Fatherhood

The disconnect between how we view child support laws and how they actually work

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A study found that the views of much of the public differ from how child support laws actually work, with more focus on children’s welfare from the public.

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An excerpt from this article: http://m.deseretnews.com/article/print/865629856/Public-views-differ-from-how-child-support-laws-actually-work.html?ref=http%3A%2F%2Fm.facebook.com%3Fref%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fm.facebook.com

The public views court-ordered formulas calculating child support in the United States and England to be unfair, according to a study released Monday that researchers hope will be valuable information for policymakers dealing with family law issues.

Although child support laws in the two nations differ, the study, published by the Child and Family Blog, found that respondents from the U.S. and England have similar personal views on what is fair in calculating child support paid by noncustodial parents.

“What it tells you is that the existing child support law is not consistent with the basic application of fairness that most people have,” said Ira Ellman, an author of the study and professor of psychology and law at Arizona State University.

For more than a decade, Ellman and professor emeritus Sanford Braver, also of ASU, examined public responses to the application of child support laws, along with other similar topics such as alimony and child custody.

The research ultimately found that the public believes child support should be adjusted higher or lower based on the mother’s income (assuming she is the custodial parent caring for the children). In some states, child support is based solely on the noncustodial parent’s income, while in others both incomes are used in the calculation with an emphasis on the noncustodial parent’s income. Each state has a set formula for judges to use in child support cases.

Braver and Ellman both felt there wasn’t enough information on the public’s view in these areas of family law, and even if their findings don’t result in changes they will at least give policymakers the knowledge and ability to take into account what the public finds fair, Braver said.

“In almost every other area of law we have polling all the time and lots of information as to what the public basically thinks — that’s input that policymakers can use,” Braver said. “They don’t have to slavishly do what the public thinks is right, but I think they ought to know what the public thinks is right.”

Law and public opinion

Methodology for the study was unique, Ellman said. He and Braver wanted the survey to be more than asking abstract questions of people, so respondents were instead asked questions about specific cases.

The team randomly selected prospective jurors in Tucson, Arizona — people who had been notified and were waiting for jury duty, Ellman said. Later, Ellman replicated much of the Arizona study in England, interviewing 3,000 people face-to-face.

“We gave people cases, and said ‘Imagine you are a judge and you are asked to set the amount for this case,'” Ellman said. “We would ask the question over and over, changing the incomes of the mother and father. … If you ask them ‘How much child support do you think people should pay?’ you’re asking them for all these different income combinations. It gave better insight into what their actual views were.”

Respondents were found to be three times as responsive than the law when it came to adjusting child support based on income changes of the noncustodial parent. In one hypothetical scenario, if the noncustodial parent made less than a custodial parent, the amount of child support would be lowered, by $100. In that case, the respondents reported they would actually lower the amount by $300.

Although the study found that people believe it’s fair to change the amount of child support paid if the mother’s income goes up or down, the study also found that once a father was ordered to pay a certain amount, that percentage of his income should remain the same even if his income increased or decreased, Ellman said.

“(Respondents) did not mirror the law in the way they responded to changes in either dad’s or mom’s income,” Ellman said. “They put much more weight on mom’s income; if her income went up or down, that would affect how much child support would be paid, versus what the law would require.”

Another area impacting child support that was explored in the study was reaction to the custodial parents getting remarried, and whether that might change the amount of child support paid.

“The law doesn’t pay any attention to remarriage of the custodial parent, but our respondents wanted to take into account the stepparent’s income,” Braver said. “That changes the resources for the child, that changes the hardship on the custodial parent, they now have the income from a new spouse to rely on. To me, that makes imminent sense that that is what is fair and just and proper.”

Practical perspectives

However, those involved in family law have a different perspective on the hows and whys of child support calculations, including Richard McKendrick, a divorce and child custody lawyer who has been a member of the Family Law Section of the Florida Bar since 1998.

Remarriage doesn’t change anything in child support cases “simply because the new stepparent is not the parent of the child and doesn’t have the legal responsibility. The parent still has the responsibility,” McKendrick said.

Child support in Florida is based on the incomes of both parties, as well as the overnights that the child or children spend at each parent’s house.

Because many individuals in the public are not in the middle of child support cases, it’s hard to have a complete understanding of all of the circumstances and what’s involved in figuring out what child support should be, McKendrick said.

