The whole idea of dead beat dads, discussed in the National Post story below, is a work of fiction created through feminist advocacy and in North America the collection of child support is a multibillion dollar industry. In the USA it is centered around a highly gender biased act called the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and Joe Biden is its patriarch. Bill Clinton passed it back in the 90’s to pay back his feminist voters,. It is control central for the unconstitutional discrimination of males within the sphere of family law. The federal government pays the States incentives for collecting child support. If they collect, more money flows downward. Thus States have every incentive to be as draconian as possible.
Most men, upwards of 70%, cannot pay because they are poor. They are deprived of passports and license to drive. That can impact, as Mr. Gurney has described, his ability to earn income. They are then sent to debtor’s prison, where they cannot work to pay it off. After getting out, sometimes after 6 months, but in at least one case involving alimony, over 10 years, they are further behind because the arrears clock never stops. Men have an 8 times higher suicide rate over women after divorce. Often it is because they see no way out. They lost their children, their savings on lawyers, their dignity, their freedom and then their life. In addition, we say we don’t have capital punishment in Canada. Eight men a day die by their own hand. What a disgrace, but we get hyperactive if the flu hits and a few die a week. Both are tragic but men are expendable. Some Provinces and States use public forums to humiliate them by posting pictures and descriptions. This is the modern equivalent of putting people in stocks for public viewing and throwing things at them.
Most men, upwards of 70%, cannot pay because they are poor. They are deprived of passports and license to drive. That can impact, as Mr. Gurney has described, his ability to earn income. They are then sent to debtor’s prison, where they cannot work to pay it off. After getting out, sometimes after 6 months, but in at least one case involving alimony, over 10 years, they are further behind because the arrears clock never stops. Men have an 8 times higher suicide rate over women after divorce. Often it is because they see no way out. They lost their children, their savings on lawyers, their dignity, their freedom and then their life. In addition, we say we don’t have capital punishment in Canada. Eight men a day die by their own hand. What a disgrace, but we get hyperactive if the flu hits and a few die a week. Both are tragic but men are expendable. Some Provinces and States use public forums to humiliate them by posting pictures and descriptions. This is the modern equivalent of putting people in stocks for public viewing and throwing things at them.
Lawyers and courts tout the unknowable “Best interests of Children” in their pompous and often kangaroo courts. Sure, they do - and I have a time share on Mars with running water. The above actions to dads are not in the best interest of any child, or any one else, but it keeps Judges, lawyers and their apparatchiks employed in a lucrative business.
You will hear of very few women being thrown in jail for child support arrears even though proportionately they are less likely to pay than men are. Further, you will seldom ever see them put in jail for denying access or alienating a child from dad. Moms get physical custody 90% of the time so there are many dads acting as ATM's for the divorce industry. Mom gets to control her ex in a myriad of fashions during and after the divorce process, aided and abetted by the machinery of the government, NGO’s (DV shelters), lawyers and most definitely judges who are the CEO’s of gender apartheid in this country. Politicians don’t have a clue what they have created and even if they piped up some feminist group funded by Status of Women Canada will chew them up in a maelstrom of shrieking rhetoric suggesting the government is abandoning women for male privilege aided by the likes of Jack Layton (Canada's Chief Socialist and feminist sycophant) and Iggenstein, (Michael Iggnatief - Canada's hapless Liberal leader). Heck, you even have Tasha Kheiriddin an op-ed writer, and lawyer doing it at the NP against a bill for equal parenting, C-422, just before Father’s Day. She claims to be conservative but that clearly is a misprint. She is, if anything, a maternal supremacist, and if not liberal a Red-Tory who are Liberals who think they are conservative but don't know any better.MJM
You will hear of very few women being thrown in jail for child support arrears even though proportionately they are less likely to pay than men are. Further, you will seldom ever see them put in jail for denying access or alienating a child from dad. Moms get physical custody 90% of the time so there are many dads acting as ATM's for the divorce industry. Mom gets to control her ex in a myriad of fashions during and after the divorce process, aided and abetted by the machinery of the government, NGO’s (DV shelters), lawyers and most definitely judges who are the CEO’s of gender apartheid in this country. Politicians don’t have a clue what they have created and even if they piped up some feminist group funded by Status of Women Canada will chew them up in a maelstrom of shrieking rhetoric suggesting the government is abandoning women for male privilege aided by the likes of Jack Layton (Canada's Chief Socialist and feminist sycophant) and Iggenstein, (Michael Iggnatief - Canada's hapless Liberal leader). Heck, you even have Tasha Kheiriddin an op-ed writer, and lawyer doing it at the NP against a bill for equal parenting, C-422, just before Father’s Day. She claims to be conservative but that clearly is a misprint. She is, if anything, a maternal supremacist, and if not liberal a Red-Tory who are Liberals who think they are conservative but don't know any better.MJM
Matt Gurney: Man jailed by courts after courts bankrupt him
June 21, 2010 – 2:12 pm
Jeff Dolan spent Father’s Day in jail, locked away for failure to pay child support. Deadbeat dads don’t garner a lot of sympathy. But you don’t need to study Jeff’s case for long before you realize that he’s anything but a deadbeat. Instead, he’s a man hopelessly ensnared in a crushing bureaucratic machine: He’s in jail because he couldn’t pay child support, but he couldn’t pay child support because he was unemployed … and he was unemployed because the court took his driver’s license for failure to pay child support … after he went bankrupt paying his court costs.
