August 12, 2007

Last summer, conservatives were celebrating 10 years of welfare reform. Now we learn out-of-wedlock births are at a record high and married couples comprise less than half the nation’s households.

And those out-of-wedlock births no longer proceed from just low-income teenagers. Inspired by books like Peggy Drexler’s “Raising Boys Without Men,” middle-class, middle-aged women are now bearing many of the fatherless children. This number does not even include the children of divorce, which almost doubles the 1.5 million out-of-wedlock births.

This plague of fatherless children is driven not only by culture but also by federal programs that subsidize single-parent homes through quasi-welfare entitlements for the affluent that welfare reform did not address.

In fact, the welfare subsidy on single-mother homes was never really curtailed so much as it was shifted. Reformers largely replaced welfare with child support, on the reasonable principle that fathers, rather than taxpayers, should support their children. But a profound unintended consequence has been the transformation of welfare from public assistance into law enforcement.

Like any bureaucracy, this one found rationalizations to expand. During the 1980s and 1990s — with no explanation or public debate — enforcement machinery created for children in poverty was dramatically expanded to cover all child support cases, including those not receiving welfare.

This vastly expanded the program by bringing in millions of middle-class divorce cases. While it is almost impossible to collect from young inner-city fathers, divorced fathers have pockets to mine. Non-welfare cases — for which the system was never intended — now account for 83 percent of cases and 92 percent of the money collected.

By padding their roles with millions of middle-class parents, state governments found they could collect a windfall of federal incentive payments. Federal taxpayers now subsidize state government operations through child support. They also subsidize family dissolution, for every fatherless child is an additional source of revenue for state governments.

To collect these funds, states must channel not just delinquent payments but current payments through their criminal enforcement machinery, subjecting law-abiding parents to criminal measures. While officials claim their perennial “crackdowns” on “deadbeat dads” increase collections, the “increase” is achieved not by collecting arrearages of low-income fathers already in the system but simply by pulling in more middle-class fathers.

These fathers have not abandoned their children. Most were actively involved with them, and many clamor for more time with them. Yet for the state to collect its funding, fathers willing and able to care for their children must be designated as “absent.” Divorce courts are pressured to cut children off from their fathers to conform to the welfare model of “custodial” and “noncustodial.” The perverse incentives further criminalize fathers by impelling states to make child support levels as onerous as possible.

This also creates a windfall for middle-class divorcing women and an incentive to create more fatherless children. “This recent entitlement,” write economist Robert McNeely and legal scholar Cynthia McNeely, “. . . has led to the destruction of families by creating financial incentives to divorce [and] the prevention of families by creating financial incentives not to marry upon conceiving of a child.”

Beyond the expense of the subsidies are costs of diverting the criminal justice system from protecting society to criminalizing law-abiding parents and keeping them from their children. But the entitlement state must then devise additional programs — many times more expensive — to deal with the social costs of fatherless children.

“My agency spends $46 billion per year operating 65 different social programs,” says former Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Wade Horn. “The need for each is either created or exacerbated by the breakup of families and marriages.” Given the social ills attributed to fatherless homes — including crime, truancy and scholastic failure, substance abuse, unwed pregnancy and suicide — it is reasonable to see a huge proportion of domestic spending as among the costs.

These developments offer a preview of where our entire system of welfare taxation is headed: expropriating citizens to pay for destructive programs that create the need for more spending and more taxation. It cannot end but in criminalizing more and more of the population.

STEPHEN BASKERVILLE

President of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children and assistant professor of government at Patrick Henry College, Purcellville, Va. The research on which this article is based is published by the Institute for Policy Innovation.

Originally published in The Washington Times, Aug 12, 2007

by Stephen Baskerville and Mitchell S. Sanderson

Those who work in what was once nobly known as the civil service — and what has degenerated into the “bureaucracy” — are required by law and ethics to be politically neutral.

Presidents and members of Congress, cabinet and sub-cabinet secretaries can voice opinions. Even judges are permitted (and often abuse) a privilege of obiter dicta. But career officials are supposed to implement the policies of the people and their elected officials, not publicly advocate what those policies should be.

