.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}
Visit Freedom's Zone Donate To Project Valour

Monday, July 24, 2006

Roe V Wade For Men Suit Dismissed

The judge threw the Roe V Wade for Men suit out. DU only racked up a few hundred posts about it. Even though some of the participants are childish in the extreme, some of them are making excellent points. It's genuinely true that in many cases "fathers" are basically picked at random, especially in CA:
If I sound bitter, its because I was on the receiving end of some of this...Some year ago I was named as the father of a child. I was the wrong race, I had gotten a vasectomy 10 years before and had the medical records to prove it. None of that mattered and a child support order was entered against me. I spoke the to social worker and showed her I could not have been the father. She said it was not her problem, even though she was setting up wage garnishment and had helped the mother file the court papers for child support. I got a lawyer and went to court. I was told I had to pay until it was decided. I refused and the garnishment was blocked (I was in the military at the time). I was refused access to "my child" even supervised visitation (we considered challenging the mother for custody). I was told if I did not pay I would be going to jail, so I paid. Finally got to court and the judge seemed unwilling to believe the evidence, including a fertility test from a local independent lab. He kept asking me if I had reconciled with the mother, a teenager I have never seen before, and was willing to do my social duty. My lawyer got a bit heated and all the state kept saying was they had the mother's word (who never showed up) that I was the father. 30 days later the order was vacated. I was out lawyer fees, was unable to recover the child support I paid, my name is still on the birth certificate, I am/was listed as a deadbeat dad, and it was on my credit report. Yes, I am bitter but with damn good cause.
So the thing cuts both ways, and I do support Georgia's law protecting "fake fathers". If we want there to be any genuine fathers left, we'd better make sure that responsible men aren't victimized in this way.

I'm amazed at how many people believe that that two adults should be able to have sex without the worry of having to deal with any potential pregnancy. I'd like to get to work without having to drive. I think the state should rent a helicopter and airlift me over. It's only fair.

Here's a brilliant idea:

132. My suggestion to make the system more fair
When a woman finds out she is pregnant, she must make a reasonable attempt to notify the potential father (father's) within a specific amount of time.

The potential father must then file a form with the local courthouse either accepting responsibilities and rights of fatherhood or declining them.

The potential mother is then given a copy of the potential father's form and then makes her decision as to whether the baby is birthed or not, knowing whether she will have a father participating in parenthood with her or not.

The reasons I like this plan are ...

The woman has absolute decision making authority on whether she births the baby or not.
The woman is not forced into parenthood without her permission.
The man is not forced into parenthood without his permission either.

-_________________________________________________________________

But what about the baby?

All participating parents should put a fixed percentage of their income into a state child support pool and each eligible child should recieve the exact same check each month from the pool. To me it's ridiculous that one child gets 200 times more support than another child just because one woman bedded a rich guy and the other a poor guy. Each child is equally valuable.

What if there's not enough in the pool?

Then general state funds should make up the difference because a hungry child is the responsibility of all of us, whether our condoms broke or not.
That last provision is added because there would be even less incentive for "potential fathers" to decide to "accept" the rights and responsibilities of fatherhood if they were going to be paying for everyone else's children as well as their own. There would be very, very few men who would take that deal, and many of them would often be institutionalized, so I doubt they would be contributing much financially overall.

What a brilliant plan to make every child everyone's responsibility. We'll never change. The problem really is that some one has to be responsible, and so those who want irresponsibility plan to make everyone responsible. I really don't see how that's an improvement. Obviously marriage wouldn't last long under this scheme. Given voting coalitions, the funding for the "fatherless" kids would keep outstripping the funding that the average married man could provide to his own children, especially given the high taxation rates he'd be paying for the children of irresponsible losers such as this poster.

Marxism has reached its summit. The first post (which I do believe) is a female sort of marxist paradise, and the second is a male sort of marxist wonderland. However they show ominous signs of meeting at the pass and joining forces, so I think all the sane people had better be alert and ready.

Both plans are, of course, injurious to the child. But hey, this entire debate has never, ever, been about the children, has it? Not in the least. It's always about avoiding responsibility rather than taking it. Whether you pick a father at random out of the phone book, or whether you decide to hand out cigars to the entire population, the people advocating these schemes are always, always, always trying to avoid basic human responsibility - their own.


