Dr. Warren Farrell to Address National Family Law Reform Conference

From an ACFC email:

We are pleased to relay the news that Dr. Warren Farrell will be joining us for the National Family Law Reform Conference, September 15 -16, 2006 at the Crystal Gateway Marriott in Arlington, Virginia.

A partial list of confirmed speakers includes:Dr. Warren Farrell, Mrs. Phyllis Schlafly, President - Eagle Forum, Glenn Sacks, Columnist, Michael McManus, Dr. Stephen Baskerville.....and many others......

Click here to register for this event.

You will come away with invaluable tools, contacts, and concrete steps to implement change and put family law reform at the center of your community and state agenda.

ACFC has negotiated a discounted room rate of $119.00 per night with the Marriott for the conference. This rate is per room, not per person, up to 4 people may share a room. Please contact the hotel directly at 703 920-3230 or toll free at 800 228-9290 to reserve your room. Indicate you are attending the National Family Law Reform Conference to receive the conference rate. A limited number of rooms are available, unbooked rooms will release back to the hotel soon (August 21, 2006), so reserve today.

Welfare Reform Meets the Law of Unintended Consequences

Welfare Reform Meets the Law of Unintended Consequences

This is the latest article by Phyllis Schlafly

Excerpts:

The Great Society welfare system was recognized by the 1990s as a social disaster that created fatherless children, illegitimacy and women's dependency on government. Channeling taxpayer handouts to mothers provided a powerful financial incentive for fathers to depart; they were not needed anymore.

Unfortunately, policy changes in the 1988 and 1996 welfare laws created similar financial incentives for state governments to exclude middle-class fathers from the home. The law incentivized the states to manufacture "noncustodial" (i.e., absent) fathers and to order money transfers (usually through wage garnishment) to mothers, thereby putting a large segment of the middle class under the welfare bureaucrats.

Formerly, to receive welfare benefits, recipients had to demonstrate eligibility by "need" (i.e., a test measured by income level), but the new policy omitted income eligibility requirements. Without a means test, a high-income mother with custody can use the power of the state to collect from a low-income father.

The federal government annually provides $4.2 billion in block grants to states to serve as collection agencies. States are reimbursed for 66 percent of their costs of child support enforcement activities, 80 percent of their costs for technology, and 66 percent of their costs of DNA testing for paternity.

The more cases the states can create and the more operational expenses they incur, the more federal funding states receive to expand their welfare bureaucracy. No performance standards are required to get this money and, in addition, the feds provide a bonus fund ($458 million in Fiscal 2006) for which the states compete.

This result was accurately predicted by Leslie L. Frye, chief of Child Support for the California Department of Social Services. In testifying to the Human Resources Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee on March 20, 1997, Frye said the new regulations "encouraged states to recruit middle-class families, never dependent on public assistance and never likely to be so, into their programs in order to maximize federal child support incentives."

Many consciences should be burdened with the realization that taxpayer money provides financial incentives to deprive millions of children of their own fathers.

Phyllis Schlafly and Stephen Baskerville Interview

On February 14, 2006 Phyllis Schlafly and Stephen Baskerville joined together in a landmark interview about the "War Against The Family."

Click here to listen to the interview.

Feminists' Double Standards About Child Care

This is the latest article by Phyllis Schlafly. I tried to make some cuts to keep the post relatively brief - but this is in fact most of the article. Click on the article title to link to the source and read it in full.

Feminists' Double Standards About Child Care
by Phyllis Schlafly

Excerpts:

Feminist ideology taught that the duties of the housewife and mother were (in Friedan's words) "endless, monotonous, unrewarding" and "peculiarly suited to the capacities of feeble-minded girls." Society's expectation that a mother should care for her own children was cited as oppression of women by our male-dominated patriarchal society from which women must be liberated so they can achieve fulfillment in workforce careers just like men.