To allow lobbying by federal officials, who after all have coercive authority over citizens, turns the civil service from the people’s servants into a taxpayer-funded advocacy organization that can suppress citizens’ opinions or activities it considers incorrect or threatening. “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, “it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox politics, nationalism, religion, or any other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

So it is disturbing to learn that Thomas Sullivan, regional administrator for the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), sent a letter last month to North Dakota state Sen. Tom Fisher urging the defeat of a proposed ballot initiative. North Dakota citizens are now collecting signatures for a popular measure providing for shared parenting for children of divorce. This would alleviate the problem of fatherless children and ease the impact of family breakup on both children and society. But these citizens must now contend with the opposition of not only the state’s powerful divorce lobby, but also a $47 billion agency of the $500 billion U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

A ballot initiative allows citizens to act when legislatures do not. To pressure a legislator to thwart their action — marshaling the full weight of the multi-billion dollar federal bureaucracy — is a serious obstruction of democracy and violation of federalism. (To his credit, Sen. Fisher has given no sign of responding to this pressure.) Sullivan insists categorically (and erroneously) that North Dakota will lose “all” money for welfare and child support enforcement if the people’s will prevails. He explicitly urges Sen. Fisher to take “whatever steps are necessary to ensure that initiated measures are not enacted.”

Advisory interpretations of regulations in response to legislative requests are one thing. But Sullivan’s letter reads more like a threat. Since he is interpreting the likely impact of a future measure under federal regulations — a speculative matter that is subject to final interpretation through administrative processes or courts — one would expect qualified language: words like “could” or “may.” Instead Sullivan issues what amounts to an ultimatum to North Dakota: Voting the initiative into law “will result in immediate suspension of all Federal payments for the State’s child support enforcement program.”

This is almost certainly not true. Leaving aside the fact that an advisory opinion is normally issued by the agency’s legal counsel, not an administrator, what is missing (and troubling) in Sullivan’s threat is the routine give-and-take when civil servants implement legislative actions. Sullivan ignores the possibility that regulations might be interpreted in ways that avoid triggering suspension of funds, let alone the option of a waiver. Many states have been out of compliance with child support regulations for different reasons for years; by some critical measures, all states are arguably out of compliance today. Yet these states have not lost any of their funding, let alone “all” of it and “immediately.”

Those who argue that federal funds are used for “extortion” could hardly find a clearer illustration. Kansas officials used precisely this language to describe related HHS regulations. “Under the guise of cracking down on so-called deadbeat dads, the Congress has required the states to carry out a massive and intrusive federal regulatory scheme by which personal data on all state citizens” is collected, the attorney general’s office charged in a federal suit. Echoing terms frequently used by fathers to describe coerced child support, one Kansas legislator called the federal directives “extortion,” and colleagues in neighboring Nebraska described them as “a form of blackmail.”

HHS, and specifically ACF, already embarrassed the Bush administration last year by paying journalists. Though conservatives were unfairly excoriated for transgressions that liberals have practiced for years, the point is that HHS is a constant temptation to corruption because it serves as an engine for placing large numbers of people on the federal payroll.

The head of ACF, Assistant Secretary Wade Horn, is justly famous for publicizing the terrible costs of fatherless children. The North Dakota initiative offers the first concrete hope of actually alleviating this crisis, with no cost to taxpayers (and savings for federal taxpayers). But his agency is now telling states that their fiscal solvency depends on broken families: no broken families, no federal money.

We have allowed both federal and state governments such a stake in family breakdown that the financing of state budgets has converted government into a family destruction machine.

Predictably, federal bureaucrats are now using taxpayers’ money to strong-arm citizens from democratic decisions that, by relieving a serious social problem, threaten to render the bureaucrats redundant. What is unusual in this federal official’s intervention into North Dakota politics is not that he did it but that he felt no need to disguise it.

Posted 08/17/2006 ET

Originally published at Human Events.

