Child support is modern debt slavery

Vox Day writes:

And the South Carolina prison system is essentially debtor's prison:

A recent MSNBC investigation highlighted that in South Carolina, noncustodial parents can be held in contempt of civil court if their child support payments are just five days late, which means a judge can send them to jail.

Libba Patterson, a law professor at the University of South Carolina and a former director of the South Carolina Department of Social Services, has been a vocal supporter of an ongoing effort to reform the way South Carolina punishes those who owe child support payments -- an effort that has gone all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

In 2009, Patterson conducted a survey of 33 county jails in South Carolina, which found that one out of every eight inmates -- or 13.2 percent of the inmate population -- was behind bars for contempt of civil court after falling behind on child support payments. In Charleston County, where Walter owed his back payments on child support, Patterson’s survey found that over 15 percent of inmates had been imprisoned for not paying child support. In a handful of the other counties studied, the figure was as high as 20 percent.

This is further evidence that feminism, in all its forms, lunatic, liberal, and conservative, is intrinsically anti-societal and anti-civilizational. It's not a simple matter of left and right, because the conservative form of feminism is more insidious, and may actually be more damaging, in some cases, than the overt outrages of lunatic and liberal feminism.

When you read Dalrock talking about Churchians, and The Only Man in the Room leaders, and Man Up and Marry Those Single Mothers, you're seeing conservative feminism. The liberal feminist fallacy is to claim that women deserve more rights than men because men are oppressive. The conservative feminist fallacy is to claim that women deserve more rights than men because women are purer of spirit and it is a man's noble right and duty to preemptively sacrifice himself for the pure sex.

The liberal Democrats are more dangerous because they have built their whole party out of being anti-family, pro-dependency, anti-man, and anti-parental-rights. But conservative feminists are also damaging.

A NY Times comment says:

Simple Solution. Make Shared Parenting LAW where NO child support is paid. The parents each get 50-50 custody requiring each parent to pay for the child when with them. FORCE "alleged" Domestic Violence cases into criminal courts where PROOF must be shown and custody stripped of False Accusers. This is the literature currently inserted into every Shared Parenting Bill in which bias usually occurs and False allegations made to take Fathers out of the picture and reduce him to a wallet. The reason support orders are initially set high is because the Feds push States ( and Judges ) to make them high for a better reimbursement rate of 2-1. This ensures the Judge and the State get a cut of the man's income before its passed to yet more State initiatives such as yet more Domestic Violence shelters in which only women can use. These shelters encourage more divorcing moms to make yet another false allegation to get custody and.........more child support.

That's right. Making 50-50 shared parenting the law would get rid of the vast majority of child custody trials and other family court disputes.

What would likely happen is that many dads would pay the moms to take the kids 5+ days a week, thru a voluntary negotiation. Even if the result turned out to be identical to what a court might order, I would still say that it would be better because the parents would be in control of their own lives. I would likewise say that it is better for salaries to be negotiated between employers and employees, rather than dictated by government bureaucrats and formulas.

However I do not see any politicians on the right side of this issue. Maybe Hillary Clinton will be elected President, and the Democrats will be more clearly the mommy-socialist-dependency party.

Here are some sensible letters to the WSJ:

Involved Fathers’ Rights Are Poorly Protected in Divorce
State divorce laws should mandate that family-court judges divide physical custody time 50/50.

Regarding the article “Fathers Seek Parity in Custody Cases” (U.S. News, April 17), opponents of 50/50 physical custody of children invariably trot out the old argument that shared custody works only for parents who can cooperate. As a veteran of a six-year child-custody battle, I’ve learned that it is the litigation itself that causes friction between parents. Parents demonize each other to win custody, which causes them to mistrust each other, and the downward spiral begins. In addition, as a legal strategy, whichever parent begins with the upper hand in the legal proceedings has an incentive to not get along with the other parent. That way, he or she can tell the judge: “Your honor, we don’t get along; therefore sharing custody won’t work.” If we had a legal presumption of 50/50 physical custody, suddenly there would be nothing to fight over and most separated parents would cooperate well.

[name omitted]
Santa Fe, N.M.

Our 50-state divorce-court system isn’t designed for judges to force negotiated settlements that are arrived at and honored by both parents. It isn’t uncommon for American fathers to undergo financial ruin, emotional fatigue and physical collapse through time-consuming litigation. The money I was forced to burn up in litigation would have been better spent on my children’s college educations. Absent overriding fact-specific considerations in individual cases, state divorce laws should mandate that family-court judges divide physical custody time 50/50 to allow fathers the ability to exercise a more active and permanent role in their children’s lives. But that isn’t enough. State divorce laws need to be amended to force the parties to pay their own attorneys’ fees and litigation expenses. The laws should impose severe financial sanctions on attorneys and parties filing meritless post-dissolution motions. The laws also need to be amended so that both parents share in the equal financial responsibility of raising their children.

Alan Jay Koshner
St. Louis

Yes, 50/50 physical custody of children is all the more important if the parents disagree. Then neither can force decisions on the other.

The original WSJ article is behind a paywall, but is mirrored here and here.