Unconscionable Debt Collection Practices of Child Support Enforcement

by Giovanni LoPresti

As an American Citizen, you want to believe that any person can rely upon judicial fairness in a child support proceeding. The outrageous child support law on the books today is designed to treat all child support debtors like a piece of garbage. The wisdom of common sense, respect, judicial fairness, doesn’t exist under the present law. The mastermind of this unconscionable child support enforcement law was created by former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey.

His Senate Bill modified U.S. Code Title IV-D (42 U.S.C. § 666(a)(9)(c)) which requires state courts to prohibit retroactive reduction of child support obligations. The law abolished the statute of limitations, created a civil judgment by operation of law on all child support debtors, allows adverse credit reporting, allows a cost of living adjustment every two years, allows for review of child support orders every 3 years, without a showing of substantial change in circumstance, allows for a suspension of drivers licenses, passports, professional licenses, income withholding, tax intercepts, unemployment & workman compensation intercepts, requires citizen to provide their social security numbers, requires employers to utilize new hire directory to see if a child support debt is owed, provides locator services, requires health care coverage to be provided by either or both parents, and requires a debtor citizen to show proof of substantial change in circumstances necessary in request for review outside 3-year cycle.

I would like to focus on the requirement of proof of substantial change in circumstances necessary in requesting a review of child support outside 3-year cycle. The law offers no guidance whatsoever on what constitutes a substantial chance in circumstances. Similarly, the Office of Child Support Enforcement offers no guidance either. With no guidance whatsoever, the law requires payments to be maintained without regard of a citizen’s ability to pay.

In my view, common sense and judicial fairness would dictate that an injury, illness, loss of employment at no fault of a citizen, whether temporary or not, would constitute a substantial change in financial circumstances? Nonetheless, family court judges throughout the United States have consistently rejected a child support debtor’s request for child support reduction under these circumstances. I asked myself over and over again, why are family court judges are so mean and lack understanding and compassion? The answer to this question is going to shock you.

Under the present law, there is a presumption that child support award is correct and a citizen debtor has the ability to pay or find similar work at the same rate of pay, even if you’re not making the same amount of money. Put simply, Congress has provided family court judges physic abilities to determine a citizen earning capabilities. I find this horrifying, but family court judges find no shame in it. I have heard endless horror stories of citizens whose financial circumstances changed, and denied judicial fairness in family court. Unfortunately, this is what will likely happen if your financial circumstances change:

1. Unemployment or workmen compensation garnished at the full amount.
2. Your ability to support yourself doesn’t matter.
3. Fall behind at no fault of your own, driver’s license, professional license, passport
revoked.
4. Your credit will be destroyed.
5. You can expect armed law enforcement showing up and putting you in county jail
for failure to pay child support.
6. Tax refund intercepted.

WHY A CHILD SUPPORT DEBTORS ARE DENIED JUDICIAL FAIRNESS
WHEN FINANCIAL CIRCUMSTANCES CHANGE

My researched has revealed that most Americans are unaware that our federal government reimburses States 66% of collection cost expended for child support enforcement, see Title IV under the Social Security Act. This doesn’t bother me, but the additional incentive dollars the States receive to treat citizens like garbage does. Under Title IV:

States receive additional incentive dollars for:

a. paternity establishment
b. order establishment
c. collection on current support cases
d. cases paying towards arrears
e. cost effectiveness
f. performance

So regardless of a child support debtors changed financial circumstances, a family court judge will routinely deny any request for a reduction or, even a temporary reduction. The unfortunate truth, family court judges armed with physic abilities to determine a citizen’s earning abilities, don’t care. They are the front line in defending the State’s performance incentives. A family court judge will bully a citizen by denying any type of relief sought, suspend your driver’s license, professional license, passport, may incarcerate you for failure to pay child support without a finding of ability to pay, intercept your tax return, garnish your unemployment or workman’s compensation, destroy your credit, and your home State will receive additional incentive dollars from our federal government for doing this to you. This is not only insane, cruel, unconscionable, but definitely creates an appearance of impropriety.

States routinely incarcerate child support debtors, without any determination that they have the ability to pay. Our States actually get paid additional incentive dollars from our federal government for incarnating a child support debtor. The States routinely tell citizens that they are court ordered to pay child support and find them in civil contempt. However, the court order is also a civil judgment by operation of law. Did you ever hear of any situation whereby any judge would allow any person to have a slice a cake and eat it too? For example, if you obtained a civil judgment against me, you can’t suspend my passport, driver’s license, professional license, intercept my tax return, garnish my unemployment or disability check, hold me in contempt, and jail me for failure to pay a debt. Special thanks to our federal government, state government are permitted to have a slice of cake and eat it too.

The last time I checked, the 14th Amendment prohibits States from denying any person within its territory the equal protection of the laws. The federal government must do the same, but this is also required by the 5th Amendment Due Process Clause. All citizens should be entitled to judicial fairness in any court proceeding. I urge all citizens to write their elected officials and asked them to repeal this unconscionable law. Alternatively, send your elected official a strong message and vote them out of office. A debtor citizen cannot rely upon judicial fairness in a family court proceeding, if a State has a financial interest in maintaining additional incentives dollars.

Child Support & Terrorists

drinking the kool-aid?

Your nation is under attack by terrorists!

When a nation is attacked, people will go to war, risking the loss of life and limb. They are willing to suffer in their standard of living because of what they judge to be a noble or righteous cause. Families are under attack from an enemy within our borders, yet most victims refuse to be part of the war effort.

Instead most injured persons concentrate on their own personal loss by falling into the money trap. They support the enemy, the fascist divorce industrial complex that has swallowed the nation, part of the international unity promoted by the United Nations. Most support terrorists by hiring an attorney, and imagining that they can receive justice in a weighted court system. They may even fool themselves by equating the expense of court with love for their kids. Supporting a fascist terrorist system to achieve justice is insanity of the highest order. Some have fallen into this trap in the past, and now see the light. Most are still lost in the darkness of state propaganda.

Both the military industrial complex and the divorce industrial complex thrive off creation and perpetuation of real or perceived “enemies.” Collusion between private corporations and government corporations, or fascism, is on the increase at the expense of civil rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Today, the founding documents of the United States are sometimes given lip service, but are commonly violated by modern government officials. Just as foreign wars are profitable for war industries, war within families is profitable for the divorce industrial complex. This industrial complex consists of judges, courts, lawyers, psychologists, social workers, “child support” workers, and all who assist in separating parents who have committed no crime from their children.

Neither industrial complex have use for peaceful resolutions. They thrive from trickery and slander.

Victims of the divorce industrial complex that are still alive need to unite, to fight terrorism against families and against a renegade court system that ignores the foundation of law in the Constitution for a modern take on legal precedence. This tyrannical sickness is being spread across the globe to benefit special interests behind the scenes. No one is safe. A new world order of tyranny is already upon us.