The gravity of the Duke university “rape” case has been seriously underestimated, even by many of its staunchest critics. The corruption of the criminal justice system by political ideology is far more advanced than has been brought out by most commentators.

The central point to be made about this case is precisely the one even most critics have not raised: It is far from unique. If such a blatant injustice can be perpetrated against men whose case attracts vast media attention – the supposed “disinfectant of sunlight” – what befalls those who languish in obscurity, victims of rigged justice that is less palpable? “If police officers and a district attorney can systematically railroad us with absolutely no evidence whatsoever,” said one defendant, “I can’t imagine what they’d do to people who do not have the resources to defend themselves.” Not what they “would do”; what they are doing.

Conservatives who rightly decry judicial “activism” in constitutional law have trouble understanding the equally serious corruption of the criminal justice system. Long before the Duke case, Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence Stratton described this legal underworld in their brilliant but neglected book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.

Michael Nifong fits precisely the profile of prosecutor presented by Roberts and Stratton. They show how prosecutors and the media collude to ensure their victims are convicted by public opinion before their case ever goes to trial. “News of a forthcoming indictment is leaked to the press to put pressure on the accused by tarring him in the eyes of his friends, family, employer, coworkers, and the general public,” they write. “The charges may be largely made out of thin air, but the prosecutor benefits from the public’s presumption that the prosecution has a case.” This describes exactly what Nifong did. The fact that other prosecutors initially defended him is an open admission that they do it too.

The single-minded hype of the racial dimension had made this case appear exceptional. But the far more powerful ideological force driving this and other miscarriages of justice is not race hatred but institutionalized feminism. Race demagogues like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are easy targets for conservatives, but they do not command the institutional clout to politicize criminal justice proceedings on a large scale. There is little indication that white people are being systematically incarcerated on trumped-up accusations of non-existent crimes against blacks. This is precisely what is happening to men (and even some women), both white and black, accused of the kind of family and “gender” crimes that feminists have turned into a political agenda.

For every Duke lacrosse player, there are literally thousands of innocent men forced to stare down the wrong of police gun barrels, hauled off in handcuffs, and incarcerated without trial – all for “crimes,” not only that they did not commit, but that everyone knows did not take place.

Rape accusations have long been out of control. Almost daily, as David Usher has pointed out, men are released from prison after decades of incarceration because DNA tests prove they were wrongly convicted. And they are the lucky ones. While DNA has righted some wrongs, the corruption is so systemic that, as the Duke case shows, hard evidence of innocence is no barrier to conviction. Even the Washington Post has documented how feminist crime lab technicians fabricate and doctor evidence to frame men they know to be innocent. Yet the Post and others invariably blame law enforcement itself. Few point the finger at the very pressure groups that create the hysteria over rape and push for more convictions, as if they are a virtue in themselves.

William Anderson of Frostburg State University and Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal have both pointed out the parallel between the Duke case and the child abuse hysteria of the 1980s and 1990s, where feminist prosecutors like Nancy Lamb in Edenton, North Carolina, similarly whipped up public invective against parents they had jailed yet knew to be innocent. “The press was transfixed” by Lamb, Anderson writes, “with her flashing eyes and bobbed hair. Lamb was speaking ‘for the children,’ you see, and the press adored her. That she was making preposterous claims and attempting to destroy the lives of seven people despite all good evidence to the contrary was not even discussed.”

Like rape, child abuse has been not simply blown out of proportion but politicized by feminism. This reached its apogee in the Clinton administration Justice Department. “From Janet Reno’s infamous prosecutions of Grant Snowden in Florida…to the McMartin case in Los Angeles, to Wenatchee, Washington in the 1990s,” writes Anderson, “the Edenton case was part of a line of what only can be called witch hunts in which state social workers badgered very young children until they came up with lurid tales – after having denied that those things occurred.” These social workers are, in effect, plainclothes feminist police.