“You have to have a system that is pretty universal, so that there’s a certain fairness in making that decision,” he said.

In most cases both parties don’t believe that the law is treating them fairly — the side being paid child support doesn’t think it is enough, the side paying thinks it is too much, McKendrick said.

There may be a father who has to keep paying the mother more child support due to his rising income but is still having a difficult time making ends meet, McKendrick explained. However, he hasn’t had to pay any medical bills for the children for years, and that may not be something people know.

“The public might be a little naive as to the cost of making it as fair as possible,” he said.

However, there are some who see inequities and want changes in a system that affects many families, said Robert Franklin, who is on the board of directors for the National Parents Organization. NPO usually works with noncustodial parents in child support and custody disputes.

“Child support is routinely established at levels higher than the noncustodial parent can pay,” Franklin said.

Child support is determined by judges who refer to an income table and set of guidelines. Judges do have the authority to depart from those guidelines and modify amounts depending on certain circumstances, but they must justify in writing why a case needed different treatment, Franklin said.

The difficulty of modifying court-ordered child support in situations where noncustodial parents have lost their job or had a pay cut is another shortcoming Franklin would like to see changed. The system requires them to hire a lawyer to prove their inability to pay the required amount, he said.

“Child support is something that is, unfortunately, necessary, because we do have a high rate of divorce and there are children that need support from both parents, but we can do a much better job than we do, we can do a much fairer job than we do,” Franklin said.

Read the rest HERE

Society

Black Like Rachel Dolezal

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“The “I was born in the wrong body” rhetoric favored by other trans people doesn’t work any better and is just as offensive, reducing us to our collective breasts and vaginas. Imagine the reaction if a young white man suddenly declared that he was trapped in the wrong body and, after using chemicals to change his skin pigmentation and crocheting his hair into twists, expected to be embraced by the black community.”

These were the words of ELINOR BURKETT from an opinion piece in the New York Times.

Well, Elinor, your scenario kinda came true yesterday. Go to the last minute or so and you will see a woman react like a deer in the headlights. She was confronted on her perpetual lies:

Summary from the NY times:

The parents of a civil rights activist in Spokane, Wash., say their daughter has misrepresented herself as black for years, spurring a growing discussion on social media about race and identity.

Rachel Dolezal, 37, the president of the N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Spokane and a part-time professor in the Africana Studies program at Eastern Washington University, has said on at least one application that she is black, as well as white and Native American.

Members of civil rights organizations in the Spokane area say Ms. Dolezal has claimed that she is part African-American. Claims that she received hate mail in late February and March generated much local media coverage and more than a little skepticism.

But Ruthanne and Larry Dolezal told a local television station Thursday that their daughter is Caucasian and had changed her appearance over time to look black. “She chose to represent herself as an African-American woman or a biracial person, and that’s simply not true,” Ruthanne Dolezal said.

Ms. Dolezal deflected questions Thursday about her race.

“I feel like I owe my executive committee a conversation” before publicly discussing the “multilayered” issue, she told The Spokesman-Review in Spokane.

“That question is not as easy as it seems,” she said.

In a statement on Friday, the N.A.A.C.P. said, “The NAACP Alaska-Oregon-Washington State Conference stands behind Ms. Dolezal’s advocacy record,” noting that “one’s racial identity is not a qualifying criteria or disqualifying standard for NAACP leadership.”

At first we had cis-gender, transgender, gender non-conforming. Now we have: TransRacial? Racial non-confirming? Cis-racial? Is this self Identity stuff getting a little crazy or what?

I feel this is the revolution eating its own.

Can I change my “race” because I like heavy metal? Can I change my race and call myself white because I feel like it at any time? What if all of a sudden I wanted to be a white man or a white woman…just because I felt like it? What if Dolezal hadn’t lied about her ancestry, but simply said “I was white but now I want you to address me as a black person”? How would people feel about that?

Caitlyn Jenner, and now this woman have opened up a can of worms that is incredibly complex and potentially divisive.

Matt Walsh summed up how I feel about much of this with this quote from a blog post:

According to mainstream feminist wisdom, there is no such thing as a “female brain” or a “female soul” or “feeling like a female.” By the words of every liberal who has ever said anything on the subject of women’s rights in the past four decades, how you dress, look, think, and feel have nothing to do with your womanhood. Usually it would be offensive and sexist to accuse a woman of acting like, thinking like, or feeling like a woman.

