boys are more likely to become predatory males, more likely to engage in violent behavior and promiscuity. Research shows that 60 percent of rapists in this country came from fatherless homes.

Here”s the truth: A man who has been initiated into manhood by his father has no need to be macho. An insecure, uninitiated man takes on the symbolic, exaggerated masculine role because he has never been given the real thing.

Other men–grandfathers, uncles, stepfathers, adoptive and unrelated mentors–can and do serve as role models. Biological fathers aren”t the only people who can guide a boy along the path toward manhood, but the fact that we recognize the need for a male role model merely underscores the fact that a boy needs a father figure. The only thing better than a father figure, of course, is a father. They”re really so handy to have around, one wonders why we go through such contortions to make substitutes necessary.

Some argue that mothers can do most things fathers do, but that”s true only if we reduce a father”s contributions to a series of mechanical drills. Fathering is more than a skill set, and besides, men and women do things differently. They talk different, smell different. They even hug different.

A father can feed a baby a bottle, but he”s still not a mother. And a mother can play catch in the backyard, but she”s still not a guy playing ball with his son.

A dad playing catch with his daughter is more than a free play period or a gratuitous gender equity exercise. It”s a learning opportunity for male and female to experience fair play, to accept failure in the presence of the opposite sex, to be clumsy and foolish and cute all in the glow of deep, noncompetitive, nonjudgmental, protective, accepting paternal love. That”s quite a package to ignore.  

To learn more or to purchase Save the Males, click here.

Parker, a syndicated columnist who is published in over 300 newspapers every week, is concerned about the decline of fatherhood, and has favorably covered many of our action campaigns.

These include: Campaign Protesting Fox’s Reality Show Bad Dads; Campaign Protesting Florida DCF’s Mistreatment of Loving Father in ‘Elian Gonzalez II’ Case; Campaign Against PBS’s Father-Bashing Breaking the Silence; and Campaign Against ‘Boys are Stupid’ Products.