Demanding that husbands take on equal duties in child care, the National Organization for Women passed resolutions in the 1970s stating, "The father has equal responsibility with the mother for the child care role."

n 1972, "Ms." Magazine featured pre-marriage contracts declaring housewives independent from essential housework and babycare, and obliging the husband to do half the dishes and diapers.

Then-ACLU attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in her 1977 book "Sex Bias in the U.S. Code" that "all legislation based on the breadwinning-husband, dependent-homemaking-wife pattern" must be eliminated "to reflect the equality principle" because "a scheme built upon the breadwinning husband [and] dependent homemaking wife concept inevitably treats the woman's efforts or aspirations in the economic sector as less important than the man's."

Feminist literature is filled with putdowns of the role of housewife and mother. This ideology led directly to feminist insistence that the taxpayers provide (in Ginsburg's words) "a comprehensive program of government-supported child care."

The icon of college women's studies courses, Simone de Beauvoir, opined that "marriage is an obscene bourgeois institution," and easy divorce became a primary goal of the feminist liberation movement. Three-fourths of divorces are now unilaterally initiated by wives without any requirement to allege fault on the part of the cast-off husband.

As divorces became easy to get, the feminists suddenly did a total about-face in their demand that fathers share equally in child care. Upon divorce, mothers demand total legal and physical custody and control of their children, arguing that only a mother is capable of providing their proper care and upbringing, and a father's only function is to provide a paycheck.

Gone are the demands that the father change diapers or tend to a sick child. Feminists want the father out of sight except maybe for a few hours a month of visitation at her discretion.

Suddenly, the ex-husband is targeted as a totally essential breadwinner, and the ex-wife is eager to proclaim her dependency. Feminists assert that, after divorce, child care should be almost solely the mother's job, dependency is desirable, and providing financial support should be almost solely the father's job.

It is settled law in the United States that parents (note the plural) have a fundamental right to the care, custody and control of the upbringing of their children. But feminists have persuaded the family courts, upon divorce, to acquiesce in feminist demands that the mother typically be given 80 to 100 percent of those fundamental rights that belonged to both parents before divorce.

What's behind this feminist reversal about motherhood? As Freud famously asked, "what does a woman want?"

The explanation appears to be the maxim, Follow the money. Beginning in the mid-1980s, the feminists used their political clout to get Congress to pass draconian post-divorce support-enforcement laws that use the full power of government to give the divorced mother cash income proportional to the percentage of custody time she persuades the court to award, but unrelated to what she spends for the children or to her willingness to allow the father to see his children.

Since the father typically has higher income than the mother, giving near-total custody to the mother enables the states to maximize transfer payments and thereby collect bigger cash bonuses from the federal government. When fathers appeal to the family courts for equal time with their children, they are opposed by a big industry of lawyers, psychologists, custody evaluators, domestic-violence agitators, and government bureaucrats who make their living out of denying fathers their fundamental rights.

It's time for a national debate and discussion of the taxpayer incentives that favor divorce, the anti-marriage feminists, and the resulting exclusion of fathers from the lives of their children.

Jim Crow Days For Men

Jim Crow Days For Men
by Carey Roberts

Excerpts:

Abuse of these orders is not an isolated problem. In Massachusetts, about 30,000 domestic orders are issued every year. One analysis by the Massachusetts Trial Court found that fewer than half of these restraining orders involved even an allegation of physical abuse.

Another troubling piece of this law -- clearly unconstitutional -- is its “mandatory-arrest” provisions. Let’s say you get into a marital tiff, your wife or girlfriend calls 911, and the cops come running. But in the meantime, things cool down and she asks police to leave. Fine, but don’t forget your toothbrush, because you will be going out in handcuffs.

It’s no surprise that this $1 billion-a-year anti-father juggernaut eventually takes its toll on families. Highlighting the fact that almost 40% of our nation’s children now live in a home without their own father, Schlafly urges Congress to “conduct an investigation to find out how much of this fatherlessness is the result of bad government in the hands of a small radical group that is biased against marriage and fathers.”

