39 replies to this topic

[Emperor Khan]

She can involve the CSA even if she does not put him down. The duty to pay Child Support is separate from Parental Responsibility.

Well that's BS. I presume that the CSA forces a paternity test in such cases? If so, then the birth certificate should be amended accordingly. The amount of child support should be directly related to 'Parental Responsibility', in other words the mother's actions should be taken into consideration as well, not just the father's (e.g. mother's who prevent access etc.).

[Iscariot]

What would this 50/50 say actually entail?

[Icewolf]

Well that's BS. I presume that the CSA forces a paternity test in such cases? If so, then the birth certificate should be amended accordingly. The amount of child support should be directly related to 'Parental Responsibility', in other words the mother's actions should be taken into consideration as well, not just the father's (e.g. mother's who prevent access etc.).

The logic is that the CSA is paid for the child and the actions of the parents should not matter in this case.

What would this 50/50 say actually entail?

In some cases parents literally split responsibility 50/50 so one of them will have the child one week and another the next, or in one case I cam across (before the courts because the arrangement had collapsed) 3 days and 4 nights then 4 days and 3 nights.

[Iscariot]

In some cases parents literally split responsibility 50/50 so one of them will have the child one week and another the next, or in one case I cam across (before the courts because the arrangement had collapsed) 3 days and 4 nights then 4 days and 3 nights.

What if one parent wants the child to do something and the other doesn't? Couples tend to compromise, but separated parents each with his or her own court mandated 50% rights would do what exactly? Do we think that these kinds of people, who already don't like each other and have a sense of entitlement towards forcing their child into their egoist mould, would actually behave sensibly?

[Icewolf]

Honestly? Lawyers get rich is the answer.

Mostly parents co-operate. The majority of cases in the UK regarding child arrangements do not go to court. You do however get some cases running backwards and forwards to court. Sometimes this is because one parent is genuinely mental unstable but it can also just be because they cannot co-operate at all.

[juslen]

I'd disagree. They both chose to have the child when they engaged in intercourse. Therefore they both have rights and responsibilities.

Accept they both didn't choose to have the child, the mother chose to have the child. By have, I mean to give birth.

No, abortion is not an option. As far as I am concerned it is the murder of an innocent life. There is no convincing me otherwise.

I'm not here to convince you otherwise.

In case you're not joking, no, it doesn't.

It would in some cases. Perhaps I should have worded it differently.

[the rebel]

Accept they both didn't choose to have the child, the mother chose to have the child. By have, I mean to give birth.

When you choose to have sex without precaution then you choose by default to potentially have a child. So yes they both chose apart from certain circumstances where protection failed or the male was mislead...

[Icewolf]

Juslen, if you honestly think that people will make agreements beforehand then you clearly have never been to any place where people drink heavily. Or even aside from that, anyone who looks at the issue of unmarried couples with co-ownership of property knows that people do not bother to prepare for things going wrong.

[Ertyy]

I'm pro choice. If dad wants kid, 50/50. If dad doesn't, chick better not contact him, ever. Seems fair.

Man rights!

 

Actually kind of agree. My semen, my choice.

[Icewolf]

Actually kind of agree. My semen, my choice.

So you seriously believe that Fathers have the same rights over a child unless the father doesn't want them? Should the mother, after birth, be able to deposit the child on him and say "your problem not mine."

[Ertyy]

So you seriously believe that Fathers have the same rights over a child unless the father doesn't want them? Should the mother, after birth, be able to deposit the child on him and say "your problem not mine."

 

 

It's not exactly the same thing but the trend is toward giving women the right to unilaterally decide to terminate a pregnancy. If the father's rights are being curtailed then so should his responsibilities. 

[juslen]

Juslen, if you honestly think that people will make agreements beforehand then you clearly have never been to any place where people drink heavily. Or even aside from that, anyone who looks at the issue of unmarried couples with co-ownership of property knows that people do not bother to prepare for things going wrong.