There is no good news in this story, but there is some dark irony. Jeff, who despite a learning disability graduated high school and held down several construction jobs in his home state of Minnesota, was also a volunteer at a local sexual violence crisis centre. One of his jobs there, on top of fielding telephone calls from sexual assault survivors, was to talk to high school classes. One thing he taught was “male privilege” — the notion that society favours men in many varied, sometimes subtle ways, thus enabling sexual violence.
Jeff is living proof that if there is such a thing as male privilege, it is doled out unevenly.
Jeff’s saga began five years ago, when a slowdown in Minnesota’s economy saw his employment opportunities dry up. After travelling to Texas to work in the oil industry, Jeff returned to his wife and two sons only to be served with a restraining order. His wife was claiming that Jeff was himself an abuser. Jeff’s lawyer urged him to immediately file for divorce, warning him that such orders are used by women as a “silver bullet” to ensure swift, favourable divorce proceedings. Jeff’s lawyer proved prescient, and he spent the next several years both seeking to prove that he was not an abuser and to get equal custody of his sons. It would be hard enough to argue for custody when facing abuse allegations at the best of time; Jeff actually had to do so before the same judge. Though the abuse allegations were ultimately set aside (two psychiatric profiles showed that he was not abusive), the damage was done — Jeff had lost equal custody, had gone deep into debt fighting two legal battles at once and had a nervous breakdown. By the time he was well enough to work, the world’s economy was in chaos, and there were no jobs.
But Jeff didn’t quit. He found new work, and could make good money billing by the hour. All he had to do was drive to the appointments, and he’d be able to pay down debt and meet his child support obligations. Enter the courts — since he had fallen behind on his obligations, the court stripped him of his driver’s license. That caused him to be unable to work. He fell further behind in his payments, and now he’s in jail. He can’t get his license back until he’s employed and making payments again, but he can’t find work because he does not have a valid license and now, must declare on job applications that he’s served jail time.
It’s a complete Catch-22, an utterly Kafka-esque nightmare from which there is no escape. The courts have left only one avenue open to Jeff to regain his freedom, financial independence and his children, while simultaneously making it impossible for him to do those very things. If anyone ever needed a heaping helping of male privilege, certainly, it must be Jeff Dolan.
Jeff is just one man, but speaks to a broader problem. Courts, in their earnest efforts to do right by families, are destroying them, instead. Men, who want only the chance to be good fathers, are crushed under the weight of gender-biased default rulings and the inertia of unfeeling bureaucracies. Whether in far-off Minnesota or, as Post columnist Barbara Kay has shown time and again, right here in Canada, men fighting custody battles are outgunned from the start. Jeff’s story, of being forced into bankruptcy by family court proceedings and then being jailed by those same courts for not being able to pay their court-mandated payments, is no surprise to any number of Canadian dads.
