October 20, 2006--Compiled by John T. Smith and John X. Smith

 

The Times (UK) does print a wide variety of arcane things in its hallowed pages: Law reports, for instance, such as one they ran recently under the title, Some fathers responsible for their own grief. But it's a nasty, self-satisfied screed from a Court which obviously thinks itself incapable of error. "Blaming the system, as the father does in this case, is no answer. He must shoulder his share of the responsibility for the state of affairs he has helped to bring about," says the Court, ignoring the system's responsibility for encouraging and enabling the mother to create the very situation of conflict it deplores. If you think things are getting better in the UK, read this and think again....

Washington Times reporter Ruth Lang writes of an encouraging financial-support program available to low-income fathers in the Washington, D.C., area.  In Program gives aid to fathers in need, she writes of the D.C. Fatherhood Initiative's efforts to help low- and no-income fathers cope with the financial burden of caring for their children.--JFS

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A Single Father in Malaysia ponders the state of things in his country in Law should protect single fathers too, an opinion column appearing on the MalaysiaKini news website. Although he has little access to his infant daughter, he still manages to feel like her father. And he is anxious for her to learn to talk so he can hear her say, 'Daddy!'
    He also wonders why the Ministry responsible for families should be called, 'Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development.' A very good question, in our opinion.---JTS

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For a little comic relief (or should that be 'vomit' relief?), we direct you to some typically inane celebrity fighting, this time over the fatherhood of the new baby girl born to one of the U.S.'s most successful gold-diggers and reality TV stars. CNN thinks it worth your time to read that gazillionnaire-heiress and well-marinated former Playboy centerfold Anna Nicole Smith (no relation to anyone at World Fathers Union, as far as we can tell) is refusing to cooperate with one of her former paramours for a DNA paternity test of the new baby girl. She has listed Howard K. Stern, one of US radio's highest-paid 'shock-jocks' as the child's father on the Bahamian birth certificate. California photographer Larry Birkhead--a poor country cousin by comparison with the foul-mouthed Stern--claims the child is his, and wants a test to prove it.
    We wonder if Anna-Nicole (as she likes to be called) isn't perhaps looking at the potential difference in child support for this girl once she gets rid of Stern...or he gets rid of her. That one's probably a coin-toss.
    If you agree--and how could you not?!--that this is a world-shattering piece of news, you may read the details here. By rough estimate, the amount of lawyers' fees spent on this one would be enough to re-pay the entire child-support arrears in New Zealand.--JXS

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There were also classier gold-diggers than Anna-Nicole Smith working the press this week. And even Britain's Families Need Fathers thinks this one's worthy of comment. So why not World Fathers Union? Ask, and you shall receive....
    Does the name 'Heather Mills' ring a bell? It might give you some small, mean comfort to know that the rich-and-famous use the same tactics against their hubbies as the rest of the world's unhappy wives.  (But who's learning from whom...?)
    Sir Paul McCartney can't be considered poor by anyone's standards (not even those of Anna-Nicole). Nobody in his right mind would see The Sensitive Beatle as likely to be a wife-beater, either. But the treatment he's been receiving in the press at the hands of his soon-to-be-ex makes us feel like calling him 'poor Sir Paul' all the same in brotherly sympathy. See CNN  ("McCartney Mistreated Wife") or Politics.co (click here, it's a 4-line URL) for all the nasty details. Welcome to the club, Sir P.---JXS

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In The Scotsman, columnist Jack O'Sullivan writes of The Fatherhood Revolution recently called for by Chancellor Gordon Brown (and much to O'Sullivan's own surprise, too). In a column dedicated to what he calls a 'leaderless revolution' unsupported by politicians, he writes of miners and unions and dads in the street with prams...and of the eight-out-of-ten children who lose all touch with their fathers by the time they reach 15. 'Gordon Brown has broken the silence on the "fatherhood revolution,' says O'Sullivan. 'It is time now for some clear policy to make the goal a reality.'---JTS

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If you thought things weren't so dark on the Dark Continent, sit down before reading this one. The South African government's 'Communication and Information System' which they call Bua News (I like the term 'Spin Doctors' better) has just put out a self-congratulatory report, Dept gets defaulting fathers paying, bragging about all the money they've snatched away from men for unpaid child-support...both past and future! That's right: the SA government can nail your entire savings in one shot, put it in their own account, and then dole it out over the next x-number of months/years to your ex as 'future maintenance payments.'
    One man whose company was closing down had his severance pay of R20 440 confiscated to be paid out as future maintenance at a rate of R500 for 34 months. (Let me see...when I was in school, 500 times 34 equalled 17,000. Wonder where the rest of it's going...?)
    Another man, the father of an 11-year-old boy, had R141,000 confiscated from his R200,000 life-savings. That money--minus arrears of R4 200--will be doled out 'for the benefit of his son' at the rate of R600 per month...for the next 228 months. Which means the boy will be 30 years old when his mother stops getting a free ride. Well. At least this time the government's not keeping any change.---JXS