Related article: Time to Defund Feminist Pork — the Hate-Men Law by Phyllis Schlafly

Court Takes Kids from Dads, Saying Service in Iraq Is 'Abandonment' - Phyllis Schlafly

I will likely reprint most of this article but that should not stop you from visiting the source: Human Events Online - Court Takes Kids from Dads, Saying Service in Iraq Is 'Abandonment' by Phyllis Schlafly.

Also, this article mentions Michigan legislation HB 5100 which I mentioned here, more information can be found on the Michigan Legislature site as well as in the Dads of Michigan Forum.

On to the article:

Court Takes Kids from Dads, Saying Service in Iraq Is 'Abandonment'
by Phyllis Schlafly

Gallant Americans are risking life and limb in Iraq to defend home and country. But they never dreamed they might lose their children, too.

When Army National Guard Spc. Joe McNeilly of Grand Ledge, Mich., came home after 15 months in Iraq, he found that a family court "referee" had taken away his joint custody of his 10-year-old son and given full custody and control to the boy's mother.

For five years, McNeilly had had a 50-50 no-problem custody arrangement with his ex-girlfriend Holly Erb. When called up to go to Iraq, he gave her temporary full custody while he was overseas.

While he was gone, Erb persuaded a family court to make her full custody permanent. When McNeilly protested, he was told that his year-long absence constituted abandonment and produced custody "points" against him.

"You want to make a soldier cry, you take his son away," McNeilly said. "It's devastating."

Michigan State Rep. Rick Jones became interested in this injustice. When he contacted the Judge Advocate General's office, he discovered that there are 15 to 20 similar cases in Michigan and it is a common problem all over the United States.

Jones has introduced legislation (HB 5100) providing that absences for military service cannot be used against a parent and that a permanent custody arrangement cannot be established while a parent is on active duty. He is hearing from legislators in other states who want to sponsor similar bills.

Since McNeilly's case was reported in the press, Erb's lawyer and the court's representative are trying to claim that depriving him of his father's rights wasn't because he was serving in Iraq, but because of his poor parenting skills.

The proof? McNeilly sent a couple of postcards to his son that showed soldiers training with a gun. Horrors! How un-politically correct to tell a son that soldiers in Iraq carry guns.

Erb's lawyer asserted that the postcards frightened the boy and showed that McNeilly is not a fit parent. But surely the boy had a right to know about his father's career and that soldiers who use guns are pursuing an honorable vocation.

The referee's report also justified deciding for mother custody because she was the "day-to-day caretaker and decision maker in the child's life" while McNeilly was deployed. But that's what mothers have always done when their men go off to war and it's no argument for taking the child away from his father upon return.

Day-to-day caretaker is feminist jargon to promote their ideology that the mother should have full custody and control because the father is not around to change diapers and do household chores. He is merely working a job, or sometimes two jobs, to support his family.

Follow the money to explain some of the motivation. When the mother was given full custody, the court ordered McNeilly to pay her $525 a month, which she would lose if they return to joint custody.

The real problem in this case is the arrogance of family courts, which claim the right to decide child custody based on their subjective personal opinions about the "best interest of the child." Family court judges, and the psychologists and referees they hire, routinely violate the fundamental right of parents to make their own decisions about the best interest of their own children.

Family courts are subjective and arbitrary, so unlucky divorced parents could get a judge or a referee who is anti-gun, or anti-military, or anti-spanking, or anti-homeschooling, or anti-religion, or a feminist who wants to transform the middle class into a matriarchal society as has already been done to the welfare class, with tragic results.

The notion that family court judges, psychologists and referees can impose personal views about what is "the best interest of the child" rather than a child's own parents is just another way of saying "it takes a village to raise a child." Thousands of good fathers have been deprived of their fundamental rights in the care and upbringing of their children by courts that treat fathers as good for nothing more than a paycheck.

The large number of fathers who have been the victims of family-court fatherphobia is no doubt the reason that one of the most popular songs on country music stations this year is Tim McGraw's "Do You Want Fries with That?" The lyrics are the cry of a father who is working a minimum-wage second job in a fast-food restaurant, living alone in a tent, after being ordered by a judge to support his children living in his house with his ex-wife and her boyfriend.

