American Fathers 4Change with a mission of helping to bring awareness that by increasing the proportion of children growing up with involved, responsible, and committed fathers it will improve the well being of children.
"The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband." ~ Honore de Balzac
Several of our videos because of our promotion of activism and open disdain for our judiciary are blocked from play on mainstream sites. This video can only be seen on my hard drive and on dailymotion. Lets see how long it lasts on Facebook...
Posted by Fathers-4-Justice USA on Tuesday, October 20, 2015
If you are facing Family CourtAbuse and Children Protection Services Agency: CPS-DFYS / DCP&P / DCF/ DHHS [whatever name CPS is called in your state] is involved in your case please join us to help defeat their fraud, pain and suffering, emotional, physical, psychological and financial abuse -racket.
United we can! This is NOT Fathers Rights groups but FAMILIES fighting together the system. There are woman and men protecting our children's future that understand that Judges are destroying us all for money.
Generalprinciples that we believe are a forming, coalescing consensus.
A
working group formed in December of 2012 through a variety of men’s rights
publications, forums, and YouTube channels. Over four dozen people from around
the globe participated in making suggestions and giving general input. Despite
the large number of people from diverse backgrounds, and the fact that almost
none of the participants knew most of the others, its development was
shockingly un-contentious, even on some of the more contentious points.
This
is not a document anyone is expected to sign or pledge to. It is an effort to
identify a general consensus.
Imagine you are in a divorce. You’ve been a dedicated parent and you aren’t a convicted felon or being accused of a crime. Now imagine walking into a local court for a procedural hearing and in a single decree your children are banned from seeing you, speaking to you or communicating in any way based solely on hearsay and allegation. Nothing’s been proven, no due process has occurred to prove anything yet a capricious judge has made a snap decision that changes the rest of your life and your children’s. What would you do?
Unfortunately this scenario is the real life experience of thousands of families across the country. An overzealous or biased Judge makes a snap decision that takes away the most important things in our lives. Whether or not you were the one seeking divorce there’s very little that parents who find themselves in this situation can do. Even when children are banned ‘temporarily’ from their parents, months can drag on to years between court dates and there’s no pause button in life. Milestones go by, alienation grows, bitterness increases and worst of all children experience immense pain and loss. Surprisingly most states have no provisions to intervene when children are banned from their parents yet this is one of the cruelest punishments that a court can levy.
While the US Constitution gives the powers of marriage, divorce and adoption to state civil courts, state civil courts simply ignore their obligations to support the civil rights protections of parents as held in the US Constitution. Parents who can’t afford attorneys can lose their children fighting spouses with access to legal assistance. Children who are the ones ‘protected’ have no say in bizarre custody decisions. Evidence standards are non-existent in family courts in the USA so children can be taken from parents purely on accusation. However, since many courts receive federal aid and recent Supreme Court cases like Turner vs. Rogers have reinforced the concept of due process in divorce many parents are turning to federal courts to seek restoration of their parental rights based on civil rights arguments.
Problem 1: Children who lose contact with their fathers do worse in life.
Problem 2: Single mothers who want to work often struggle with the cost of childcare.
Problem 3: Many non-resident fathers are without meaningful work.
All three of these problems are fairly well established in the research literature. Each also motivates a battery of policy responses, with varying degrees of efficacy. In a recent report on poverty and opportunity from a working group convened by Brookings and the American Enterprise Institute, non-resident fathers received some special attention. (I was a member of the group).
The report notes that the Child Support Enforcement Program has become increasingly effective at establishing paternity and levying child support payments. Good: parenting is a responsibility, regardless of the nature of the relationship into which a child is born. But the payments can also be onerous for non-resident parents, who are almost always fathers, ‘functioning as a tax on their earnings’. The accumulation of child support debt is a particular problem – non-resident parents are currently about $53 billion in arrears for child support – and the Brookings/AEI group suggested that these kinds of debts should be forgiven in certain circumstances.
“Failing to expect both parents to support their children is not only unfair, it reduces marriage incentives, increases poverty rates for custodial mothers and children, and is likely to hurt children,” the report concludes. But we should not make the mistake of assuming that support can only come in the form of cash.
Since most non-resident parents are fathers, there is a tendency for policy-makers to see them primarily in terms of their financial obligations, as walking ATMs. Many of these men are in no position to make serious financial contributions: 41 percent of poor non-resident fathers have been out of paid work for at least a year, according to a recent study conducted by the Urban Institute. Meanwhile, working single mothers are also struggling. Forty percent of those working said that child care costs led them to change jobs or hours worked, according to a recent survey.
So, let’s see…Lots of non-resident fathers are not gainfully employed; single mothers are struggling with childcare cost; and children, especially boys, are suffering from the distance or absence of their father. Here’s an idea: have the fathers look after their children, allowing mothers to get into and stay in work. The savings for the mother would far outweigh child support payments, which could be suspended when the father is providing childcare. What if, rather than squeezing these men for every last nickel, we were to ask them to do childcare instead?
How many fathers could help in this way? According to the National Survey of Family Growth, for the years 2006-2010, there were almost nine million non-resident fathers in the United States. We do not know for sure how many of them are not currently in paid work, but we can produce some estimates. As a group, non-resident fathers are less educated than the norm: 15 percent dropped out of high school and 38 percent have just a high school diploma. Given this educational breakdown, and assuming that non-resident fathers, on average, face the same labor market conditions as their similarly-educated peers, we estimate that 2.35 million non-resident fathers are unemployed. This figure lines up reasonably well with the Urban Institute study referred to earlier.
On paper at least, then, there is a potential reserve army of childcare workers of more than two million. Of course there are lots of reasons why this figure does not translate to the real world. Non-resident fathers are more likely to be incarcerated; they may have addiction or substance abuse problems; and they may be wholly unsuited, in some way, for caring for their own children. Some may not live close-by. But even so, there must be many fathers who could be doing more care. Many of these men might object to doing the unpaid work of raising their children, even if their child support payments were waived. But if they are not active in the labor market, it is hard to see why they ought to take this view: we are talking about their own children, after all.
Right now, the childcare contribution of non-resident fathers is very low, accounting for just 6 percent of total time when the mother is in a single-parent household, and just 1 percent of total time when the mothers is living with a boyfriend, according to research by Ariel Kalil, from the University of Chicago.
No doubt there are practical obstacles to increasing the amount of care provided by non-resident fathers, including some of those discussed above. But perhaps the greatest barrier is the outdated mental model with which these problems are addressed. As my colleague Isabel Sawhill and I argued in a recent New York Times piece (‘Men’s Lib!’), we urgently need to break down outdated gender roles if both men and women are to flourish. Seeing non-resident fathers as potential caregivers is one step in this direction. After all, women can now serve in every role in the U.S. military, so why can’t we start to see men performing a bigger role as parents?
Richard V. Reeves is Policy Director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution.
Clark, who identifies herself as a “Floridian-American,” claims that her civil rights were violated five years ago when she was arrested for plotting to break the father of her baby out of prison.
Fittingly, her memo is full of what is, to say the least, a dismissive attitude towards Judge Willis Hunt and other agents of the government.
“You think because you sit up there in that little black robe hiding behind the ignorance of the masses like a little b*tch, that ANYBODY gives a d*mn about you or what you have to say?” Clark says. “Well, just in case you haven’t noticed-I couldn’t give two f*cks about you or what you have to say. F*ck you, old man. You’re a joke. Your court’s a joke. You take it up the a*s; and you suck nuts. Lol.”
"So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home." (Tecumseh).
American Fathers Liberation: ALL Men’s Rights are Human Rights. ’nuff said http://bit.ly/1JgMgEm