In the United States, the founding fathers provided the means for people to address tyrannical government. This begins with the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees free speech, free press and the right of the people peacefully to assemble to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Exposing the Fascist Divorce Industrial Complex: family court judges, family lawyers, psychologists, social workers, child protective services, child support agencies, and all who assist family courts in the process of diminishing relationships between fit parents and their children.

VIOLATIONS OF CIVIL AND CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS:

1) Denial of First Amendment Freedoms of Religion and Speech – Parents cannot train up their children according to their beliefs when stripped of parental authority.

2) Denial of First Amendment Right to Petition for Redress of Grievances – Parents, mostly fathers, are denied justice in family courts – their petitions are denied or dismissed.

3) Kidnapping – State “family” court judges steal children from fit, law-abiding parents, perpetuating custody battles.

4) Denial of Fourth Amendment Right to Privacy – Unsubstantiated accusations result in invasion of homes and stealing of children by police or child protective services without probable cause; judges routinely order psych evaluations which invade and probe every detail of private family life of law-abiding parents. Parties who come to court to address legal issues are diverted into a wilderness of psychological evaluations because judges refuse to do their job: enforce the constitutional right to parent, further draining family assets.

5) Denial of Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment Rights to Due Process of Law – These include: denial of the right to free counsel for poor defendants, denial of the right to take depositions, lack of evidenciary hearings, lack of notice, and improper standard of proof – with defendants being presumed guilty and being sentenced, like criminals, to loss of the fundamental constitutional right to be a parent.

6) Denial of the Sixth Amendment Right to a Speedy and Public Trial – “Temporary” pendente lite orders in secretive unrecorded hearings usually become permanent orders. Justice delayed is justice denied. Fathers are treated as guilty in either or both criminal and “civil” court upon mere accusation, and are in effect sentenced to loss of the fundamental right to parenthood in civil court even if criminal cases are dismissed.

7) Denial of the Seventh Amendment Right to Trial by Jury – Heartless, treasonous judges make decisions to sever loving parent/child relationships which no jury would allow, which perpetuates continual litigation and profits for the divorce industry.

8) Denial of Thirteenth Amendment Prohibition Against Slavery and Involuntary Servitude – Usually fathers are enslaved as non-custodial parents and forced to pay extortion (so-called “child support”) or risk being thrown into debtors’ prison.

9) False Imprisonment – Fathers are typically arrested first in domestic disputes upon mere accusation. Usually fathers are thrown into debtors’ prisons when they do not or are unable to comply with the illegal extortion/”child support” orders.

10) Denial of Fourteenth Amendment Right to Equal Protection of the Laws – Mothers initiate most divorces and are “awarded” sole custody in the vast majority of contested cases even though both parents are equally fit and loving parents, resulting in state sanctioned gender discrimination and child abuse – stealing one half of the child’s world.

11) Denial of Fourteenth Amendment Liberty Interest in the Family – Numerous U.S. Supreme Court rulings have well-established the fundamental liberty interest in the family and the constitutional right to be a parent. Yet, treasonous family court judges daily and routinely ignore and violate the U.S. Constitution and their own state constitutions, and violate their oath of office to uphold those constitutions.

12) Fraud upon family courts – Judges and lawyers of the multi-billion dollar divorce industry increase the amount of custody and family law litigation in contradiction of its alleged purpose – to strengthen and preserve families, by trampling on the rights of U.S. Citizens.

Many professed professionals routinely commit or assist in fraud upon courts of family law as they violate the U.S. Constitution by pretending to act “in the best interest of the child”. Then, under the false pretense, a created need for “child support” caused an unequal custody order, the same renegade, tyrannical judges issue extortion (“child support”) orders against these parents. They even routinely jail parents who do not or are unable to obey their extortion demands in debtors’ prisons of involuntary servitude. This false imprisonment is nothing less than slavery.

This involves a perversion of language in which some acts are given names opposite of the true meanings, the foundation of lies in which families are being destroyed in kangaroo courts across the United States.

PRIMARY EXAMPLES:

A. STEALING A CHILD from a fit parent is called the “BEST INTEREST OF THE CHILD”.

B. EXTORTION against a fit parent, necessary ONLY because of the illegal, unconstitutional, forced unequal custody order, is called “CHILD SUPPORT “.

C. INVASION OF PRIVACY when no crime has been alleged is called a “PSYCHOLOGICAL EVALUATION”.

States: Fear All Around

by Idaho senator, Mary Souza

Fear was evident on both sides of the Child Support bill we were called back to consider last Monday for the Special Session. The House and Senate Judiciary & Rules Joint Committee, of which I am a member, heard nearly 5 hours of testimony, and much of it was based in fear. Those supporting the bill were afraid Idaho’s child support collection system would dissolve without passage of the bill, leaving children and families in dire straits. Those opposed to the bill were worried about loss of constitutional due process and opening our laws to foreign influence. Are any of these people crazy or worthy of ridicule or reprisal? Of course not. Concerns and questions must always be respected.

This was a tricky and complicated piece of legislation. Lack of communication from the Administration left important questions unanswered, which fanned the flames of fear on all sides and caused the need for the special session.

In my position as the new Senator from Coeur d’Alene, I talked with and heard from a great number of constituents before the special session. Many were in favor, many opposed, but all were very worried. I studied the bill, in depth, on my own and conferred with others. Then I asked questions of a number of attorneys and, as you might guess, heard differing overall views. There were some consistent answers, however, and several of the most important areas of agreement were:

1. The international treaty on child support collection, which is the root of the federal push for this legislation, cannot become more powerful than our US Constitution. No treaty can.

2. Due process is protected for Idahoans involved in child support through foreign countries, and the Idaho court has the right to dismiss a support request if the other country’s laws are “manifestly incompatible” with our public policies.

3. Since 1996, Idaho has had reciprocal child support relationships with 16 foreign countries without significant problems.

4. Child support collection would continue in Idaho, if the bill did not pass, but it there would be a period of uncertainty and possible disruption, until alternate plans could be put in place.

I voted to approve the bill because of the potential disruption. It passed the House 49-21 and the Senate 33-2. But I remain unhappy, as do most legislators, with the coercive methods used by the Federal government to force states’ approval of this bill. The Feds fueled fear by threatening to withdraw the entire $43 million dollar grant Idaho uses to collect child support payments if the bill was not approved exactly as written and within their dictated timeframe. They also threatened to close our access to the federal database portal used to track the parents responsible to pay for their children.

This just underscores my overall frustration that, too often in Boise, we legislate out of fear… fear of losing Federal money. A significant and growing portion of Idaho’s state budget, nearly 35%, comes from Washington DC. We receive large sums of money for transportation, health and welfare, education and more. And we all know those who give the money hold the strings.