 

Remove the welfare entitlements and stop babysitting adults and children alike with stolen money and people will think twice about !@#$ting out kids they can't afford. There are lots of couples out there who can't have kids of their own, they adopt children from all over the world because most children in the U.S are already being taken care of by the state. If a woman has sex with a man she can't trust to help support a child and she gets pregnant, she has a choice to make. She can take care of the child on her own, she can give it up for adoption or she can abort it. Men who pay child support aren't even paying for half the cost of raising a child, the state takes over whatever child support and the mother cannot cover. Without the government, even where men were legally required to support the child, they would have an incentive not to have sex without protection because they would have to pay even more out of pocket without government subsidies.

 

So it's a two way street.. I'm taking care of kids that aren't mine.. I'm covering for jobless losers that can't pay child support. There is no excuse for a modern country to have so many damn kids being born out of wedlock. Look at the rates, 70% among blacks and reaching close to 50% among whites. The trend is clear.. whenever the government gets in the way there are unintended consequences. Sex education, cheaper condoms and birth control aren't enough to wake people up. So maybe they should get hit where it hurts the most, their pocketbooks. I never claimed that this would be a solution, only that without hand holding by taxpayers and bureaucrats more people will grow up learning that nobody is going to be there to catch them when they screw up. They have tough decisions to make, and families have to start having conversations about these types of things instead of assuming that the government is going to be there to make everything all better.

Edited by juslen, 26 January 2013 - 05:53 PM.

[Hereno]

There has been government before there were large rates of single mothers and such. You could probably think up a pseudo-logical way to correlate the government with anything you wanted, good or bad, but that doesn't mean it's actually true.

[commander thrawn]

There has been government before there were large rates of single mothers and such. You could probably think up a pseudo-logical way to correlate the government with anything you wanted, good or bad, but that doesn't mean it's actually true.

You are right, the real problem of single parenthood and stuff is cultural. No one is willing to tell people to stop making destructive and stupid decisions. This is why you end up with 50% divorce rates and 70% of blacks coming from broken homes. 

 

The family unit, and the extended family are part of society because they are an effective way of organizing households and helping to mitigate and prevent things like poverty. 

[juslen]

There
has been government before there were large rates of single mothers and
such. You could probably think up a pseudo-logical way to correlate the
government with anything you wanted, good or bad, but that doesn't mean
it's actually true.

 

And how large was the welfare state?

 

One of the many reasons why rhetoric does not automatically translate
into reality is that the ramifications of so many government policies
produce results completely different from what was claimed, or even
believed, when these policies were imposed.

    The poverty rate among blacks was nearly cut in half in the 20 years
prior to the 1960s, a record unmatched since then, despite the expansion
of welfare state policies in the 1960s.

    Unemployment among black 16 and 17-year-old males was 12 percent back
in 1950. Yet unemployment rates among black 16 and 17-year-old males has
not been less than 30 percent for any year since 1970 -- and has been
over 40 percent in some of those years.

    Not only was unemployment among blacks in general lower before the
liberal welfare state policies expanded in the 1960s, rates of
imprisonment of blacks were also lower then, and most black children
were raised in two-parent families. At one time, a higher percentage of
blacks than whites were married and working.

    None of these facts fits liberal social dogmas.

    While many politicians and "leaders" have claimed credit for black
progress, no one seems to be willing to take the blame for the
retrogressions represented by higher unemployment rates, higher crime
rates, and higher rates of imprisonment today. Or for the disintegration
of the black family, which survived centuries of slavery and
generations of government-imposed discrimination in the Jim Crow era,
but began coming apart in the wake of the expansion of the liberal
welfare state and its accompanying social dogmas.

 

http://townhall.com/...oric/page/full/

 

Thomas Sowell knows a thing or two about the history of black families, the welfare state and the economic consequences of such policies.

