Parents Without Rights has been around since 1991. It was founded by a group of Rocket Scientists and Engineers on Kennedy Space Center who were outraged to discover that while they were competent to send men and women into outer space, that Florida's Family Courts did not consider them competent to be active Father and Parents, much less have custody of their children, when their marriages failed in divorce.
The Deadbeat Dad Myth: Strategies and Research in Defense of Men In Divorce,
by William N. Bender, Ph.D.
[Unpublished Manuscript, 1992]
Professor of Education - The University of Georgia
The Deadbeat Dad construct is a lie; it is a half-truth which masquerades as a truth, and that is, perhaps, even more dangerous than a lie. The available evidence, presented throughout these chapters, will indicate that the deadbeat dad phenomenon is, like many of the negative images of men presented in our nation's media, almost entirely, a result of a biased court system and an antimale bias in our society.
Men are not genetically predisposed to abandon their children, nor do they refuse to pay child support specifically in order to hurt their children. Rather men leave a court which, their attorney explained, would be biased against them. The available scientific evidence, presented in this text, documents that anti-male bias. Men have seen their children, their homes, their financial futures stolen from them by that biased court. They are ordered to deny their parental love for their children and become a second-class citizen--i.e., a "visitor" in their child' life. Their human right to actively parent their child is stolen from them--most often without any evidence that they did anything wrong and they are told--inaccurately--that this decision is in the child's best interest. Their money is stolen repeatedly, for the next 20 years as ex-wife support rather than child support (There is never any documentation that those monies go to the child, so many men refuse to call it child support--it is ex-wife support).
Men are angry; indeed men are enraged by this discrimination, and rightfully so. In response to this bias, some men decide to not participate in that system. The best understanding of non-compliance with the current child support system is an understanding of an unorganized non-violent civil disobedience movement, founded almost exclusively on anti-male prejudice in the courts. Some men decide that they simply won't pay. I salute them, and encourage them in their courageous decision.
Furthermore this decision is the morally correct one. Men should make that decision. The evidence and rational for this position is presented throughout the text, but a brief introduction is provided here--the theses, if you will. First, the scientific evidence demonstrates that our current child support laws are quite biased. Meyers and Garasky, two government funded researchers, documented in a recent study that child support laws were enforced against men and not against women. In point of fact, even when women are the non-custodial parents, they are rarely ordered to pay any child support at all! On the rare occasion when women are ordered to pay child support, collection efforts are not a vigorous. Clearly, the application and enforcement of these child support laws represent sexist discrimination against men, and they are merely one example.
A related example of the discrimination against men may be found in federal programs for "Families." These programs would include federally funded child support collection programs, "family crisis centers", federal welfare programs (i.e., Aid to Families with Dependent Children), and many non-government programs such as Habitat for Humanity. When men are excluded from families, and the divorce creates financial hardship on all parties concerned, these programs tend to favor the parent with the children. In point of fact, the vast majority of "families" which are assisted by these programs are single parent, maternal custody families; simply put, the automatic discrimination against men at the point of divorce disallows many men from participation in many of these federal and private relief programs. These programs would more accurately be described as "women support programs" rather than "family support programs," and here, as elsewhere, the discrimination against men is apparent for the honest observer.