The witch hunts were carried into adulthood through “recovered memory therapy,” another fraud perpetrated largely by feminist perversion of the psychotherapy industry, where wild, preposterous tales of childhood sex crimes were manufactured from a psychological theory. In Victims of Memory, Mark Pendergrast shows how the recovered memory hoax destroyed families, ruined lives, and sent innocent parents to prison.

But these are only the tip of the iceberg; at least they required convictions, however unjust. They are dwarfed by “crimes” in which men are removed from their homes and incarcerated without even a trial.

These are “domestic violence” accusations, where no evidence, formal charge, or trial are necessary for the plainly innocent to be hauled away in handcuffs. Defendants are passed by the thousands through mass processing centers that bear little resemblance to a court of law or receive summary punishment without the benefit of media scrutiny. Patently false accusations are not only permitted but rewarded in divorce courts, largely because they are effective weapons in lucrative custody battles that are the bread and butter for venal judges and lawyers, who do all they can to encourage more.

This is now so blatant that even the legal establishment has been forced to recognize it. “Michigan courts do not provide a fair, or impartial, tribunal for any domestic relations litigant,” according to Michigan Lawyers Weekly. “Instead, they customarily and regularly deprive litigants of due process of law.” It is now common knowledge that obviously trumped-up abuse accusations are frequently used, and virtually never punished, in divorce and custody proceedings. Thomas Kasper describes in the Illinois Bar Journal how knowingly false accusations readily “become part of the gamesmanship of divorce.” “Whenever a woman claims to be a victim, she is automatically believed,” says Washington state attorney Lisa Scott. “No proof of abuse is required.” Writing in the Rutgers Law Review, David Heleniak describes domestic abuse as “an area of law mired in intellectual dishonesty and injustice.” Heleniak identifies six separate denials of due process in one state statute, which he terms “a due process fiasco”: lack of notice, denial of indigent defendants to free counsel, denial of the right to take depositions, lack of evidentiary hearings, improper standard of proof, and denial of trial by jury. One family court judge was caught instructing his colleague to violate the constitutional rights of male defendants. “Your job is not to become concerned about the constitutional rights of the man that you’re violating as you grant a restraining order,” New Jersey municipal court judge Richard Russell stated at a government training seminar recorded by the New Jersey Law Journal: “Throw him out on the street… They have declared domestic violence to be an evil in our society. So we don’t have to worry about the rights.”

Also similar to the Duke case, the open politicization of scholarship by domestic violence advocates with an ideological agenda is also simply accepted. Domestic violence has become “a backwater of tautological pseudo-theory and failed intervention programs,” write Donald Dutton and Kenneth Corvo in the scholarly journal Aggression and Violent Behavior. “No other area of established social welfare, criminal justice, public health, or behavioral intervention has such weak evidence in support of mandated practice.”

These are not the excesses most people associate with feminism, which is precisely why they receive little scrutiny or opposition and why the feminists have been able to wreak such damage.

Many were appalled that the Duke faculty should publicly demand that the lacrosse players confess – as if professors are prosecutors, judges, and jurors. Yet precisely this modus operandi has long characterized “women’s studies” programs, hotbeds of trumped-up accusations that have polluted the curricula of thousands of higher education institutions with political ideology masquerading as scholarship, turned students and faculty into police informers, and incited young women into believing that every personal hurt is a crime of “violence.” “If a woman did falsely accuse a man of rape,” opines one graduate of such programs, “she may have had reasons to. Maybe she wasn’t raped, but he clearly violated her in some way.” A Vassar College assistant dean thinks false accusations contribute to a man’s education: “I think it ideally initiates a process of self-exploration. ‘How do I see women? If I didn’t violate her, could I have?’” Such views have long been dismissed as belonging to the extremist margins, but we see the fruits of them at Duke.

This is mob justice at its most incendiary, because it is perpetrated by the educated. It vindicates James Madison’s observation that “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

Conservatives cannot afford to be smug, for many have colluded in this degeneracy of the criminal justice system. When it comes to anything labeled as “crime,” conservative skepticism crumbles. The demand for conviction becomes unanimous and unchecked by any voice of restraint or reason.