There is legal precedence, however, for states to challenge the hammer of the Federal government when they threaten to remove funding for an existing program as coercion to entice additional action. US Supreme Court Justice Roberts wrote a clear opinion on a recent case about state Medicaid funds. “The States…object that Congress has ‘crossed the line distinguishing encouragement from coercion’…The State’s claim that this threat serves no purpose other than to force unwilling States to sign up for the dramatic expansion of health care coverage affected by the act. Given the nature and the threat and the programs at issue here we must agree.”

There’s more to his legal opinion, of course, but Idaho continues to allow Federal dollars to dictate many of our decisions. To push back would require a show of will and coordination from the Administration, which is not in evidence right now.

Our Founding Fathers were concerned about the power of the then newly formed central government, and feared its future growth could alter the balance of power in our country. Thomas Jefferson expressed this key belief when he reminded, “The federal government is our servant, not our master!”

–

States have become dependent on Federal money, corporations that are mostly concerned with feeding themselves. The views of this senator don’t begin to address the reality of the system, for all Americans.

This poor senator. She doesn’t realize that she had already undercut the U.S. Constitution by going along with the Feds. She wrote this in an effort to try to absolve her conscience before her constituents. Poor. Pathetic. Stupid. – Rathbone

Owe Money? You’re A Deadbeat

by Moody Jim Rathbone

these are the ‘good guys’

They want you shaking in your boots. If you owe child support in the United States, authority claims you are a “deadbeat.” People owe money for all kinds of debts, but that doesn’t make the person a deadbeat, nor are they called one. In fact, the current Administration wants you in debt to grow the economy, but most “deadbeat” parents with an average or less income don’t have any money to spend to support the dreams of the state. In fact, they don’t even have the mythology of the “American Dream” that American Presidents push like candy. They are too busy supporting the state and Federal government to prop up unconstitutional child support. It’s all about “justice” they say.

For example:

Early Wednesday morning, a group of Montgomery County sheriff’s deputies went around the county seeking “deadbeat” parents who have failed to appear in court for failing to pay child support. The nine parents taken into custody owe a total of $66,382.90 to nine children.

In fact, as far as these authorities are concerned, you owe them money. That is because according to Federal Law, you do owe the state. Child Support is federal debt per the Bradley Amendment for Social Security Administration. The Federal government pays the state corporations handsomely for collecting what debt they can, all backed and funded by federal taxpayer funds. It’s Constitutionally illegal, but justified by fed and state alike (as statute or policy) as they work together to pry money from “deadbeats” any way they can. The Feds may be financially bankrupt themselves, but you won’t have that privilege, if and when you decide to file bankruptcy. That is because President Bush signed eternal child support into law by modifying bankruptcy code. The state has all the rights. There is no way out in their eyes… you know, the death and taxes sort of thing. That is the sad path that this nation has taken – the path of exploitation, extortion and tyranny.

In this day, depending on the local authority around you, the sheriff is seeking to shame anyone that is behind on child support for any reason. They post your name, address and face on a billboard or online with your local newspaper. To authorities, your debt of child support is a public issue that is all your fault. The reality is entirely different. The state persecutes you because of corporate policy. You see, each court, each government department is a corporation that seeks to make money off of you. Many of them have decided that you will be cuffed and slapped in jail, with the expectation of coercing you to pay up your child support. The court doesn’t even need to be right. Much of the time, the ‘judge’ isn’t right – not even close.

Actually, these “family courts” are wrong 100% of the time. American ‘citizens’ are supposed to have Constitutional guarantees that preclude evil treatment by the authority of courts, family judges and those that take their orders from them. Due process has become fiction. Most attorneys are fearful of standing up for real justice. That justice certainly isn’t oppressing non-custodial parents, even if they are ‘guilty’ before the law (that means what they want it to mean). For that matter, human rights have become fiction too – even as the Feds point a finger of accusation at China or Russia. The Feds have made themselves the holy arbiter of ‘human rights,’ the church of morality. In the case of any court-ordered child support, your human right is for you to pay up and shut up. That is called tyranny.

Everyone is affected. Nobody is immune. They just think they are – immune that is. The only vaccination is to overthrow the tyranny.

NJ Lawsuit: No Automatic License Suspensions Over Child Support

A new class action lawsuit seeks to end the automatic suspensions of driver’s license held by parents in New Jersey who are behind on child support payments. The lawsuit seeks to limit when suspensions would be allowed.

The suit filed last Friday claims that such suspensions are unconstitutional, contrary to the “clearly expressed legislative intent” and “obviously counter-productive.” It was filed in state Superior Court by David Perry Davis, a Pennington-based attorney, and names four plaintiffs who have had their licenses suspended.

The attorney that filed the lawsuit called the license suspensions “absurdly self-defeating,” noting that policy and statute can block parents from going to work, applying for jobs, or seeing their children.” “It doesn’t make sense. The idea that automatically suspending someone’s driver’s license because he is in arrears will force him to pay child support is an example of a well-intentioned, but not well thought-out law.”

The suit wants judges only to suspend a delinquent payer’s license only as a last resort, not as required punishment. “Judges should have this as an option, but only if the facts of a case justify it.”

The suit names Raymond Martinez, chief administrator of the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, state Acting Attorney General John Jay Hoffman and Director of the New Jersey Division of Family Development as defendants. A hearing on a preliminary injunction should be held in the next 10 days.  In typical fashion, these ‘authorities’ refuse comment, noting they don’t publicly discuss ongoing litigation.

New Jersey is the only state in the country that imposes an immediate draconian penalty on motorists. According to Attorney Davis, most states suspend an average of 250 licenses annually, but nearly 20,500 licenses were suspended in New Jersey last year. Of the licenses in New Jersey, 99.5 percent of those licenses were suspended without a hearing being convened. That defies due process rights.

Taxpayers Pay for Road Signs to Shame ‘Deadbeats’

by Moody Jim Rathbone

If you are a non-custodial parent, you’ve probably heard it before. When you find yourself behind in child support you are automatically labeled a deadbeat by certain authorities and those with an axe to grind. After all, they are ‘entitled’ to your cash any way they can get it.

Nationally, some ‘public officers’ have taken it on themselves to disgrace the public ‘deadbeats’ in their jurisdiction at your expense. In a new program, those in Northumberland County Pennsylvania are likely to find their faces on a billboards. The county may lease four billboards for $700 a year and post photos to shame those who owe the courts nearly $20 million in fines and child support. Commissioner Vinny Clausi loves the idea.

“I am 100 percent supporting this. These guys have been doing everything they can to collect this money. We have tried for years to get these people to pay, and I believe that the efforts between the cost collections team and the constant pressure the group is applying to the deadbeats who refuse to pay is something we need in this county.”