Bill Levy, a Canadian with bitter personal experience in such matters said it best: “Canada has reopened debtor prisons, only for parents. Only alienated parents go to jail for poverty. No Mastercard or mortgage debtors. The Constitution does not permit this, we can’t be forced into servitude. And yet no one will stand up in court and make these arguments. Men, and some women, too, can’t fight back against the court’s preference for expediency.” That mirrors what Jeff’s brother Jon told me in a phone interview: “Jeff isn’t in jail because he’s an abuser or a bad father. He’s in jail because he’s poor in a bad economy where there are no jobs.”
You can take any number of harsh lessons from Jeff’s tale, or those that Ms. Kay has chronicled in the Post time and again, but the overriding one must be how helpless parents — usually fathers — are in the face of an inflexible family court system that gives no leeway or understanding to those trapped in its clutches.
National Post
There is no good news in this story, but there is some dark irony. Jeff, who despite a learning disability graduated high school and held down several construction jobs in his home state of Minnesota, was also a volunteer at a local sexual violence crisis centre. One of his jobs there, on top of fielding telephone calls from sexual assault survivors, was to talk to high school classes. One thing he taught was “male privilege” — the notion that society favours men in many varied, sometimes subtle ways, thus enabling sexual violence.
Jeff is living proof that if there is such a thing as male privilege, it is doled out unevenly.
Jeff’s saga began five years ago, when a slowdown in Minnesota’s economy saw his employment opportunities dry up. After travelling to Texas to work in the oil industry, Jeff returned to his wife and two sons only to be served with a restraining order. His wife was claiming that Jeff was himself an abuser. Jeff’s lawyer urged him to immediately file for divorce, warning him that such orders are used by women as a “silver bullet” to ensure swift, favourable divorce proceedings. Jeff’s lawyer proved prescient, and he spent the next several years both seeking to prove that he was not an abuser and to get equal custody of his sons. It would be hard enough to argue for custody when facing abuse allegations at the best of time; Jeff actually had to do so before the same judge. Though the abuse allegations were ultimately set aside (two psychiatric profiles showed that he was not abusive), the damage was done — Jeff had lost equal custody, had gone deep into debt fighting two legal battles at once and had a nervous breakdown. By the time he was well enough to work, the world’s economy was in chaos, and there were no jobs.
But Jeff didn’t quit. He found new work, and could make good money billing by the hour. All he had to do was drive to the appointments, and he’d be able to pay down debt and meet his child support obligations. Enter the courts — since he had fallen behind on his obligations, the court stripped him of his driver’s license. That caused him to be unable to work. He fell further behind in his payments, and now he’s in jail. He can’t get his license back until he’s employed and making payments again, but he can’t find work because he does not have a valid license and now, must declare on job applications that he’s served jail time.
It’s a complete Catch-22, an utterly Kafka-esque nightmare from which there is no escape. The courts have left only one avenue open to Jeff to regain his freedom, financial independence and his children, while simultaneously making it impossible for him to do those very things. If anyone ever needed a heaping helping of male privilege, certainly, it must be Jeff Dolan.
Jeff is just one man, but speaks to a broader problem. Courts, in their earnest efforts to do right by families, are destroying them, instead. Men, who want only the chance to be good fathers, are crushed under the weight of gender-biased default rulings and the inertia of unfeeling bureaucracies. Whether in far-off Minnesota or, as Post columnist Barbara Kay has shown time and again, right here in Canada, men fighting custody battles are outgunned from the start. Jeff’s story, of being forced into bankruptcy by family court proceedings and then being jailed by those same courts for not being able to pay their court-mandated payments, is no surprise to any number of Canadian dads.
Bill Levy, a Canadian with bitter personal experience in such matters said it best: “Canada has reopened debtor prisons, only for parents. Only alienated parents go to jail for poverty. No Mastercard or mortgage debtors. The Constitution does not permit this, we can’t be forced into servitude. And yet no one will stand up in court and make these arguments. Men, and some women, too, can’t fight back against the court’s preference for expediency.” That mirrors what Jeff’s brother Jon told me in a phone interview: “Jeff isn’t in jail because he’s an abuser or a bad father. He’s in jail because he’s poor in a bad economy where there are no jobs.”
You can take any number of harsh lessons from Jeff’s tale, or those that Ms. Kay has chronicled in the Post time and again, but the overriding one must be how helpless parents — usually fathers — are in the face of an inflexible family court system that gives no leeway or understanding to those trapped in its clutches.
National Post
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