|
No Way to Treat Our
Soldiers
September 19, 2005
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, Michigan 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 Representative Rick Jones
became interested in this outrageous 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 country.
Rep. Jones has introduced legislation
(H.B.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 local
press, Erb's lawyer and the court's spokesmen 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-P.C. to
tell a son that our 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-religious, 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 their 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 the father as good for nothing
except 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."
Related Website: http://www.eagleforum.org/
©2005. Copley News Service. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted with permission. |
Other online articles
Violence
Against The Constitution
October 12, 2005
Stephen
Baskerville, Ph.D.
Child
Support: It's All a Matter of Record
October 3,
2005
Detra Davis
Fighting
False Allegations of Domestic Abuse
September 26,
2005
Maury Beaulier, Esq.
No Way
to Treat Our Soldiers
September 19, 2005
Phyllis
Schlafly
Katrina's
Coming Wave of Family Litigation
September 12,
2005
Charles Beaudry
Persecuting
Low Income Parents
August 31, 2005
Jeffery M.
Leving and Glenn Sacks
Are You
An Alienating Parent?
July 29, 2005
Jeff Opperman
Time to
Dispose of Radical Feminist Pork
July 19,
2005
Phyllis Schlafly
This
Year Daddy Began A Comeback
July 13, 2005
Glenn
Sacks
Congress
Should Kill Discriminatory Domestic Violence
Act
June 29, 2005
Wendy McElroy
Where's
Dad?
June 22, 2005
Ned Holstein, MD, MS
How To
End Father-Absence When Divorce is Necessary
June
15, 2005
David Usher
What
Have Feminists Done to America's Fathers?
June 10,
2005
Phyllis Schlafly
|