 

You are right, the real problem of single parenthood and stuff is cultural. No one is willing to tell people to stop making destructive and stupid decisions. This is why you end up with 50% divorce rates and 70% of blacks coming from broken homes. 

 

The family unit, and the extended family are part of society because they are an effective way of organizing households and helping to mitigate and prevent things like poverty. 

 

Yes, the family has been replaced by the state. A society that becomes dependent on the government will continue to deteriorate culturally. The war on drugs, failing public schools and the expansion of government welfare programs have all lead to the decline of our culture. Nobody is held responsible for their actions because the government can always steal or extort money to redistribute among the people which only results in creating new problems without solving anything.

[Icewolf]

Remove the welfare entitlements and stop babysitting adults and children alike with stolen money and people will think twice about !@#$ting out kids they can't afford. There are lots of couples out there who can't have kids of their own, they adopt children from all over the world because most children in the U.S are already being taken care of by the state. If a woman has sex with a man she can't trust to help support a child and she gets pregnant, she has a choice to make. She can take care of the child on her own, she can give it up for adoption or she can abort it. Men who pay child support aren't even paying for half the cost of raising a child, the state takes over whatever child support and the mother cannot cover. Without the government, even where men were legally required to support the child, they would have an incentive not to have sex without protection because they would have to pay even more out of pocket without government subsidies.

 

So it's a two way street.. I'm taking care of kids that aren't mine.. I'm covering for jobless losers that can't pay child support. There is no excuse for a modern country to have so many damn kids being born out of wedlock. Look at the rates, 70% among blacks and reaching close to 50% among whites. The trend is clear.. whenever the government gets in the way there are unintended consequences. Sex education, cheaper condoms and birth control aren't enough to wake people up. So maybe they should get hit where it hurts the most, their pocketbooks. I never claimed that this would be a solution, only that without hand holding by taxpayers and bureaucrats more people will grow up learning that nobody is going to be there to catch them when they screw up. They have tough decisions to make, and families have to start having conversations about these types of things instead of assuming that the government is going to be there to make everything all better.

 

Firstly, the children born out of wedlock is a bit of a false statistic. It does not transfer directly into children born outside of a family unit. Furthermore, marriage only translates into a more stable family in upper or middle class settings where the family has property. Poor families with a rented house and little to no savings do not create any incentive for the Father (or mother but normally the father) sticking around when the going gets tough. 

 

In terms of the situations when disputes as to Fathers rights arise this is not restricted to cases where either party is dependent on state benefits. It is a massive simplification in these situations to say "oh this case arose because they assumed the state would sort it out." Long term families breaking up rarely do so because of state benefits, and if you argue that they do you are essentially calling for women to be bound economically to the Husband (or vice-versa) and unable to leave the family unit if the situation becomes unbearable. 

 

I have spent time in the family courts and this is what I saw. 

 

-Mother trying to cut out mentally unstable father 

-Mother trying to cut out physically abusive father

-2x Local authority actions to take children into care-both against very undesirable parents (only 1 case had any relation to benefits)

-Custody dispute between parents equally financially independent parents divorced about 1 year

-Mother trying to re-assert contact following recovery from heroine addiction

 

Only one case with somewhat strange facts had any tie to welfare. 

 

That all said, I suspect the actual thrust of the above answer came down to wanting to have a debate you think you know the answers to (welfare) rather than actually having to consider things you haven't considered before (parenthood rights).

[juslen]

Firstly, the children born out of wedlock is a bit of a false statistic. It does not transfer directly into children born outside of a family unit. Furthermore, marriage only translates into a more stable family in upper or middle class settings where the family has property. Poor families with a rented house and little to no savings do not create any incentive for the Father (or mother but normally the father) sticking around when the going gets tough. 

 

In terms of the situations when disputes as to Fathers rights arise this is not restricted to cases where either party is dependent on state benefits. It is a massive simplification in these situations to say "oh this case arose because they assumed the state would sort it out." Long term families breaking up rarely do so because of state benefits, and if you argue that they do you are essentially calling for women to be bound economically to the Husband (or vice-versa) and unable to leave the family unit if the situation becomes unbearable. 

