Tag Archives: Child Support

Commentary

On women leaving marriages that don’t make them happy enough

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Don’t blame me! I didn’t write it. Alisha wrote it. She’s the meany, not me!

Excerpt:

I have a certain friend, a great guy I’ve known since I was a gawky teen, and who continues to be my friend in  my fully grown yet still gawky state. He has always been strong- fights hard, works hard, but loves the hardest.

When he married a few years ago, I was a little worried. Now that he’s divorced, I’m very hurt. And taken aback that he is not the only guy I know in this situation. In fact, I know about 4.

Now, these men are far from perfect. No one except God is. Yet in all these collapsed marriages, the women openly and willingly admitted the men they promised to be with until death had never hit, pushed, sexually or emotionally accosted them. They quite simply, no longer wanted to be married.

Of course, there is nothing really simple about dissolving one’s marriage, except for my simple-minded incomprehension as I sat at a showing of “The Devil Wears Prada” with one of these ladies a few years back. We had gone to the mall to do a little window shopping, and for what seemed to be the entire trip, this young lady- I’ll call her Amber- complained non-stop about what her husband wasn’t doing. He wasn’t buying her new clothes or shoes or taking her on vacations. She worked hard, many days 10 hours. And well, he worked, too, but it wasn’t fair he didn’t buy her more.

“Can he afford to buy you all that stuff?” I asked. She looked at me as if I were stupid. “MY FATHER works two even three jobs to make sure Mama gets everything she wants and deserves! Sometimes, he is away for weeks, working at construction sites to ensure it!”

[…]Another girl I know got hitched- only to ditch her groom before a tan line started to develop on her ring finger. The very same things she loved about him while they were dating- his commitment to God, desire to go into the ministry, his “good guy” sweetness- were instantly repulsive in marriage. Their marriage annulled, she jumped into a long term dating relationship which turned into cohabitation and a child together. But fortunate for her, no wedding.

I actually blame the men for choosing these women. Men have to test women during the courtship to see if what they are interested in is making a commitment and then acting self-sacrificially to honor their obligations. I could tell you nightmare stories about Christian women I know who can do the most amazing acts of selfishness and then totally refuse to make amends or accept any responsibility. But then, I’m not married to those women – because that all came out before I ever got serious about them. Many women are judging men today based on how amusing they are and whether their girlfriends will be envious and approving based on secular criteria supplied by TV shows and music videos. This all has to be detected during the courtship by the man. Courting is when the man has to detect if the woman is thinking anything other than “if I don’t like this – if it doesn’t make me feel happy all the time and impose no obligations on me – then I can get out of it”. Is she ready for a commitment? That’s the man’s job to find out.

What courtship is really about for men is communicating your plan and the challenges you’re facing and then standing back to see if she wants to help. I once met a Christian woman who would not so much as sit down with me to see what I did for a living. She wanted to have fun! And understanding my job so that she could help was not fun. (Presumably, spending my money that I earned from that job would have been more fun). So if a man marries a woman like that, then it is the man’s fault. If men are too stupid to know how to detect lemons then they deserve to suffer. Learning how to court is more important than playing video games. Knowing what laws strengthen men in their roles as husbands and fathers is more important than watching X-treme sports. Men are responsible to understand marriage, understand what women do in a marriage, and understand policies that strengthen or weaken marriage. Many men who are divorced today voted for the party of no-fault divorce (with the custody battles and fake charges of child abuse) and domestic violence laws (which criminalize criticizing your wife’s spending or weight) yesterday. And those men are fools. And they must be punished.

Men are terrible at knowing what they want from women. What matters to the stupid men about women today is not whether they are chaste and self-sacrificial and organized and goal-oriented, but only their physical appearance, how much they are willing to drink, and how far they are willing to go physically. Even Christian men have no idea what Christian women are supposed to DO in a marriage. Many men think that marriage will be 50% playing video games, and 50% sex or something. It’s just totally unrealistic. Not to mention that women are not inanimate objects. They are more like employees. If you bring a woman into your home and do not know how to motivate them, then they will not fill the role that they are assigned. Surely a wife is as entitled to as much “management” as an employee. Having sex with someone is not effective management. One-on-one eye-to-eye communication about current concerns and future goals is effective management.