You remember who is paying for the signs, regardless of any perceived return on investment. The taxpayer is paying for the signs. Regardless of whether it comes from federal money or state money, they are pulling it from the tax base somewhere. This is because corporate government supposedly doesn’t make any money, even though this is a cultural lie. Corporate government is all about making money since virtually all government offices and courts are incorporated. They make money, even when they don’t. That is why they believe they can afford billboards with the intent of shaming local residents into submission.

Just remember, regardless of what Vinny and others in ‘public service’ say, taxpayer money is being used to fund the venture for a measure that is Constitutionally illegal. Due process has been vacated. No matter. Child support law is unconstitutional, but Federal family law statute has overcome that. Officials believe it is their God-given right to oppress those that owe them – publicly, and at your expense. This is also at the expense of your grandchildren as well, since the nation is running a budget deficit. That’s just good business. Right?

Technically, Vinny and his ilk are the deadbeats.

People with outstanding warrants can avoid arrest or jail for failure to pay child support if they surrender, court officials say in Pennsylvania. The amnesty program will not forgive outstanding child support, but will give parents a chance to make arrangements to pay what they owe.  Some amnesty. It’s illegal and lawful. How’s that for American jurisprudence?

Man Forced to Pay Child Support for Kid Who Isn’t Even His

by Linda Fogarty

There are a lot of good guys out there. Men who will step up to the plate and treat children who aren’t theirs as if they are their own. But, as one dad from North Carolina is learning after being told he has to pay child support for a child he didn’t father, some will take advantage of kindness.

Allow me to explain this somewhat complicated story. Randall Smith met, fell in love with, and married a woman shortly after he was hospitalized with lymphoma. Not long after their wedding, she came to him with some happy news—she was pregnant—hip-hip hurray, right?

Eh, not so fast. Smith had a vasectomy years before her announcement. We all know what that means, right?

Shocked beyond belief, we’re sure, Smith made an appointment with his urologist, who confirmed that he didn’t actually have sperm.

Instead of high-tailing it out of his marriage, he stuck around and showed he was more committed to his wife than most would have been if they were in this same position. He promised to raise the child as if he were his own, but says he also made it clear that if they ever split, her son would be her responsibility and he wouldn’t have to pay child support.

Seems fair, doesn’t it? After cheating on him, which I realize is only an assumption since he has yet to get a DNA test (say what?! I know), I would consider her pretty darn lucky to get a second chance with a man who was also willing to be a father figure to her son.

I think you know where I’m going with this. They eventually broke up and the woman wants him to pay child support. Not only is Smith angry because he says he isn’t the father and they had an agreement (which, unfortunately, wasn’t in writing and signed by attorneys), but also because his injury left him disabled and $7,000 in arrears.

The biggest problem here is that Smith didn’t get a DNA test as soon as his wife’s son was born. He now has to scramble to get one in a certain amount of time for the court to even consider exonerating him from paying child support. What was he thinking?! Is he really that trusting that he assumed he could have faith in his wife’s word? Maybe he didn’t want to put the child through the trauma of a DNA test?

This is such a sad story. Any man who is kind enough to take care of a child who isn’t his deserves better than this—especially when there are many biological dads who aren’t acting responsibly and feel they are within their right to walk away when the duties of parenthood get in their way.

Do you think this man should be forced to pay child support?

The War on Fatherhood in the United States

The South Carolina Killing & the Child Support Racket

by Phyllis Schafly

Why was Walter Scott running away from a policeman who tried to stop him because of a broken tail light? The media are trying to make a South Carolina policeman’s killing of a black man, Walter Scott, another sensational case of racism, but the media have missed the point of the tragedy.

The problem wasn’t racism, or even dangerous driving or stolen property. It was caused by the obnoxious anti-father rulings of the family courts and Scott’s fear that he would be returned to debtors’ prison. Scott had already been jailed three times for failure to pay child support, and he didn’t want to be sent to prison again.

Debtors’ prisons were common in England in the colonial period. You can read about them in the writings of Charles Dickens, who wrote from firsthand knowledge; his own father spent time in a debtors’ prison.

We kicked out British rule by the American Revolution and abolished some of its trappings, such as royalty and its titles, primogeniture and bowing to our top national official. We thought we abolished debtors’ prisons even before we abolished slavery, but they continue to exist today to punish men who are too poor to pay what is falsely labeled “child support.”

We say “falsely” because the money collected from the poor guy usually doesn’t go to his kid or her mother. It just supports the welfare-state bureaucracy.

Of course, it wasn’t wise to try to outrun the policeman’s gun, but this sad event should make us re-evaluate the policy of repeatedly sending a penniless man to jail for failure to pay so-called child support.

These guys don’t have the money to hire a defense lawyer, which he should be given when jail is the cost of losing the case.

When corporations can’t pay their debts, they can take bankruptcy, which means they pay off their debts for pennies on the dollar over many years. But a man can never get an alleged “child support” debt forgiven or reduced, even if he is out of a job, penniless, homeless, medically incapacitated, incarcerated (justly or unjustly), can’t afford a lawyer, serving in our Armed Forces overseas, isn’t the father, or never owed the money in the first place.

The reason “child support” debt can never be reduced by the court is the Bradley Amendment, named after a Democratic senator from New Jersey and one-time presidential candidate. That law should be repealed.

Fifteen years ago, a family court judge threw Scott in jail because he hadn’t made his child support payments on time, and that meant he lost his $35,000-a-year job at a film company, “the best job I ever had.” He then found some odd jobs but couldn’t make enough money to make the support payments the government demanded.

The whole idea that a poor man is expected to support two households, including one with a child he never sees and may not even be his, is contrary to common sense and to all human experience. In too many cases, DNA investigations revealed that the poor guy is not the father of the kid for whom he is ordered to pay child support.

Scott seemed to turn a corner, but after making a couple of payments he fell behind again and was sent back to jail. He said, “This whole time in jail, my child support is still going up.”

Walter Scott’s older brother, Anthony Scott, told the Charleston Post and Courier, “Everybody knows why he ran away.” A bench warrant had been issued for his arrest for failure to pay enough child support.

A survey of county jails in South Carolina found that at least one out of every eight incarcerated people is there for not paying so-called child support. All this imprisonment is imposed without any jury trial, due process, or the benefit of a lawyer to defend the guy.

According to CUNY Law School professor Ann Cammett, an expert on incarcerated parents who owe child support, “We have zero evidence that it works. If the goal of the child support system is to get support for children, parents can’t do that if they’re incarcerated.”

One case on this issue went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2011, but it didn’t produce much relief. Michael Turner of South Carolina argued that his constitutional rights had been violated because he didn’t have a lawyer at his hearing, even though jail was the penalty if he lost. The Court ordered some minimal “procedural safeguards,” but didn’t tackle the issue of giving a father the fundamental right of due process before sending him to jail.

We hope Walter Scott’s death may help some dads in the future who are unfairly treated by the family courts, not given a lawyer, denied due process and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty.