 

I have spent time in the family courts and this is what I saw. 

 

-Mother trying to cut out mentally unstable father 

-Mother trying to cut out physically abusive father

-2x Local authority actions to take children into care-both against very undesirable parents (only 1 case had any relation to benefits)

-Custody dispute between parents equally financially independent parents divorced about 1 year

-Mother trying to re-assert contact following recovery from heroine addiction

 

Only one case with somewhat strange facts had any tie to welfare. 

 

That all said, I suspect the actual thrust of the above answer came down to wanting to have a debate you think you know the answers to (welfare) rather than actually having to consider things you haven't considered before (parenthood rights).

 

 

Use whatever figures you like. The rates at which black children are born into wedlock, grow up without fathers (biological or otherwise) are double that of whites and it was never like that prior to the 1960's when the welfare state exploded. Read the article, they cite multiple reasons for why it's so difficult for fathers to be part of their children's lives.

 

There's no pay. There are no benefits. You
don't get time off. You don't get a break," he said. "But once in a
while you get to see your child shine and you say to yourself, 'That's
my boy. That's my girl.'"

It is
also a job that Gardner and others believe is increasingly in trouble in
the United States, even as the country gives its annual Fathers Day
salute on June 17.

More than 19
million children -- about one in four -- were living in households where
no father, biological or other, was present, according to a Census
Bureau report in 2005.

The
statistics also show that this burden falls more heavily on black
children. Some 56 percent of black children lived in single-parent
families in 2004, with most of those families headed by mothers. That
figure compared with 22 percent of white children and 31 percent of
Hispanic children.

"Father absence
in the African American communities, across America, has hit those
communities with the force of 100 hurricane Katrinas," said Phillip
Jackson, executive director of the Chicago-based Black Star Project,
which helps children in mainly minority schools.

"It is literally decimating our communities and we have no adequate response to it."

Among
those who grew up without a father is Gardner, the subject of the movie
"The Pursuit of Happyness." The movie tells how he struggles with
homelessness and raising a child while trying to pursue a new career as a
stockbroker in training.

Gardner is now the millionaire head of investment firm Gardner Rich & Co. and a motivational speaker.

For
groups like the Black Star Project, the focus is on education,
sponsoring activities such as getting fathers to walk to school with
their children on the first day of classes each year.

Last
year an estimated 300,000 men in 127 cities participated that first day
of school effort called the "Million Father March" and this year the
group hopes to see nearly half a million men in 200 communities.

"The
children start thinking, 'Wow, my father is here. This thing called
education, this must really be important because my father took the time
off to come up here'," Jackson said.

Jackson said it has taken decades for fathering to decline to its current state, and restoring it would be a long process.

"We're not going to wake up tomorrow or next year and say 'Voila! We're back to where we were,'" he said.

In
2006, the National Fatherhood Initiative in Gaithersburg, Maryland
commissioned the University of Texas at Austin to conduct a survey of
701 fathers called "Pop's Culture: A National Survey of Dads' Attitudes
on Fathering."

It found that 91
percent of those questioned agreed there is a father-absence crisis in
America. They listed work demands as the No. 1 barrier to being a good
father. Other major impediments included the media and popular culture
followed by financial problems.

Fathers
who were not married to the mother of their children cited a lack of
cooperation from mothers as the chief obstacle to being a good father,
followed by work responsibilities, financial problems and treatment of
fathers by the courts.

Roland
Warren, president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, said that
children in fatherless households are more susceptible to life's
challenges.

"They are two to three
times more likely to use drugs, become teen parents, be connected with
the criminal justice system, to fail in school or to live in poverty,"
he said.

Gardner credits his uncles with being positive male figures in his life.

"I
had a very abusive stepfather. I made a decision at 5 years-old that
when I became a man and had children no one would ever talk to my
children, treat or terrorize them as I was," he said in an interview.