Comments:
M-o-M, every Perfect Utopian Society -- from the French Revolution's "Republic of Perfect Virtue" to Star Trek's Federation to the fanboy masturbations inflicted on me at F&SF cons -- all have two things in common:
Atheism and Total Sexual Freedom (TM).

The Headless Unicorn Guy
 
TSF goes right along with TMI?

My point is that there can't be total sexual freedom because of our biological makeup. It's a fantasy, rather than science fiction. We carry our microbiological critters with us, and due to the very rapid timescale of their evolution compared to ours, any time human beings sleep with a lot of different partners you get disease epidemics within a couple of generations.

You can sterilize yourself. You can engage in same-sex sex. But the only way to have promiscuous sex that doesn't spread havoc throughout society is to never actually make physical contact with the other person's body.

Shrink-wrapped sex would be safe, but somehow I don't think it will ever catch on. We don't just hunger for the Big O - we hunger for the contact, for the risk, for the acceptance, the engagement and the challenge of that level of access to another human being.

There have been at least a thousand different ways of trying to define G_d, the Great Unknowable, but for me the best definition is that Reality that is unchangeable and immutable and not determined by the physical laws of our universe.

Feminists who deeply reject their physical gender seem to have the same atheism thang going on.

Do you think that atheism can be correlated with a very broad-based refusal to deal with reality at some level? I'm not talking about agnosticism. I'm talking about the type of atheism that adamantly maintains that
A) God does not exist, and
B) any worldview that allows the possibility of God's existence is evil.

Maybe I should be asking one of the online shrinks this question?
 
Looking for reality in OZ.

Think about that.
 
That's why it's so disturbing. Not knowing is something that we all experience in life and accept. Having to make up knowledge for some internal reason seems rather dangerous.
 
SC&A, what I really mean to ask is whether this induces a sort of hysterical isolation and desperation?

I can see that the more a person needs something to be true, the more the idea that it IS true would have to be fiercely defended. I'm just not sure how a person gets in this bind.

Maybe that's why I think scientific method is such an important cultural idea in the west. By defining a structure for developing knowledge which requires identifying first what we cannot know, I think it has an important psychological effect on the individual. Habits of thought are habits of thought.
 
MoM:

There's wisdom in the saying that you need a license to drive a car, but any two assholes can make a baby...

The Carthaginians took a religious approach to this, albeit in an era where infant and child mortality was astronomical by our standards:

http://lexicorient.com/tunisia/carthage02.htm

Go there in person...weird vibe, very weird. Makes you appreciate the God of Abraham.

But I reckon that ancient Carthaginians had fistfights to "adopt" orphans, don't you?

When the concept of "Chastity" doesn't work, and we fail to make the scrupulous use of contraception a virtue, what is left?

Unwanted children...

So our modern response is to make the bastards slaves of the State.

And the State, once it gets the taste of being a slavemaster, gets used to the role and hungers for more.

So it usually enslaves the unwanted child's mother.

And if the mother can be enslaved, then why not the father?

Especially when all that is needed is his name entered on a birth certificate, the mothers' signature, and the overseer's rubber stamp.

Not all people are equipped for freedom, and frankly, not all people are properly human.

Regards;
 
Bilgeman - one person's lack of ability to be meaningfully free should not rationally translate into a random male being assigned the duty of taking care of her offspring.

Call me a Neanderthal, cave-dwelling, hairy-legged Sasquatch too primitive to grasp the extreme wisdom of the modern feminist society, but the fact that in some of these cases the men have never even met the women that the courts have ruled impregnated OUGHT to be a valid defense against financial claims against them.

Btw, the women have the choice to give their children up for adoption. The men in some of these cases never had any choices whatsoever, including that of keeping their pants zipped. Lord help the poor Californian schmuck named "John Smith" or "Mike Brown". Maybe this accounts for the new trend of giving children really unique names - it's a way of evading randomly assigned fatherhood.

Think of this, and name your son Ramses II The Sasquatch. He'll thank you for it later.
 
Post a Comment



<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?