Conservatives are correct that criminals often go free. What many fail to understand is that this happens because of a politicized judiciary that also sends the innocent to prison. The acquittal of Andrea Yates, convicted of capital murder in 2002 after admitting to drowning her five children, is the other side of the ideological justice coin. Yates was defended by feminists like Rosie O’Donnell, who expressed “overwhelming empathy” with her, and by the National Organization for Women. “One of our feminist beliefs is to be there for other women,” said Deborah Bell, president of Texas NOW. “We want to be there with her in her time of need.”

More than a decade ago, Michael Weiss and Cathy Young warned of this trend in their Cato Institute paper, Feminist Jurisprudence. Seen in the larger context of feminist justice, the Duke case demonstrates that the corruption of the criminal justice system by political ideology is now the greatest danger to American freedom, surpassing both Islamic radicalism and government measures against it. Judicial corruption – where avenues of legal redress are not only blocked but turned into instruments of injustice – is the most debilitating corruption, because it cripples the means to redress injustice elsewhere.

But what is most alarming is the complacence. At one time, the incarceration of the knowingly innocent would have incited outrage from Americans, who were known, even among Western societies, as staunch defenders of civil liberties. Today there is little outcry. Few have been concerned to know if this case is typical of many more or why the criminal justice system of what was once the freest society on earth is so compromised that law-breaking officials sit in judgement on law-abiding citizens.

This is where “social” justice has led us. Decades of pursuing this illusory, subjective, and politically defined “justice” have left Americans so incapable of distinguishing guilt from innocence that we are now inured to the most open injustice.
Stephen Baskerville, PhD, is president of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children. His book, Taken Into Custody: The War against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family, will be published in the summer by Cumberland House Publishing. The views expressed are his own.

Gov. Tom Vilsack’s quest for the presidential nomination may not be as quixotic as it appears. Vilsack is in an excellent position to influence the next election and possibly emerge as a leader in the domestic policy debate, which is a traditional winner for Democrats.

The November election showed that Republicans have no monopoly on one of their core issues: the family. Democrats who championed positive family policies outflanked Republicans who offered only rhetoric. Bob Casey in Pennsylvania and Jim Webb in Virginia are the most obvious examples.

Vilsack has already gone further in this direction than Casey, Webb, or any other Democrat. In 2004, he signed House File 22, a bill that put Iowa on the forefront of divorce-custody reform and showed that Democrats can lead when it comes to the family.

The bill, which encouraged shared parenting in custody cases, was not only a step toward gender equality in family policy. It also represented an alternative approach to dealing with one of the most intractable and vexatious problems of American society: the continued rise in out-of-wedlock births and fatherless children.

New figures from the National Center for Health Statistics show that, despite 10 years of welfare reform that was supposed to remedy this problem, out-of-wedlock births are at a record high. The Census Bureau also reports that married couples now comprise less than half the nation’s households. Such news traditionally helped Republicans.

But the Bush administration’s response to the perennial family dilemma has been weak. Questionable programs to “promote fatherhood” and “healthy marriage” have left Republicans ironically open to the charge of promoting big government and “throwing money at the problem.”

A simpler and less costly alternative is the measure Vilsack  “in cooperation with moderate Republicans” has enacted to keep fathers involved with their children.

Vilsack has also enhanced his appeal among a potential huge voting bloc. Some 20 million parents (about 10 percent are mothers) have lost their children to divorce and separation. That number doubles if one adds second spouses and grandparents, and the problem touches virtually every family in America. Disproportionately affected are blacks and other minorities, whose traditional loyalty to the Democrats has been strained over family issues.

No political party can ignore a voting bloc this massive. In Massachusetts, 85 percent of voters approved a nonbinding shared parenting referendum in 2004. This year, North Dakota voters narrowly missed enacting a binding referendum only because of massive spending by bar associations.