Yet now, suddenly, emotions and looks define a woman so severely that a man can actually become one if he claims to experience feelings that he assumes are feminine?

The whole thing contradicts itself.

Feminism and transgenderism say two opposing things about what it means to be a woman. In fact, feminists have come up with the term “neurosexism” to condemn the misogynistic and “pseudo-scientific” idea that male and females brains are different. But Bruce Jenner claims he has “the brain of a female,” so how does this work? Do you mean to tell me that the only people who can have female brains are males?

Meanwhile, feminists regularly insist that the absence of a uterus and a vagina excludes men from having an opinion about things like abortion. So a man can’t have ideas about women’s issues because he lacks the correct anatomy, but he can actually be a woman despite lacking the correct anatomy?

How does that make any kind of sense?

Transgenderism and feminism cannot coexist. Progressives can’t have both.

They’ll just have to choose.

For my part, I agree that a man can never lay claim to womanhood. I also agree that there is such a thing as a female brain and a female soul — and by extension female emotions and female personalities and female characteristics — but the trouble is that female brains and souls are always contained securely in female bodies. A man will never be born with a sloth’s heart or a rhino’s liver or a birch tree’s root system, just as he will never be born with a woman’s brain.

 

 

 

It’s apparent that this woman has major psychological issues. Being exposed as a fraud nationally is incredibly embarrassing.

Racial and sexual identity are real issues and must be discussed. We must get to an understanding that we are all humans, have differences and hopefully will be able to enjoy them instead of use them to claim the biggest victim.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with being white. There is nothing wrong with white people helping out “colored people” in the NAACP or in any other way. A lie is a lie no matter how much you do for a community. Why can’t she be a community activist for whoever she wants to without lying about who she really is? Is she embarrassed to be white?

Then we have to get into the “hate speech,” “hate crime” stuff. Can a black person commit a hate crime against a white woman? She was a supposed target of a “hate crime.”

This whole thing is rather silly.

In a follow up interview:

She said it’s more important for her to “clarify” this with the black community than to “explain it to a community that I, quite frankly, don’t think really understands the definitions of race and ethnicity.”

Dolezal considers herself to be black and rejects the label “African-American.”

Watch her video HERE: http://www.mediaite.com/…/rachel-dolezal-i-dont-give…/

 

Society

Title IX, the All-Purpose Leftist Excuse because It allows persecution of anyone who contravenes feminist doctrine.

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An Excerpt from this article: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/419344/title-ix-all-purpose-leftist-excuse-david-french

If you are a dissenting professor or a male student in modern American higher education, there is a chance that you’ll be subjected to legal proceedings so bizarre, so opaque, and so unfair that you won’t believe they could happen in the United States of America. On the basis of the most flimsy of complaints, supported by minimal to nonexistent evidence, you can find yourself deprived of a lawyer and facing tribunals of hostile, barely trained ideologues applying only the flimsiest rules of evidence. As Northwestern professor Laura Kipnis discovered, it can even be an ordeal to discover the nature of the charges against you. And for every Kipnis case that gets heavily covered by the national media, there are dozens more that go wholly unreported, hidden behind university confidentiality requirements.

When students and professors question this travesty of justice, the response is uniform: The university’s hands are tied. These actions are required by federal law, by Title IX. But this is a monstrous, destructive lie. In reality, the modern campus Star Chamber is the product of collusion between a lawless Obama administration and ideologically complicit universities — with both institutions defying established legal norms to violate due process and chill constitutionally protected speech.

Title IX is, in fact, one of the shortest significant statutes in the United States Code. Its key operative provision is as follows: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” This is the statute passed according the constitutional process — through the House and Senate, signed by the president.

The statute has been dramatically amplified by voluminous regulations, passed through the typical notice-and-comment process, which is less democratic (obviously) than statutory enactment but still formally allows for public input. Multiple Title IX regulations have been challenged in court, with the cases often resulting in significant changes to the regulations as well as the statute itself.