Divorced from Reality: Government Wants to End Your Marriage

“We’re from the Government, and We’re Here to End Your Marriage.”

by Stephen Baskerville

The decline of the family has now reached critical and truly dangerous proportions. Family breakdown touches virtually every family and every American. It is not only the major source of social instability in the Western world today but also seriously threatens civic freedom and constitutional government.

G. K. Chesterton once observed that the family serves as the principal check on government power, and he suggested that someday the family and the state would confront one another. That day has arrived.

Chesterton was writing about divorce, and despite extensive public attention to almost every other threat to the family, divorce remains the most direct and serious. Michael McManus of Marriage Savers writes that “divorce is a far more grievous blow to marriage than today’s challenge by gays.”

Most Americans would be deeply shocked if they knew what goes on today under the name of divorce. Indeed, many are devastated to discover that they can be forced into divorce by procedures entirely beyond their control. Divorce licenses unprecedented government intrusion into family life, including the power to sunder families, seize children, loot family wealth, and incarcerate parents without trial. Comprised of family courts and vast, federally funded social services bureaucracies that wield what amount to police powers, the divorce machinery has become the most predatory and repressive sector of government ever created in the United States and is today’s greatest threat to constitutional freedom.

Unilateral Divorce

Some four decades ago, while few were paying attention, the Western world embarked on the boldest social experiment in its history. With no public discussion of the possible consequences, laws were enacted in virtually every jurisdiction that effectively ended marriage as a legal contract. Today it is not possible to form a binding agreement to create a family. The government can now, at the request of one spouse, simply dissolve a marriage over the objection of the other. Maggie Gallagher aptly titled her 1996 book The Abolition of Marriage.

This startling fact has been ignored by politicians, journalists, academics, and even family advocates. “Opposing gay marriage or gays in the military is for Republicans an easy, juicy, risk-free issue,” wrote Gallagher. “The message [is] that at all costs we should keep divorce off the political agenda.” No American politician of national stature has ever challenged involuntary divorce. “Democrats did not want to anger their large constituency among women who saw easy divorce as a hard-won freedom and prerogative,” observes Barbara Whitehead in The Divorce Culture. “Republicans did not want to alienate their upscale constituents or their libertarian wing, both of whom tended to favor easy divorce, nor did they want to call attention to the divorces among their own leadership.”

In his famous denunciation of single parenthood, Vice President Dan Quayle was careful to make clear, “I am not talking about a situation where there is a divorce.” The exception proves the rule. When Pope John Paul II criticized divorce in 2002, he was roundly attacked from the right as well as the left.

The full implications of the “no-fault” revolution have never been publicly debated. “The divorce laws . . . were reformed by unrepresentative groups with very particular agendas of their own and which were not in step with public opinion,” writes Melanie Phillips in The Sex-Change Society. “Public attitudes were gradually dragged along behind laws that were generally understood at the time to mean something very different from what they subsequently came to represent.”

Today’s disputes over marriage in fact have their origin in this one. Demands to redefine marriage to include homosexual couples are inconceivable apart from the redefinition of marriage already effected by heterosexuals through divorce. Though gays cite the very desire to marry as evidence that their lifestyle is not inherently promiscuous, activist Andrew Sullivan acknowledges that that desire has arisen only because of the promiscuity permitted in modern marriage. “The world of no-strings heterosexual hookups and 50 percent divorce rates preceded gay marriage,” he points out. “All homosexuals are saying . . . is that, under the current definition, there’s no reason to exclude us. If you want to return straight marriage to the 1950s, go ahead. But until you do, the exclusion of gays is . . . a denial of basic civil equality” (emphasis added). Gays do not want traditional monogamous marriage, only the version debased by divorce.

Contrary to common assumptions, divorce today seldom involves two people mutually deciding to part ways. According to Frank Furstenberg and Andrew Cherlin in Divided Families, 80 percent of divorces are unilateral, that is, over the objection of one spouse. Patricia Morgan of London’s Civitas think tank reports that in over half of divorces, there was no recollection of major conflict before the separation.

Under “no-fault,” or what some call “unilateral,” divorce—a legal regime that expunged all considerations of justice from the procedure—divorce becomes a sudden power grab by one spouse, assisted by an army of judicial hangers-on who reward belligerence and profit from the ensuing litigation: judges, lawyers, psychotherapists, counselors, mediators, custody evaluators, social workers, and more.

If marriage is not wholly a private affair, as today’s marriage advocates insist, involuntary divorce by its nature requires constant government supervision over family life. Far more than marriage, divorce mobilizes and expands government power. Marriage creates a private household, which may or may not necessitate signing some legal documents. Divorce dissolves a private household, usually against the wishes of one spouse. It inevitably involves state functionaries—including police and jails—to enforce the divorce and the post-marriage order.

Almost invariably, the involuntarily divorced spouse will want and expect to continue enjoying the protections and prerogatives of private life: the right to live in the common home, to possess the common property, or—most vexing of all—to parent the common children. These claims must be terminated, using the penal system if necessary.

Onerous Implications

Few stopped to consider the implications of laws that shifted the breakup of private households from a voluntary to an involuntary process. Unilateral divorce inescapably involves government agents forcibly removing legally innocent people from their homes, seizing their property, and separating them from their children. It inherently abrogates not only the inviolability of marriage but the very concept of private life.

By far the most serious consequences involve children, who have become the principal weapons of the divorce machinery. Invariably the first action of a divorce court, once a divorce is filed, is to separate the children from one of their parents, usually the father. Until this happens, no one in the machinery acquires any power or earnings. The first principle and first action of divorce court therefore: Remove the father.

This happens even if the father is innocent of any legal wrongdoing and is simply sitting in his own home minding his own business. The state seizes control of his children with no burden of proof to justify why. The burden of proof (and the financial burden) falls on the father to demonstrate why they should be returned.

Though obfuscated with legal jargon (losing “custody”), what this means is that a legally unimpeachable parent can suddenly be arrested for seeing his own children without government authorization. Following from this, he can be arrested for failure or inability to conform to a variety of additional judicial directives that apply to no one but him. He can be arrested for domestic violence or child abuse, even if no evidence is presented that he has committed any. He can be arrested for not paying child support, even if the amount exceeds his means (and which may amount to most of his salary). He can even be arrested for not paying an attorney or a psychotherapist he has not hired.

The New York Times has reported on how easily “the divorce court leads to a jail cell.” Take the case of Marvin Singer, who was jailed without trial for not paying an attorney he never hired $100,000—only half of what the court claimed he “owes.” In Virginia, one father was ordered to pay two years’ worth of his salary to a lawyer he also did not hire for a divorce he did not request. Once arrested, the father is summarily jailed. There is no formal charge, no jury, and no trial.