 

http://www.reuters.c...419185720070614

 

Statistics never tell the full story, but they sure as hell give us an indicator of the progress that has been made within minority communities and the figures overwhelmingly show that blacks are poorer, are more likely to be killed, more likely to end up in prisons, more likely to grow up without a father, more likely to be abused, less likely to graduate school and the list goes on and on. It wasn't always like that for blacks. Their main obstacle in life prior to the 1960's was racial discrimination. Today, discrimination has fallen drastically, yet instead of being able to have more opportunities to see their standard of livings rise along side non minorities they have instead seen their standards of living decreases relative to whites and even Hispanics and Asians. Something like 70% of all prison inmates are black, yet they only make up 12% of the population.

 

 

The process of gathering and analysing statistics on an incarcerated African-American males has been taken by several studies on a specific age group, geographical location, causes of incarceration
or simply the upbringing of a child over a course of years.
Approximately 12%-13% of the American population is African-American,
but they make up72.7% of the almost 2.1 million male inmates in jail or
prison (U.S. Department of Justice, 2009). Census data for 2000 of the
number and race of all individuals incarcerated in the United States
revealed a wide racial disproportion of the incarcerated population in
each state: the proportion of blacks in prison populations exceeded the
proportion among state residents in twenty states; the percent of blacks
incarcerated was five times greater than the resident population.

 

 

It just amazes me that people are unwilling to admit that the government plays a huge role in figures like these. They want to blame it on culture.. what culture? The culture that teaches kids to grow up poor, uneducated, without fathers, and to live in ghettos and commit crimes?

Edited by juslen, 27 January 2013 - 01:23 PM.

[Hereno]

And how large was the welfare state?

 

 

 

http://townhall.com/...oric/page/full/

 

Thomas Sowell knows a thing or two about the history of black families, the welfare state and the economic consequences of such policies.

 

 

Yes, the family has been replaced by the state. A society that becomes dependent on the government will continue to deteriorate culturally. The war on drugs, failing public schools and the expansion of government welfare programs have all lead to the decline of our culture. Nobody is held responsible for their actions because the government can always steal or extort money to redistribute among the people which only results in creating new problems without solving anything.

I didn't feel like arguing with you /yet again/ that government is not, in fact, the cause of every problem you will ever have in your life. So, instead, I did a quick Google search for Thomas Sowell. At a glance - he looked like a pretty good source. College educated - black, and born in 1920. And then I started reading...

 

"Sowell compared President Barack Obama's actions to Adolf Hitler's in a June 2010 editorial for Investor's Business Daily titled "Is U.S. Now On Slippery Slope To Tyranny?"^[34] Sowell described the role of uninformed citizens ("useful idiots") in the rise of Hitler and Vladimir Lenin, arguing that the U.S. was on a "slippery slope to tyranny" because citizens were not thinking about the issues. The example he gave was the creation of a relief fund for the BP oil spill, in which he asked rhetorically what gave the President an unconstitutional "authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation.""

 

HAHAHAHAHA what a !@#$@#$ nutter

[commander thrawn]

Firstly, the children born out of wedlock is a bit of a false statistic. It does not transfer directly into children born outside of a family unit. Furthermore, marriage only translates into a more stable family in upper or middle class settings where the family has property. Poor families with a rented house and little to no savings do not create any incentive for the Father (or mother but normally the father) sticking around when the going gets tough. 

 

 

What is your argument here? Are you trying to say that having broken families is just fine and logical among the poor? 

[Icewolf]

What is your argument here? Are you trying to say that having broken families is just fine and logical among the poor? 

No I'm not. I was just marveling at the fact that an anarchist was citing a government defined and recognised relationship as the primary reason for family stability. 

 

That and the fact that marriage is only a bringer of stability in a family with substantial property. The incentive to stay together would also hold true in an unmarried family if they have substantial shared property.