Yet in April 2011, the Obama administration abandoned both the statutory and the regulatory rule-making processes to unilaterally issue a “Dear Colleague” letter from the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR). The letter relied on debunked statistics on the prevalence of sexual assault on campus and then not only mandated an extraordinarily low burden of proof in sexual-assault cases (“preponderance of the evidence” rather than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard applied in criminal cases) but failed to even acknowledge the tension between expansive sexual-harassment prohibitions and the broad constitutional protections afforded even “offensive” speech.

These procedural and substantive problems were immediately recognized by critics on the left and the right. For example, 16 University of Pennsylvania law professors criticized new university policies enacted in response to the OCR letter by reminding the university that the OCR had overstepped its bounds:

In addressing the issue of sexual assault, the federal government has sidestepped the usual procedures for making law. Congress has passed no statute requiring universities to reform their campus disciplinary procedures. OCR has not gone through the notice-and-comment rulemaking required to promulgate a new regulation. Instead, OCR has issued several guidance letters whose legal status is questionable.

Yet despite the lawless federal action, it’s gone largely unchallenged in the courts. Why? Why have billion-dollar educational institutions shied away from legal confrontation with the Department of Education, even when the department clearly violated mandatory rule-making requirements? One reason, of course, is fear. The DOE can threaten federal funding, and universities are dependent on the flow of federal dollars. The primary reason, however, is ideology. Universities are in the grip of a feminist-driven hysteria, with university campuses inaccurately portrayed as among America’s most dangerous places for young women. The price of defying the OCR — which enabled the campus crackdown — was the ire of the radical campus Left.

Universities are addicted to censorship, and the Department of Education is their partner and enabler.
So universities meekly acquiesced, crafting new policies that have done nothing to calm the hysteria but have instead given ideologues powerful new tools to crush dissent and ruin innocent students’ lives. For example, at Northwestern alone, Professor Kipnis faced a Title IX complaint over her Chronicle of Higher Education essay, a faculty colleague faced a second complaint for objecting to Ms. Kipnis’s treatment at a faculty meeting, and the president of the university faced his own complaint for writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal supporting academic freedom. How many professors or administrators are willing to speak freely with Title IX investigations the price of offending the wrong students?

Read the rest HERE

 

Society

Why do high-profile campus rape stories keep falling apart?

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A page from “A Rape on Campus,” published in the December 2014 issue of Rolling Stone. (Reuters)

A page from “A Rape on Campus,” published in the December 2014 issue of Rolling Stone. (Reuters)

An excerpt from this article in the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/06/02/why-do-high-profile-campus-rape-stories-keep-falling-apart/

At Slate, Emily Yoffe digs into the one of the poster cases for the anti-campus rape advocacy film “The Hunting Ground” and finds some devastating flaws in how the movie portrays what happened.

[Kamilah] Willingham’s story is not an illustration of a sexual predator allowed to run loose by self-interested administrators. The record shows that what happened that night was precisely the kind of spontaneous, drunken encounter that administrators who deal with campus sexual assault accusations say is typical. (The filmmakers, who favor David Lisak’s poorly substantiated position that our college campuses are rife with serial rapists, reject the suggestion that such encounters are the source of many sexual assault allegations.) Nor is Willingham’s story an example of official indifference. Harvard did not ignore her complaints; the school thoroughly investigated them. And because of her allegations, the law school education of her alleged assailant has been halted for the past four years.

I’ll let you read Yoffe’s article to understand why the allegations against the man don’t hold up.

But this all raises an important question. I think the activists on this issue are mistaken when they say that we’re in the midst of a campus rape crisis. The data just don’t support the notion. And the studies that do have some serious flaws. The results produced by this debate are also troubling: Colleges and universities are essentially pulling an end-around the criminal justice system, adjudicating sexual assault cases on their own, on terms more favorable to the accusing party. The punishment isn’t as severe, but it can still be pretty devastating for the wrongly accused. And the guilty aren’t put away to protect society, but merely banished from campus to protect the students who pay tuition.

That said, there’s obviously no doubt that campus rape happens. The nature of the crime makes it extraordinarily difficult to assess its frequency. From the studies I’ve seen, it seems safe to say that it isn’t nearly as frequent as the one-in-five figure often raised by activists, but it happens often enough that there are likely thousands of assaults on campus every year. It’s also easy to sympathize with frustrations over how difficult rape can be to prove, especially those assaults that don’t produce any physical injury. And because rape can be so hard to prove, there’s no doubt that there are thousands of cases in which a rape actually occurred and for which the perpetrator was never disciplined, criminally, administratively or any other way.