Family court judges’ contempt for both fathers and constitutional rights was openly expressed by New Jersey municipal court judge Richard Russell: “Your job is not to become concerned about the constitutional rights of the man that you’re violating,” he told his colleagues at a judges’ training seminar in 1994. “Throw him out on the street. . . . We don’t have to worry about the rights.”

Generated Hysteria

Why do we hear almost nothing about this? Aside from media that sympathize with the divorce revolution, the multi-billion-dollar divorce industry also commands a huge government-funded propaganda machine that has distorted our view of what is happening.

The growth of the divorce machinery during the 1970s and 1980s did not follow but preceded (in other words, it generated) a series of hysterias against parents—especially fathers—so hideous and inflammatory that no one, left or right, dared question them or defend those accused: child abuse and molestation, wife-beating, and nonpayment of “child support.” Each of these hysterias has been propagated largely by feminists, bar associations, and social work bureaucracies, whose federal funding is generously shared with state and local law-enforcement officials.

The parent on the receiving end of such accusations—even in the absence of any formal charge, evidence, or conviction—not only loses his children summarily and often permanently; he also finds himself abandoned by friends and family members, parishioners and pastors, co-workers and employers (and he may well lose his job)—all terrified to be associated with an accused “pedophile,” “batterer,” or “deadbeat dad.”

It is not clear that these nefarious figures are other than bogeymen created by divorce interests, well aware that not only the public generally but conservatives and family advocates in particular are a soft touch when it comes to anything concerning irresponsible behavior or sexual perversion.

Christians are especially vulnerable to credulity about such accusations, because they are disposed to see moral breakdown behind social ills. Moral breakdown certainly does lie behind the divorce epidemic (of which more shortly), but it is far deeper than anything addressed by cheap witch-hunts against government-designated malefactors.

It is also largely credulity and fear that leads Congress by overwhelming majorities to appropriate billions for anti-family programs in response to these hysterias. The massive federal funds devoted to domestic violence, child abuse, and child-support enforcement are little more than what Phyllis Schlafly calls “feminist pork,” taxpayer subsidies on family dissolution that also trample due process protections. Family law may technically be the purview of states, but it is driven by federal policies and funded by a Congress fearful of accusations that it is not doing enough against pedophiles, batterers, and deadbeats.

In fact, each of these figures is largely a hoax, a creation of feminist ideology disseminated at taxpayers’ expense and unchallenged by journalists, academics, civil libertarians, and family advocates who are either unaware of the reality or cowed into silence. Indeed, so diabolical are these hysterias that some family advocates simply accept them as additional evidence of the family crisis.

But while sensational examples can be found of anything, there is simply no evidence that the family and fatherhood crisis is caused primarily or even significantly by fathers abandoning their families, beating their wives, and molesting their children. Irrefutable evidence indicates that it is driven almost entirely by divorce courts forcibly separating parents from their children and using these false accusations as a rationalization.

Divorce Gamesmanship

During the 1980s and 1990s, waves of child abuse hysteria swept America and other countries. Sensational cases in Washington state, California, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Ontario, Saskatchewan, the north of England, and more recently France resulted in torn-apart families, blatantly unjust prison sentences, and ruined lives, while the media and civil libertarians looked the other way.

Today it is not clear that we have learned anything from these miscarriages of justice. If anything, the hysteria has been institutionalized in the divorce courts, where false allegations have become routine.

What is ironic about these witch-hunts is the fact that it is easily demonstrable that the child abuse epidemic—which is very real—is almost entirely the creation of feminism and the welfare bureaucracies themselves. It is well established by scholars that an intact family is the safest place for women and children and that very little abuse takes place in married families. Child abuse overwhelmingly occurs in single-parent homes, homes from which the father has been removed. Domestic violence, too, is far more likely during or after the breakup of a marriage than among married couples.

Yet patently false accusations of both child abuse and domestic violence are rampant in divorce courts, almost always for purposes of breaking up families, securing child custody, and eliminating fathers. “With child abuse and spouse abuse you don’t have to prove anything,” the leader of a legal seminar tells divorcing mothers, according to the Chicago Tribune. “You just have to accuse.”

Among scholars and legal practitioners it is common knowledge that patently trumped-up accusations are routinely used, and virtually never punished, in divorce and custody proceedings. Elaine Epstein, president of the Massachusetts Women’s Bar Association, writes that “allegations of abuse are now used for tactical advantage” in custody cases. The Illinois Bar Journal describes how abuse accusations readily “become part of the gamesmanship of divorce.” The UMKC Law Review reports on a survey of judges and attorneys revealing that disregard for due process and allegations of domestic violence are used as a “litigation strategy.” In the Yale Law Review, Jeannie Suk calls domestic violence accusations a system of “state-imposed de facto divorce” and documents how courts use unsupported accusations to justify evicting Americans from their homes and children.

The multi-billion dollar abuse industry has become “an area of law mired in intellectual dishonesty and injustice” writes David Heleniak in the Rutgers Law Review. Domestic violence has become “a backwater of tautological pseudo-theory,” write Donald Dutton and Kenneth Corvo in the scholarly journal Aggression and Violent Behavior. “No other area of established social welfare, criminal justice, public health, or behavioral intervention has such weak evidence in support of mandated practice.”

Feminists confess as much in their vociferous opposition to divorce reform. A special issue of the feminist magazine Mother Jones in 2005 ostensibly devoted to domestic violence focuses largely on securing child custody.

Both child abuse and domestic violence have no precise definitions. Legally they are not adjudicated as violent assault, and accused parents do not enjoy the constitutional protections of criminal defendants. Allegations are “confirmed” not by jury trials but by judges or social workers. Domestic violence is any conflict within an “intimate relationship” and need not be actually violent or even physical. Official definitions include “extreme jealousy and possessiveness,” “name calling and constant criticizing,” and “ignoring, dismissing, or ridiculing the victim’s needs.”

For such “crimes” fathers lose their children and can be jailed. “Protective orders” separating parents from their children are readily issued during divorce proceedings, usually without any evidence of wrongdoing. “Restraining orders and orders to vacate are granted to virtually all who apply,” and “the facts have become irrelevant,” writes Epstein. “In virtually all cases, no notice, meaningful hearing, or impartial weighing of evidence is to be had.”

Cycle of Abuse

Trumped-up accusations are thus used to create precisely the single-parent homes in which actual abuse is most likely to occur. According to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), “Children of single parents had a 77% greater risk of being harmed by physical abuse, an 87% greater risk of being harmed by physical neglect, and an 80% greater risk of suffering serious injury or harm from abuse or neglect than children living with both parents.” Britain’s Family Education Trust reports that children are up to 33 times more likely to be abused in a single-parent home than in an intact family.