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Columnist and associate editor at The Detroit News, Richard Burr writes clearly and incisively of the failure of politicians to address the single largest crisis issue facing the United States.  In Left and right agree: Absense of fathers is the nation's biggest problem he tells how both the Clinton and Bush administrations have 'flirted' with this issue without doing anything concrete about it. He also writes about how Liberal Black book-author Leonard Pitts and Conservative intellectual David Frum of the American Enterprise Institute each addressed the Association of Opinion Page Editors in Toronto recently...and said the same thing: If there is no father, there is small chance of sucess for the children.---JTS

The blogs and news sites of the radical right and left (and even the radical center, if such a concept isn't an oxymoron) are frequently interesting in a depressing sort of way. What bothers us most often about these is that while each camp frequently supports good causes, they most often do so from self-centered motives. In other words, they argue to save the trees they like, but ignore the forest completely. Such is the curse of radicalism, it seems, no matter what its flavour.

A good example is the man who recently posted a lengthy essay on the situation of fathers and children in today's "America," and backed up his summary of the dismal facts with good, well-researched statistics...only to spend the entire second half of his article explaining that if everyone accepted his particular god as our Father--not, he was careful to emphasise, our 'mother'--we wouldn't have all these problems. Oh, dear....

So it is with some hesitation I mention On November 7th, only YOU can prevent feminist hell!, a piece currently running on the 'News By Us--not News Bias' website which John X. has brought to my attention. Its message is important...but the terms in which it is couched are guaranteed to annoy those without the wish to grind their political axes at this particular touchstone.

Read it for its message please; try to ignore the rabid phrasing and the rest of the writer's agenda. It is supremely important for each citizen to vote, and if you can't find someone worth voting for, at the very least you can find someone for whom it is imperative to vote against.---JTS

Coming on the heels of CNN's poll reporting that the average citizen of the US trusts judges more than he trusts politicians (and backed up by pronouncements on judicial activisim from SCUS Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Stephen Breyer), this juicy tidbit (also from CNN) entitled, Women accuse ex-judge of sex for Rx swap, has a kind of ironic leer to it. Oh, well; this guy was only a muny-court judge in some cow-town in Wisconsin--we'd never have to worry about someone like him ever actually having enough power to make someone else's life miserable....---JXS

In Utah, the US bastion of Mormonism, adoptions have been producing thorny legal issues lately. The western state is known for its 'adoption friendly' statutes, according to an article by Kristin Stewart and Elizabeth Neff in the Salt Lake Tribune, but this time, the Latter-Day-Saints (LDS) Family Services department seems to have run afoul of federal Indian-Act legislation by putting a child of native ancestry out for adoption without finding the father first. In another case, the Utah Supreme Court came down hard on a family court judge who authorised custody for a foster family in a complicated surrogate-birth tangle. Tribune reporter Elizabeth Neff gives the details in her story, Utah couple can't keep boy; Court gives boy back to mom. Meanwhile, the 2-year-old knows no other parents than his foster family, and will soon be separated from them and given to a woman who bore him for money paid her by a convicted felon she met on the internet who is currently serving time in a federal penitentiary.---JXS

According to researchers at the University of North Carolina in the United States, it seems that a father's influence on his children's language development and skills is far greater than that of their mother. Research assistant Nadya Panscofar and Dr. Lynne Vernon-Feagans conducted the study--the first, according to Panscofar, which does not focus exclusively on the mother's influence--several years ago while at Penn State University. Further details and information for on-line access to the full study are published in their press release published on the Newswise site.--JTS

Yet another story of maternal child abuse is getting wide coverage in the US press. The Associated Press has picked up the story by reporter Adam Aasen in the Florida Times Union, who wrote of the bizarre case in Jacksonville. Both CNN and Fox News picked it up from the AP, and local papers as far away as Seattle, Washington, are running it. The mother apparently duct-taped her children together last March in lieu of hiring a babysitter to watch them while she went to work on a US Navy air base. The children were taken into custody by Florida's child protective services, but it took seven months before authorities completed their investigation and arrested the mother on Monday. None of the articles mentions the father.--JXS

Updated to Nov. 1, 2006--Compiled by John T. Smith and John X. Smith