Republicans are getting hammered hard right now by pro-family groups who feel taken for granted. Few have much enthusiasm for the administration’s family psychotherapy programs. It also isn’t that long ago that many social conservatives were Democrats or grew up with parents who were. Democratic populists with a creative pro-family message have an opportunity right now to regain what was once their constituency.Hillary Clinton is not likely to capitalize on this. With her base among young singles, and her view that “there is no such thing as other people’s children,” she is not likely to energize the heartland as a convincing family-issues candidate.

Vilsack, who can invoke his own childhood in an orphanage and “bouncing between separated parents,” could pull it off much more plausibly.

He could even end run Hillary on gender issues. One of the earliest feminist grievances urged fathers to take a more active role in child-rearing. The National Organization for Women once advocated shared parenting, and moderate feminists remain consistent, such as former NOW president Karen DeCrow, who says that “part of ending sexism involves eliminating the inhuman practice of awarding a parent “visitation” to his or her own child.”

As the family and parenting rise to the top of the nation’s domestic agenda, Vilsack and Iowa could constructively employ the state’s caucus influence to lead this critical debate.

Bryan Iehl is founder and president of IowaFathers.com. Stephen Baskerville, PhD, is president of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children.

This article was originally published in Iowa’s Waterloo Courier.

Mitch Sanderson and the North Dakota Coalition for Families and Children are fighting a David and Goliath battle that has already sent shock waves throughout the divorce industry. Not surprisingly, divorce operatives are now pulling out all the stops during the final week to defeat the Initiative.

The only opponents of this Initiative are those who profit from family breakup and fatherless children: lawyers, judges, social workers and other bureaucrats, child support enforcement agents, domestic violence lobbies, and feminist groups. Because they have no substantive arguments to wield against the measure, they resort to insulting personal attacks against the citizens who have collected thousands of signatures to place the measure on the ballot.

Here is what Mitch and the NDCFC are up against:

• The wealthy bar associations have begun an all-out media campaign to protect the profits they acquire by destroying families and encouraging fatherless homes.

• The state’s Division of Human Services has again been caught using taxpayers’ money to lobby against the Initiative. DHS director Carol Olson has already admitted such practices when she directed DHS employees to stop using government, taxpayer-financed time for political purposes, in violation of North Dakota law and standard ethical principles.

• The federal government has also been caught using taxpayer-funded government resources to lobby against the citizen Initiative. This is a flagrant violation of federal law, the constitutional division between federal and state government, and standard ethics. HHS Deputy Secretary Dr. Wade Horn has likewise corrected misinformation propagated by his region administrator, but much of the damage has been done.

The big guns of bar associations and state and federal bureaucrats are being trained on this Initiative. The stakes are even bigger than shared parenting and the American family, important as those are. They have upped the ante to the point where the issue is now American democracy itself and the power of an out-of-control federal tax-and-patronage apparatus to thwart democracy, suppress lawful citizen initiative, and destroy the republican institutions and participatory democracy for which this nation has long been a shining beacon.

Yet the response from family defenders across the country and even in neighboring states has been less than overwhelming. If you cannot go in person to help, what Mitch and his allies need more than anything during this last week is money. The financial power of the bar associations is massive. As a political scientist, I can attest that referenda are usually won by the side that has the most money to saturate the media, and no law requires that they tell the truth. Measures that begin with huge popular support are often defeated by well-funded special interests.

In this case, the bar associations are using precisely the same tactics politically that they use in the courtroom: Plant doubt in the public’s minds. Spread misinformation which, however inaccurate, nevertheless creates fear. Slander the opposition and innocent people. And if all else fails – if you are a state or federal bureaucrat – break the law.

To contribute to the North Dakota Shared Parenting Initiative, go to http://www.ndspi.org. You can contact Mitch Sanderson and the North Dakota Coalition for Families and Children at their website: info@ndspi.org.

Stephen Baskerville is President of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children (www.acfc.org). His latest major article, “Politics and Same-Sex Marriage,” is published in the November-December issue of Society, a journal of the social sciences.