So here’s my question: Given that there are so many legitimate incidents to choose from, why have so many high-profile cases ultimately fallen apart?

If you were to ask an average person today to name a prominent story about rape on college campuses, odds are pretty good that among the top four or five replies would be the Duke lacrosse case, the Rolling Stone cover story about Jackie and the University of Virginia, Columbia University “mattress girl” Emma Sulkowicz and one of the stories from “The Hunting Ground.” Yet in all of these stories, either the accusations were later shown to be a complete fabrication or at least serious questions were raised about them.

Each time a new high-profile story falls apart, a larger portion of the public becomes less likely to believe the next one. (It would be nice to think that we’d evaluate these stories on their own merits. But that isn’t how we tend to process contentious issues.) The anti-campus rape activists often claim that false accusations of sexual assault are practically nonexistent. (“Anti-campus rape activists” is a necessary but admittedly clumsy term. Every sane person is obviously opposed to campus rape. And even among activists who have made campus rape their issue, there is dissent and disagreement about strategy, priorities and reform.) But that so many of the accusations that they themselves have chosen as emblems of the cause have been proved false or debatable suggests that they’re either wrong about the frequency of false accusations or that the movement itself has had some extraordinarily bad luck.

Read the entire piece HERE

Society

Shooting from the Hip: Camille Paglia sends #feminists into a frenzy.

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Camille Paglia is one truly interesting person. This in an excerpt from an old article, but a great read.

Originally posted here: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/shooting-from-the-hip-camille-paglia-sends-feminists-into-a-frenzy-she-reveres-masculinity-its-hot-tried-to-match-male-promiscuity-i-couldnt-and-believes-date-rape-is-an-occupational-hazard-sex-is-combat-is-there-any-serious-point-here-or-is-she-all-motormouth-1479082.html

Paglia not only envies but reveres what she identifies as men’s naturally raucous sexuality. It is brutal masculine lust, she says, that drives men out into the world, away from the potency of their mothers. Male lust is, in this sense, the motor force of civilisation. Horny college boys (temporarily free of both mothers and wives), men who visit prostitutes, gay men who pick up tricks in public lavatories – these are all valiant representatives of the masculine principle, re-enacting the primary, civilisation-forging escape from Mother Nature.

‘The historical record will show that I am the one who resurrected masculinity,’ Paglia says. ‘It’s disgusting the way masculinity has been denigrated by feminism. I think masculinity is hot] In ancient Greece they had these celebrations of the young, masculine body and this was gorgeous, okay? What kind of feminism is it that calls masculinity a ‘disease’ the way Marilyn French does? That is illness. Neurosis] Psychosis]’


All of this helps to explain Paglia’s position on rape. Being reluctant to curb vital male energies more than is absolutely necessary, she defines rape as ‘stranger rape or the intrusion of sex into a non-sexual encounter’. Date rape is ‘bullshit’. Women should accept that dates are part of a mating ritual and acknowledge the risks that they entail. ‘Listen, my generation of women said we wanted sexual freedom, but we accepted the risks] Sex is combat] Gay men understand this. Every gay man I know has had rough encounters – why aren’t they running for protection from the police? I’m saying to women, ‘Grow up] If you go to a man’s apartment, you are signalling that you want sex. If you don’t, then carry a knife] I carry a knife] This is street-smart feminism] Not weeping back to the authorities when things go wrong]’

In the past, I’ve found myself cheering Paglia’s counterblasts against the date rape lobby. I still think she offers an important warning to women, not to slip back into the frail roles of the past. But in encouraging women to ‘grow up’, she seems to absent men from all responsibility. She is fond of comparing rape with theft. ‘Blaming the victim makes perfect sense if the victim has behaved stupidly . . . when you drive your car to New York City, do you leave your keys on the hood?’

Read the entire piece here: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/shooting-from-the-hip-camille-paglia-sends-feminists-into-a-frenzy-she-reveres-masculinity-its-hot-tried-to-match-male-promiscuity-i-couldnt-and-believes-date-rape-is-an-occupational-hazard-sex-is-combat-is-there-any-serious-point-here-or-is-she-all-motormouth-1479082.html