I think that men and women really need to sit down and think about marriage and parenting as an engineering problem. What are the use cases? What are the requirements? What is the design plan? What are the possible solutions? What are the tradeoffs? What is the schedule? How much of this can we build ourselves, and how much of it can we purchase or outsource? If the woman is not on board with the seriousness of marriage, because she resents obligations, saving money and structure, then drop her like a hot potato. If she does not want a man to fulfill his roles in the marriage – protecting, providing and leading on moral/spiritual issues – then kick her to the curb. Spontaneity is good for a Sunday afternoon or a Friday night. It is not the way to run a a marriage, especially when there are kids. Spontaneity is not the way to produce quality software – with garbage in, you get garbage out. Can you imagine hiring an engineer based solely on their physical appearance and amusement value? Yet this is what men are doing. Christian men are doing this.

News

Feminist Melanie McDonagh says that paternity should not be checked

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Check out this unbelievable article from the UK Spectator that ECM sent me. It’s written by a feminist. She is complaining about paternity tests. She thinks that women should be able to sleep with a lot of men and then arbitrarily name the richest one as the father to get the highest child support payments, and no fancy DNA test should be able to contradict her.  Oh, and it goes without saying that women should not be punished for committing paternity fraud. That would be mean.

Excerpt:

The subject has resurfaced lately, courtesy of a story in the Daily Mail, about a married television presenter who for years had been paying for the support of a child conceived, as he thought, as a result of his relationship with a writer. It seems that after meeting the child for the first time, he asked for a DNA test; it duly turned out that he was not, after all, the father. Poor child.

[…]Now I can see that some men might rather welcome an end to the old-fashioned scenario whereby they find themselves held to account for the paternity of children born to girls with whom they just happen to have had sex. The actor Jude Law recently found himself in just this position, and unhesitatingly and ungallantly demanded a DNA test.

By contrast, the old situation, in which women presented men with a child, and the man either did the decent thing and offered support, or made a run for it, allowed women a certain leeway. The courtesan in Balzac who, on becoming pregnant, unhesitatingly sought, and got, maintenance from two of her men friends, can’t have been the only one. Uncertainty allows mothers to select for their children the father who would be best for them.

The point is that paternity was ambiguous and it was effectively up to the mother to name her child’s father, or not. (That eminently sensible Jewish custom, whereby Jewishness is passed through the mother, was based on the fact that we only really knew who our mothers are.) Many men have, of course, ended up raising children who were not genetically their own, but really, does it matter?

Hmmmn. I wonder how anyone could even prove that the woman actually slept with her victim? Maybe a woman can just pick out a man arbitrarily on the street, based on his nice suit or fancy car, and name him as the (involuntary) sperm-donor. He wouldn’t have any parental rights or authority, you understand.

Anyway, this shouldn’t affect me. I’m chaste. But maybe I could still be forced to pay single mothers that I haven’t even slept with just because I can afford to? Oh wait – that already happens. It’s called progressive taxation. Oh well. It’s not like I needed the money I earn for my own future wife and children…

Save us, Barbara Kay!

Here’s another article about child support from Barbara Kay about the child support bureaucracy in Ontario, Canada.

Excerpt:

Ontario’s Family Responsibility Office, which is responsible for ensuring that custodial parents don’t get stiffed for child support payments by the non-custodial parent, has a lot of power.

Starting Dec. 1, someone (read “father”) in arrears on their support payments can have their car impounded. That’s about the stupidest punishment for non-payment one can imagine, since most people need their cars in order to work.

[…]If you’re going for irrational responses to non-payment, why not just throw the guy in jail –– but oh wait, they already do that. They throw guys in jail for non-support all the time, and when they do, the guys serve the whole 30, 60 or 90-day sentence (the term keeps lengthening), even though cocaine dealers routinely get out of jail after serving half their time.

[…]Let’s look at the bigger picture, though. What is the guy paying child support for? Yeah yeah, to support his children. But that means they are, you know, sort of hischildren, right? Not necessarily. The custodial parent, almost always the ex-wife, although supposed to grant agreed-upon access rights to the children’s father, can arbitrarily decide she doesn’t want to allow access, and for any old reason — oh sorry, little Jimmy has a play date, oh sorry little Emma has too much homework, oh sorry, I just don’t want to — can deny the father access. And does she pay for that? No. Oh, she might get a scolding from the judge, but there is no downside for her. No custodial mom has ever spent a night in jail or had her licence suspended for refusing her children’s father legal access to them.