The father laments, "You took my wife, and you took my kids, and you stole the life that I used to live; my pride, the pool, the boat, my tools, my dreams, the dog, the cat."

What Have Feminists Done to America's Fathers?

What Have Feminists Done to America's Fathers?

by Phyllis Schlafly
Jun 10, 2005

On Father's Day, Americans should ponder the appalling fact that an estimated 40 percent of our nation's children are living in homes without their own father. Most of our social problems are caused by kids who grow up in homes without their own fathers: drug abuse, illicit sexual activity, unwed pregnancies, youth suicide, high school dropouts, runaways, and crime.

Where have all the fathers gone? Some men are irresponsible slobs, but no evidence exists that nearly half of American children were voluntarily abandoned by their own fathers; there must be other explanations.

For 30 years, feminist organizations and writers have propagated the myth that women are victims of an oppressive patriarchal society and that marriage is an inherently abusive institution that makes wives second-class citizens. Feminists made divorce a major component of women's liberation and their political freedom.

For three decades, feminists have toyed with the question that Maureen Dowd chose as the title of her forthcoming book, Are Men Necessary? That's just the latest version of Gloria Steinem's famous line, "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle."

College textbooks portray marriage as especially bleak and dreary for women. Assigned readings are preoccupied with domestic violence, battering, abuse, marital rape, and divorce.
During the Clinton Administration, the feminists parlayed their hysteria that domestic violence is a national epidemic into the passage of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). This created a gigantic gravy train of taxpayers' money, known as feminist pork, that empowers pro-divorce, anti-male activism.

Not satisfied with several billions from the U.S. Treasury, 67 feminist and liberal organizations supported a lawsuit to try to get private allegations of domestic abuse heard in federal courts so they could collect civil damages against men and institutions with deep pockets. Fortunately, the Supreme Court, in Brzonkala v. Morrison (2000), declared unconstitutional VAWA's section that might have permitted that additional mischief.

However, VAWA's billions of dollars continue to finance the domestic-violence lobby, and there is a deafening silence from conservatives who pretend to be guardians against federal takeovers of problems that are none of the federal government's business. Local crimes and marital disputes should not be subjects of federal law or spending.

Billions of dollars have flowed from VAWA to the states to finance private victim-advocacy organizations, private domestic-violence coalitions, and the training of judges, prosecutors and police. This tax-funded network is, of course, staffed by radical feminists who teach the presumption of father guilt.

Legislating a special category of domestic violence is very much like legislating a special category of hate crimes. Both create a new level of crimes for which punishment is based on who you are rather than what acts you commit, and the "who" in the view of VAWA and the domestic-violence lobby is the husband and father.

A Justice Department-funded document published by the National Victim Assistance Academy established a widely accepted definition of "violence" that includes such non-criminal acts as "degradation and humiliation" and "name-calling and constant criticizing." The acts need not be illegal, physical, violent, or threatening; "domestic violence" becomes whatever the woman says it is.

The Final Report of the Child Custody and Visitation Focus Group of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges admitted that "usually judges are not required to make a finding of domestic violence in civil protection order cases." In other words, judges saddle fathers with restraining orders on the wife's say-so without any investigation as to whether it is true or false.

The late Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN), a big advocate of VAWA, admitted that "up to 75 percent of all domestic assaults reported to law enforcement agencies were inflicted after the separation of the couple." Most allegations of domestic violence are made for the purpose of taking the custody of children away from their fathers.

The June issue of the Illinois Bar Journal explains how women use court-issued restraining orders (which Illinois calls Orders of Protection) as a tool for the mother to get sole child custody and even bar the father from visitation. In big type, the magazine proclaims: "Orders of protection are designed to prevent domestic violence, but they can also become part of the gamesmanship of divorce."