The principal impediment to child abuse is thus precisely the figure whom the welfare and divorce bureaucracies are intent on removing: the father. “The presence of the father . . . placed the child at lesser risk for child sexual abuse,” concludes a 2000 study published in Adolescent and Family Health. “The protective effect from the father’s presence in most households was sufficiently strong to offset the risk incurred by the few paternal perpetrators.” In fact, the risk of “paternal perpetrators” is miniscule, since a tiny proportion of sexual abuse (which is far less common than physical abuse) is committed by natural fathers, though government statistics lump them in with boyfriends and stepfathers to make it appear that incest is widespread.

Despite the innuendos of child abuse advocates, it is not married fathers but single mothers who are most likely to injure or kill their children. “Contrary to public perception,” write Patrick Fagan and Dorothy Hanks of the Heritage Foundation, “research shows that the most likely physical abuser of a young child will be that child’s mother, not a male in the household.” Mothers accounted for 55 percent of all child murders according to a Justice Department report. HHS itself found that women aged 20 to 49 are almost twice as likely as men to be perpetrators of child maltreatment: “almost two-thirds were females.” Given that “male” perpetrators are not usually fathers but boyfriends or stepfathers, fathers emerge as by far the least likely child abusers.

Yet government logic is marvelously self-justifying and self-perpetuating, since by eliminating the father, officials can present themselves as the solution to the problem they have created. The more child abuse there is—whether by single mothers, boyfriends, or even (as is often the case) by social workers and bureaucrats themselves—the more the proffered solution is to further expand the child abuse bureaucracy.

Waxing indignant about a string of child deaths at the hands of social workers in the District of Columbia, federal judges and the Washington Post found solace in the D.C. government’s solution: to hire more social workers (and lawyers too, for some unspecified reason). “Olivia Golden, the Child and Family Services’ latest director . . . will use her increased budget to recruit more social workers and double the number of lawyers.” Children die at the hands of social workers, so we must hire more social workers.

Likewise, it is difficult to believe that judges are not aware that the most dangerous environment for children is precisely the single-parent homes they themselves create when they remove fathers in custody proceedings. Yet they have no hesitation in removing them, secure in the knowledge that they will never be held accountable for any harm that may come to the children. On the contrary, if they do not remove the fathers, they may be punished by the bar associations and social work bureaucracies whose funding depends on a constant supply of abused children.

A commonplace of political science is that bureaucracies relentlessly expand, often by creating the very problem they exist to address. Appalling as it sounds, the conclusion is inescapable that we have created a massive army of officials with a vested interest in child abuse.

Trafficking in Children

The child abuse industry also demonstrates how one threat to the family creates another. Just as the divorce revolution eventually led to the demand for same-sex “marriage,” the child abuse deception has led to demands for parenting by same-sex couples.

Most discussion of homosexual parenting has centered on questions of children’s welfare versus the rights of homosexuals. Few have questioned the politics whereby prospective homosexual parents obtain the children they wish to parent. Granting same-sex couples the right to raise children means, by definition, giving at least one of the partners the right to raise someone else’s children, and the question arises whether the original parent or parents ever agreed to part with them or did something to warrant losing them.

Current laws governing divorce, domestic violence, and child abuse render this question open. The explosion in foster care based on the assumed but unexamined need to find permanent homes for allegedly abused children has provided perhaps the strongest argument in favor of same-sex “marriage” and homosexual parenting. Yet the politics of child abuse and divorce indicate that this assumption is not necessarily valid.

The government-generated child abuse epidemic and the mushrooming foster care business that it feeds have allowed government agencies to operate what amounts to trafficking in children. A San Diego grand jury reports “a widely held perception within the community and even within some areas of the Department [of Social Services] that the Department is in the ‘baby brokering’ business.”

Introducing same-sex “marriage” and adoption into this political dynamic could dramatically increase the demand for children to adopt, thus intensifying pressure on social service agencies and biological parents to supply such children. While sperm donors and surrogate mothers supply some children for homosexual parents, most have been taken from their natural parents because of divorce, unwed parenting, child abuse accusations, or connected reasons.

Massachusetts Senator Therese Murray, claiming that 40 percent of the state’s adoptions have gone to gay and lesbian couples, rationalizes the practice by invoking “children who have been neglected, abandoned, abused by their own families.” But it is far from evident that these children are in fact victims of their own parents. What seems inescapable is that homosexual parenting has arisen as the direct and perhaps inevitable consequence of government officials getting into the business—which began largely with divorce—of distributing other people’s children.

Child-Support Racket

The “deadbeat dad” is another figure largely manufactured by the divorce machinery. He is far less likely to have deliberately abandoned offspring he callously sired than to be an involuntarily divorced father who has been, as attorney Jed Abraham writes in From Courtship to Courtroom, “forced to finance the filching of his own children.”

Child support is plagued by the same contradictions as child custody. Like custody, it is awarded ostensibly without reference to “fault,” and yet nonpayment brings swift and severe punishments. Contrary to popular belief, child support today has nothing to do with fathers abandoning their children, reneging on their marital vows, or even agreeing to divorce. It is automatically assessed on all non-custodial parents, even those divorced against their will who lose their children through no legal fault or agreement of their own. It is an entitlement for all single mothers, in other words, regardless of their behavior.

Originally justified as a method of recovering welfare costs, child support has been transformed into a massive federal subsidy on middle-class divorce. No-fault divorce allowed a mother to divorce her husband for any reason or no reason and to take the children with her. Child support took the process a step further by allowing the divorcing mother to use the now-fatherless children to claim her husband’s income—also regardless of any fault on her part (or lack of fault on his) in abrogating the marriage agreement.

By glancing at a child-support schedule, a mother can determine exactly how large a tax-free windfall she can force her husband to pay her simply by divorcing, money she may spend however she wishes with no accounting requirement. It is collected at gunpoint if necessary, and nonpayment means incarceration without trial.

Like the welfare it was supposed to replace, child support finances family dissolution by paying mothers to divorce. Economist Robert Willis calculates that child-support levels vastly exceeding the cost of raising children create “an incentive for divorce by the custodial mother.” His analysis indicates that only one-fifth to one-third of child-support payments are actually used for the children; the rest is profit for the custodial parent. Kimberly Folse and Hugo Varela-Alvarez write in the Journal of Socio-Economics that child support serves as an “economic incentive for middle-class women to seek divorce.”

Mothers are not the only ones who can profit by creating fatherless children. Governments also generate revenue from child support. State governments receive federal funds for every child-support dollar collected—money they can add to their general funds and use for any purpose they choose. This gives states a financial incentive to create as many single-parent households as possible by encouraging middle-class divorce. While very little child support—or government revenue—is generated from the impecunious young unmarried fathers for whom the program was ostensibly created, involuntarily divorced middle-class fathers have deeper pockets to loot.