There’s more in the article. Sigh. At least Barbara Kay likes men enough to speak out to defend us. Sometimes I think that women who care that men are treated fairly are the only ones who should be able to get married. If only men weren’t so stupid that they judge women solely based on appearance. I guess we’ll have to learn the hard way!

Commentary

Do big government tax credits break up intact families?

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Here’s a research study from the Royal Economic Society. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Labour’s tax credits have caused thousands of families to break up, an authoritative study said yesterday.

The flagship scheme is blamed for a doubling of the divorce rate among low income parents with young children.

Tax credits, introduced a decade ago to cut child poverty, were supposed to help single mothers and hard-working families.

But a so-called ‘couple penalty’ means that a mother can pick up more than £100 extra a week by splitting from her partner.

Evidence published by the Royal Economic Society said that tax credits give mothers married to men on low earnings an incentive to divorce.

The study found that the divorce rate among mothers with low-income husbands rose by 160 per cent in the three years after the benefits were brought in.

Marco Francesconi, of the University of Essex, said that tax credits had limited the
benefits of marriage, encouraged mothers to work and produced a ‘greater risk of family disruption’.

He said: ‘The result that tax credits had strong employment and divorce effects on married mothers in poor households is very important.

The findings, published in the highly-influential Economic Journal, are the first hard evidence that tax credits are working to drive couples apart.

[…]Professor Francesconi and two senior colleagues based their research on 3,235 couples tracked from 1991 by the British Household Panel Survey.

‘Women married to a partner who did not work or who worked fewer than 16 hours a week were more than 2 per cent more likely to dissolve their partnership after the reform than their childless counterparts,’ the report said.

Now take a look at this interview about unilateral (“no fault”) divorce from Life Site News, featuring Dr. Stephen Baskerville. (H/T Ruth Blog)

Excerpt:

LSN: Are there any other often-ignored laws or cultural issues that work against the family?

SB: The divorce regime is in fact a panoply of destructive laws, not just no-fault.  The massive federally funded machinery catering to the dishonest hysteria over “domestic violence” is almost all geared to facilitating divorce.  Knowingly false accusations of domestic violence are now out of control, and almost all of it is generated to secure custody of children in divorce cases.

The same is largely true of the hysteria over “child abuse”.  Child abuse is certainly real, but almost all of it takes place in single-parent homes, not intact families.  In other words, there is a child abuse industry that actually creates the problem it professes to be addressing.  By encouraging false accusations of child abuse to facilitate divorce and single-parent homes, the child abuse industry actually creates more child abuse.  That is a shocking statement, I realize, but I have documented it in my book.

Child support is another facilitator of divorce.  Too many people credulously accept feminist/government propaganda that child support is to provide for children who have been abandoned.  Nothing is further from the truth.  It is mostly extorted from fathers that have been evicted, again through “no fault” of their own.  It is a subsidy on divorce and single-parent homes.  If you pay people to divorce, they will do it more.  That is precisely what child support does.

Basically, these single-mother welfare policies are put in place by left-wing political parties in order to provide financial incentives to women to break up their marriages. This is called “compassion” – equalizing the life outcomes of married couples with single-mother households. Government does this by transferring wealth from marriage couples to single parents households.

But social problems are created by fatherless homes, no matter how much wealth redistribution the socialists do. Big government has to raise taxes and increase social programs to deal with the failures they themselves caused in the first place. Bigger government means more regulation of private life, and less take-home pay for working husbands. Eventually, a traditionally-minded man cannot support a family alone, and his wife has to work. That leaves government-regulated day cares and public schools in charge of the children. How convenient for the secular left – now they can impose their sex education on ever younger children. Parents can’t complain about what they don’t know about.

Remember that 77% of young, unmarried women voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 election. This is what they wanted – to replace the unreliable men they freely and unwisely chose for themselves with the security offered by big government. But big government gets its money from the reliable men. What do you suppose the reliable men will do when 50% of their paycheck is confiscated by the state? Does that give a man confidence to get married? Will he respected by his family and have moral authority in the home because of his role as sole provider? Of course not. Government will be in charge.