The "game" is that mothers can assert falsehoods or trivial marital complaints and thereby get sole custody orders that deprive children of their fathers. This "game" is based on the presumption (popularized by VAWA and the domestic-violence lobby) that fathers are inherently guilty and dangerous.

Congress should not be spending taxpayers' money to deal with marital disputes, and courts should not deprive children of their fathers on a presumption that fathers are dangerous. Congress can help us celebrate Father's Day this year by refusing to reauthorize the costly VAWA boondoggle.

Federal incentives exist to make children fatherless

Phyllis Schlafly: Federal incentives exist to make children fatherless

Excerpts (admittedly, this is most of the article):

Why has Congress appropriated taxpayer money to give perverse incentives that break up families and deprive children of their fathers? The built-in financial incentives in the current child-support system have expanded the tragedy of fatherless children from the welfare class to millions of non-welfare divorced couples.

Congress tried to reform the out-of-control welfare system by a series of child-support laws passed in 1975, 1984, 1988, 1996 (the famous Republican welfare reform), and 1999. Unfortunately, these laws morphed the welfare system into a massive middle-class child-support system that deprives millions of children of fathers who never abandoned them.

People think that child-support enforcement benefits children, but it doesn't. When welfare agencies collect child support, the money actually goes to the government to reimburse it for welfare payments already given to mothers, supposedly to reduce the federal budget (which, of course, is never reduced).

In 1984, Congress passed the Child Support Enforcement Amendment. It required states to adopt voluntary guidelines for child-support payments.

In 1988, Congress passed the Family Support Act, which made the guidelines mandatory - along with criminal enforcement - and gave states less than one year to comply. The majority of states quickly adopted the model guidelines conveniently already written by a Department of Health and Human Services consultant who was president of what was shortly to become one of the nation's largest private collection companies, which makes its profits on the onerous guidelines that create arrearages.

The 1988 law extended the guidelines to ALL child-support orders, even though the big majority of those families never had to interact with government in order to pay or receive child support. This massive expansion of federal control over private lives uses a Federal Case Registry to exercise surveillance over 19 million citizens whether or not they are behind in child-support payments.

The states collect the child-support money and deposit it in a state fund, but the federal government pays most of the administrative costs and, therefore, dictates the way the system operates through mandates and financial incentives. The federal government pays 66 percent of the states' administrative overhead costs, 80 percent of computer and technology-enhancement costs, and 90 percent of DNA testing for paternity.

In addition, the states share in a nearly $500 million incentive reward pool based on whatever the state collects. The states can get a waiver to spend this bonus money anyway they choose.

So, in order to cash in on federal bonus money, build their bureaucracies and brag about successful child-support enforcement, the states began bringing into the government system middle-class fathers with jobs who were never (and probably would never be) on welfare. These non-welfare families have grown to represent 83 percent of child-support cases and 92 percent of the money collected, creating a windfall of federal money flowing to the states.

The federal incentives drive the system. The more divorces, and the higher the child-support guidelines are set and enforced (no matter how unreasonable), the more money state bureaucracies collect from the federal government.

Follow the money. The less time that noncustodial parents (usually fathers) are permitted to be with their children, the more child support they are required pay into the state fund, and the higher the federal bonus to the states for collecting the money.

States have powerful incentives to separate fathers from their children, to give near-total custody to mothers, to maintain the fathers' high-level support obligations even if their income is drastically reduced and to hang onto the father's payments as long as possible before paying them out to the mothers. The General Accounting Office reported that in 2002 that states were holding $657 million in undistributed child support.

Fatherless boys are 63 percent more likely to run away and 37 percent more likely to abuse drugs. Fatherless girls are twice as likely to get pregnant and 53 percent more likely to commit suicide. Fatherless boys and girls are twice as likely to drop out of high school and twice as likely to end up in jail.

We can no longer ignore how taxpayer money is providing incentive for divorce and creating fatherless children. Nor can we ignore the government's complicity in the predictable social costs that result from more than 17 million children growing up without fathers.