Mitch Sanderson is waging a heroic stand there against the slings and arrows of the Mitchell Sanderson, A Hero Who Needs Our Helpdivorce industry. Arrayed against Mitch is virtually the entire North Dakota government, as well as the bar associations, social workers, feminists, and all the others who have discovered how lucrative it is to take control of other people’s children. All these groups are receiving help from outside the state who realize the earth-shaking importance of what Mitch has done.

Mitch is the driving force behind the North Dakota Shared Parenting Initiative – a ballot referendum that will provide for equal parenting and child support levels at reasonable levels that do not subsidize broken homes. This summer Mitch and other parents collected sufficient signatures to place the referendum on the November ballot.

For decades now policymakers have bellyached about the “fatherhood crisis,” which they use to procure federal funds for useless government psychotherapy programs. The North Dakota Initiative is the first effective measure that will actually do something about this problem. It is no wonder the divorce industry is bringing out the big guns against him. The State Bar Association of North Dakota, the North Dakota Association of Counties, the state’s Department of Human “Services,” even the federal government are pulling out all the stops to suppress this measure. In the most appalling action yet, a federal HHS official, using his office for political purposes that are clearly improper and probably illegal, issued an ultimatum to North Dakota: Pass the initiative and we will cut off all federal funding. Such an act of federal bullying against citizens exercising participatory democracy may be unprecedented. HHS Assistant Secretary Wade Horn, to his credit, recently refused to back this threat, but state officials are ignoring him.

Mitch and the North Dakota Coalition for Families and Children have already achieved heroic feats. They collected over 17,000 signatures for the Initiative. They have attracted the attention of television, newspapers, and internet pundits like Wendy McElroy. In some cases, they have turned them from hostility to sympathy.

But they cannot stand alone much longer. It is well known that referenda are won by whoever has the most money and time to wage a media battle. Mitch and his allies are vastly outgunned. Though the public clearly favors the measure – this is clear from the speed with which they collected the signatures (and by a similar but non-binding referendum in Massachusetts that garnered over 85% of vote in 2004) – with each passing day, the divorce industry has more time to wage their propaganda onslaught against Mitchell, against the truth, and against families.

From now to Election Day, every parents’ group, every parent, every citizen in America should turn their eyes to North Dakota. Mitch and his friends are in desperate need of volunteers to help with the campaign and of money – not only to compete with the wealthy lawyers and other interests who have mobilized against the citizens of North Dakota, but perhaps even to survive.

This is no exaggeration. Mitch himself has gone into debt to pay for the campaign and is now vulnerable to arrest if he cannot meet his extortionate “child support” payments. This is only one weapon wielded by the divorce industry to silence its critics. We must hang together or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.

On the other hand, Mitch Sanderson and his friends have already sent shock waves through the divorce industry and, thanks to them, we have an opportunity to bring this behemoth under control. The name of Mitchell Sanderson deserves to be known wherever people fight for freedom. The rest of us can help these courageous parents at no risk to ourselves. Now is the time for all parents who love their children and their country to stand up and act.

You can contact Mitch Sanderson and the North Dakota Coalition for Families and Children at info@ndspi.org. Their web site is http://www.ndspi.org.

Stephen Baskerville is President of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children (www.acfc.org). His latest major article, “What God Hath Joined Together…”, is published by MovieGuide.com.

“When Words Bear Witness” is a more appropriate headline than Michael Rips and Amy Lester may realize, since their own words reveal the brave new world the feminists and bar associations are creating around the trumped-up issue of “domestic violence.”

“Domestic violence accounts for up to 34% of all reported violent crimes,” they state. Given that government authorities define domestic “violence” as “name-calling and constant criticizing, insulting, and belittling,” it would appear that many “reported violent crimes” are not very violent.

“Reported” crimes are also not proven crimes, and strong incentives exist to report violence where none has taken place. Fabricating abuse accusations ensures custody of children and marital property during divorce. The custody battles are lucrative for lawyers, whose bar associations control judicial appointments and promotions, which is why patently false accusations are treated as fact.