This is why state governments set child support at onerous levels. Not only does it immediately maximize their own revenues; by encouraging middle-class women to divorce, governments increase the number of fathers sending dollars through their systems, thus generating more revenue. Federal taxpayers (who were supposed to save money) subsidize this family destruction scheme with about $3 billion annually. “Child support guidelines currently in use typically generate awards that are much higher than would be the case if based on economically sound cost concepts,” writes Mark Rogers, an economist who served on the Georgia Commission on Child Support. Rogers charges that guidelines result in “excessive burdens” based on a “flawed economic foundation.” The Urban Institute reports that arrearages accrue because “orders are set too high relative to ability to pay.” Federal officials have admitted that the more than $90 billion in arrearages they claimed as of 2004 were based on awards that were beyond the parents’ ability to pay.

All this marks a new stage in the evolution of the welfare state: from distributing largesse to raising revenue and, from there, to law enforcement. The result is a self-financing machine, generating profits and expanding the size and scope of government—all by generating single-parent homes and fatherless children. Government has created a perpetual growth machine for destroying families, seizing children from legally blameless parents, and incarcerating parents without trial.

Responsibility of Churches

While many factors have contributed to this truly diabolical, bureaucratic onslaught against the family, we might begin by looking within. The churches’ failure or refusal to intervene in the marriages they consecrated and to exert moral pressure on misbehaving spouses (perhaps out of fear of appearing “judgmental”) left a vacuum that has been filled by the state. Clergy, parishioners, and extended families have been replaced by lawyers, judges, forensic psychotherapists, social workers, and plainclothes police.

Family integrity will be restored only when families are de-politicized and protected from government invasion. This will demand morally vigorous congregations that are willing to take marriage out of the hands of the state by intervening in the marriages they are called upon to witness and consecrate and by resisting the power of the state to move in. This is the logic behind the group Marriage Savers, and it can restore the churches’ authority even among those who previously viewed a church’s role in their marriage as largely ceremonial.

No greater challenge confronts the churches—nor any greater opportunity to reverse the mass exodus—than to defend their own marriage ordinance against this attack from the government. Churches readily and rightly mobilize politically against moral evils like abortion and same-sex “marriage,” in which they are not required to participate. Even more are they primary stakeholders in involuntary divorce, which allows the state to desecrate and nullify their own ministry.

As an Anglican, I am acutely aware of how far modernity was ushered in not only through divorce, but through divorce processes that served the all-encompassing claims of the emerging state leviathan. Politically, this might be seen as the “original sin” of modern man. We all need to atone.

from Touchstone Magazine

Oppressive Government: Licenses & Child Support

by E.J. Manning

To receive federal grants, each state must require license suspension as a penalty for failure to pay child support. Most states have been on board with this policy since around 2007. Under Title IV-D of the Social Security Act, states are required to pass laws that “withhold or suspend, or to restrict the use of driver’s licenses, professional and occupational licenses, and recreational and sporting licenses” of delinquent child support debtors. In Texas alone the license-suspension statute includes fifty-six state agencies responsible for issuing a variety of licenses: appraisers, vets, chiropractors, plumbers, air conditioning and pest control specialists, as well as hunting and fishing licenses.

The purpose of this exploitative tyranny is to drive fear into your soul, to make you crawl on glass, to humiliate you, to make you a butt-kisser. Clearly, the suspension of a citizen’s drivers license is a bad idea where continuing to make an income is concerned. Revoking licenses also give the  government too much control over individual liberties. While it may drive fear and compliance into the hearts of some, most commonly, it  makes a bad situation worse. It has the consequence of making oppressed persons angry and more resentful of the government and of the ex spousal relationship.  The oppressed person may withdraw and become themselves from society, becoming less compliant and even enraged. The oppressed may become part of an underground workforce as they continue to drive at risk with a suspended license, that is, if they can work. Certainly, an attitude that leans towards outrage is the most common reality versus obsequious compliance.

These laws have unintended consequences on decent people that work hard, those that are struggling to get by in a dead economy, or those that need their money the most, the disabled. Many that are able-bodied may begin job hopping because they cannot survive on a small amount left for them in their paycheck. Many times, child support oppression prevents them from catching up entirely, and they become part of a spiraling negative cycle, unable to work their way out. You may be labeled as a liar. Those that are able take a job in another country sometimes do so. Of course, once you leave, you won’t be able to return until you pay your debt. For those that have a passport, the system is only too willing to confiscate your passport in the hope of controlling you. The politicians of the past and the present have a built an insurmountable wall of class oppression for divorced parents.The state disregards any and all personal circumstances, labeling you as a deadbeat. They make no effort to examine the circumstance in your individual situation. If you are behind on your support “you are a liar and a deadbeat.” The government is so concerned about child’s support, they are unaware that they are hurting the child by oppressing the non-custodial parent and reducing his or her integrity. The custodial parent and government insinuate that the other parent is a deadbeat, which damages the child further for life. As far as licenses go, when you get behind again the system will take your license again at their will, often without telling you for months. Do you think that is right? Isn’t that fraud?

Making an agreement with prompt and effective communication doesn’t ensure success. You can be in full communication with the state office with a planned payment for getting caught up, and they take your license anyway. Many times, you are notified after the fact, and three weeks late by mail with a fifteen or twenty day appeal period based on the date of the letter. When the state mails the letter three weeks late, you are denied due process under the law. That is mail fraud as well. This is illegal, but that is not their concern. Deadbeats are worthless. The wheels of the system keep turning like a rusty axle. The system has “authority.” What is my advice to you. You are better off not stressing yourself out by taking their phone calls because the end result being positive is unlikely. This creates a further rift between the oppressed and the tyrannical oppressor, who could be nothing more than a poorly-paid state employee that cares little about their honesty and has a big chip on their shoulder that is probably larger than yours.

It’s a big power trip. The government doesn’t really care about the child, the mother or the father, whether the non-custodial parents are employed, or whether they live at all. All is assumed. Of course, most of you probably know this. All said, a woman can flip out just as easily as a man from the pressure induced by non-caring people and government entities seek to oppress. Ultimately, the system will be rewarded with destruction because oppression doesn’t last forever. That is history.

Finally on your credit record, your license suspension may show up without explanation, which may affect your ability to get insurance.  You may be required to pay more for insurance because of a credit bureau report while the system seeks to rob you of more than you could possibly afford. This affects your credit score, which impacts your ability to borrow to pay child support or for any other purpose. How does making a nation full of enraged men (and women) fulfill the purpose of the country? That is for you to decide. We have become a nation of petty people that satisfy ourselves through the exploitation of others. At least the people that are part of the occupy Wall Street movement are making a noise and working for change through public protest. Oppressed men and women that are under the thumb the Bradley Amendment just hold it in and keep on taking it when we need to fight for fair government and due process under the law as minimum standards. If you have a story or want to share your testimony, just post it here. Giving us your take is completely free.

Oppressive Government: Licenses & Child Support by E.J. Manning is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://bradleyamendment.wordpress.com.