Fatherhood faces stacked deck in family court

From townhall.com

Fatherhood faces stacked deck in family court
Phyllis Schlafly

January 31, 2005


It's not just gay adoptions that threaten the right of children to be raised in traditional two-parent, mother-father homes. A threat also comes from father-phobic family courts that deprive children of their fathers.

Under no-fault divorce, equality is the rule: Either spouse can terminate a marriage without the other spouse's consent and without any fault committed by the cast-off spouse or even alleged by the spouse initiating the divorce.

When it comes to determining child custody, however, sexism is the rule. By making allegations of fault (true or false, major or petty) against the male, the female can usually get the family court to grant her their children and his money.

Despite an extended string of U.S. Supreme Court decisions upholding the fundamental right of parents to the care, custody and control of their children (reaffirmed in a 2000 case), and despite a very high standard that the government must meet in order to terminate parental legal rights, fathers are routinely denied due process when it comes to determining child custody after divorce.

Family courts use a highly subjective rule called the best interest of the child as recommended by court-appointed child-custody evaluators or psychotherapists. There is no requirement that they have first-hand experience with raising children, and they are allowed to use their own personal prejudices to overrule the parents.

But why aren't parents the ones best able to decide what is in the best interest of the child?

Family courts routinely rubber-stamp child-custody evaluators who recommend maternal custody with fathers getting so-called visitation only every other weekend. This despite the mountain of social science research presented in Warren Farrell's book, "Father and Child Reunion" (Tarcher; $24.95), which proves that the best interest of the child of divorced parents is usually to give the child equally shared parent time.

Two dozen different measures listed in Farrell's book indicate that equally shared custody is better for children than maternal custody alone. Farrell's book explains how most fathers provide benefits that mothers usually don't.

Yet, family courts typically rule as though fathers have no value except their money, and routinely banish fathers (who have not been proven to have committed any misdeed) from the lives of their children, except for every other weekend. Farrell describes how this typical custody pattern is a loser for the child, causing intense feelings of deprivation and depressive behavior.

In his new book "Twice Adopted" (Broadman & Holman: $24.99), Michael Reagan tells how, as the child of divorced parents, he only got to see his father, former President Ronald Reagan, on alternating Saturdays. He wrote, "To an adult two weeks is just two weeks. But to a child, having to wait two weeks to see your father is like waiting forever."

American courts are presumed to be based on an adversarial system with each side arguing its best case, subject to standards of due process, evidence and proof. Somehow, that doesn't function in family courts.

Some divorce lawyers advise wives to manipulate the process by using a three-step technique: (1) make domestic violence or child abuse allegations, (2) demand full custody, (3) collect large amounts of child support, alimony, and legal fees.

If the father objects to this process, the wife can make more accusations. The evaluators then call it a high-conflict divorce and give custody to the wife, declaring that shared parenting won't work.

If the husband doesn't acquiesce, he is reprimanded by the court for "not buying into the process." In trying to defend himself against accusations, the father is denied the basic rights of a criminal defendant such as presumption of innocence and the necessity that the accuser provide proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Family courts force fathers to submit to interrogations and evaluations by court-chosen child-custody evaluators. Fathers are forced to pay the high fees of these private practitioners whom they have not hired, whose services they do not want, and whose credentials and bias are suspect.

The children are also subjected to these evaluators who attempt to turn the children against their parents in unrecorded interviews.

One of the most un-American aspects of family court procedure is the sentencing of fathers to attend re-education classes and psychotherapy sessions to induce them to admit fault and to indoctrinate them in government-approved parenting behavior. The court-approved psychotherapists report back to the court on the father's supposed progress, and his attendance at these Soviet-style re-education sessions must continue until he conforms.

A cozy relationship exists among local lawyers and court-approved psychotherapists who recommend each other for this highly paid work of making evaluations, counseling, and conducting re-education classes. The psychotherapists decline to challenge each other's recommendations or question their competence, and lawyers decline to cross-examine them, because they all want to continue the profitable practice of referring business to each other and collecting fees from fathers who are desperate to see their own children.

Fight for Fathers' Rights Proving Popular

From Human Events Online

Fight for Fathers' Rights Proving Popular
by Phyllis Schlafly
Posted Jan 11, 2005

One impressive Nov. 2 vote has been overlooked by the media. By 85 percent to 15 percent, a ballot initiative in Massachusetts approved equal legal and physical custody of children whose parents are divorced.

That ballot initiative is nonbinding, but it certainly is indicative of the will of the people and the growing recognition that children are best off under the care of both parents. The initiative came out of the grass roots following a massive signature-gathering effort during the summer.

The proposition appeared on the ballot as follows: "Shall the State Representative from this district be instructed to vote in favor of legislation requiring that in all separation and divorce proceedings involving minor children, the courts shall uphold the fundamental rights of both parents to the shared physical and legal custody of their children and the children's right to maximize their time with each parent, so far as is practical, unless one parent is found unfit or the parents agree otherwise, subject to the requirements of existing child support and abuse prevention laws?"

This initiative was sponsored by a fathers' rights group whose members believe fathers are systematically discriminated against by family courts, which nearly always award physical custody to the mother even when the father has committed no fault. Family courts typically deny faultless fathers their equal parental rights even when state law appears to require equal custody.

California Family Law, for example, states (Sec. 3010(a)): "The mother ... and the father ... are equally entitled to the custody of the child." The only specific examples the statute gives for denying custody to a parent are child abuse, false accusations of child abuse, abuse of someone else with whom the person has a domestic relationship, substance abuse, and conviction of certain felonies.

Laws about custody rights vary from state to state, and only about a dozen states specify a legal presumption in favor of equal custody. Iowa's new law says that if a court denies a request for joint physical custody, the judge must explain why it's not in the best interest of the child.

Whether or not a state law mandates equal rights to both parents, family courts appear instead to rely on a concept called "the best interest of the child." Because that notion is wholly subjective, an indefinable rule with no standards or accountability, in practice it rests on the personal whim or bias of the family court.

Family court judges find unwelcome the task of rendering a judicial decision detached from the law and from any due-process finding of fault, so they call on court-appointed psychologists to provide opinions of which parent should have custody. But the issue before the court is not psychological (except in rare cases of mental illness), and the psychologist's credentials no more qualify him to determine what is "the best interest of the child" than the judge - or the father or mother.

The social ills caused by the lack of a paternal role model and discipline dispenser in the home have been voluminously reported. We've been led to believe that the plight of fatherless children is caused by husbands walking out on their wives, fathers abandoning their children and deadbeat dads.

That might be a primary cause in the matriarchal welfare system, but no evidence supports a claim that large numbers of non-welfare fathers are voluntarily abandoning their children. Thousands, perhaps millions, of middle-class children are growing up fatherless because family courts have deprived them of fathers.

One of the best-kept secrets in American society today is that two-thirds of divorces are sought by wives, not husbands. The feminist movement has taught wives they can seek "liberation" by walking out on the marriage contract and marital duties and still reap the benefits of marriage - their children and his money.

Some 80 percent of divorces are involuntary, that is over the objections of one spouse. Very few of these divorces involve grounds such as desertion, adultery or abuse.

We urgently need a comprehensive study of how many family court decisions deprive fathers of their parental rights and deprive children of their fathers, when that awesome punishment is not based on any finding of fault. Information is difficult to gather because most of what family courts do is unavailable to public scrutiny.

How many children are separated by judicial fiat from involuntarily divorced fathers who have done nothing wrong? How many children are separated from their fathers because of questionable child abuse accusations without any evidentiary hearing or due process of law?

Fathers are starting to fight back. During 2004, federal class-action suits were filed against 46 states on behalf of an estimated 25 million non-custodial parents, primarily fathers, claiming violation of their right to equal custody of their children.

The gay-rights lobby has a national strategy based on federal "equal protection" to get their day in court to demand marriage licenses. What we really need are laws ensuring that children of broken homes have equal access to their fathers and mothers.