This perversion of the justice system is now common knowledge among legal practitioners. Thomas Kasper recently described in the Illinois Bar Journal how false accusations readily “become part of the gamesmanship of divorce.” Bar associations and even courts themselves sponsor divorce seminars counseling mothers on how to fabricate abuse accusations. “The number of women attending the seminars who smugly – indeed boastfully – announced that they had already sworn out false or grossly exaggerated domestic violence complaints against their hapless husbands, and that the device worked!” astonished Thomas Kiernan, writing in the New Jersey Law Journal. “To add amazement to my astonishment, the lawyer-lecturers invariably congratulated the self-confessed miscreants.” The UMKC Law Review reports a survey of judges and attorneys found complaints of disregard for due process and allegations of domestic violence used as a “litigation strategy.”

Since most reports involve no crime, it is hardly surprising that domestic violence, as Rips and Lester claim, “is notoriously difficult to prosecute, because [alleged?] victims frequently drop charges or refuse to testify when their [alleged?] abusers [allegedly?] threaten them with further violence.” What is this “further violence”? “One study found that many such witnesses received threats that their children would be kidnapped if they testified,” says Joan Meier of George Washington University. Their children kidnapped! These wife-beaters are so sophisticated they have organized child kidnapping operations to intimidate witnesses. Translation: The accusations are concocted to separate the children from their fathers, and the fathers understandably want their children back. Each lie necessitates another.

Rips and Lester continue: “In the 1980’s and 1990’s, the refusal of [alleged?] victims to cooperate in the prosecution of their [alleged?] batterers may have resulted in the dismissal of as many as 70% of all domestic violence cases.” The refusal of Rips and Lester to observe the presumption of innocence in their writing is not only standard in feminist literature; it pervades state and federal statutes, including the notorious Violence Against Women Act, for which Congress is now considering appropriations. VAWA grants encourage governments to “mandate and encourage police officers to arrest [alleged?] abusers.” It is more likely that the cases were dismissed because there was no evidence, because there was no violence and no crime, and because the objective of obtaining custody was accomplished.

But now we can secure convictions even when there is no evidence, no victim, and no crime: “Prosecutors, police officers, and advocates for domestic violence victims have developed techniques, together known as ‘evidence-based prosecution,’ that focus on the use of reliable evidence, like 911 tapes, to build cases that do not depend on the cooperation of the [alleged?] victim.” As with the Ministry of Truth, “evidence-based prosecution” is designed to convict those against whom you have no evidence. And since the defendant – excuse me, the “batterer” – can be convicted using hearsay, with no right to face his accuser, it is not really necessary that there even be an accuser, or for that matter a crime.

It is not difficult to see where this is going. In Britain, “special domestic violence courts” allow third parties such as civil servants and pressure groups to use “relaxed rules of evidence and the lower burden of proof” to bring actions against those they identify as batterers, even if no alleged “victim” comes forward (or even exists). “Victim support groups,” who say women “should be spared having to take legal action,” can now act in the name of an anonymous or purported plaintiff to seize the children, homes, and other property of men who have not been convicted of any crime. Similar “domestic violence courts” are being created in the United States and Canada, where “conviction rates have risen” and “guilty pleas are way up,” Mother Jones magazine enthuses. In other words, rigged trials and the certainty of conviction allow prosecutors to extort guilty pleas.

Sending men to jail is apparently now a virtue in itself. In San Diego, Rips and Lester report with glee, suspending due process protections “obtains convictions in about 88% of its cases.” Convicting people of crimes – thousands of people of whose guilt or innocence we can have no first-hand knowledge – is now something to be celebrated for its own sake.

Guilt used to be determined by juries weighing evidence in specific cases. But Rips and Lester apparently know that these “batterers” are guilty en masse, and all that remains is removing constitutional impediments to convicting them. Trials, juries, evidence, and the entire apparatus of due process are superfluous because guilt is not defined by whether an individual committed a specific deed. Guilt is a foregone conclusion because the defendant belongs to a class that is guilty by political definition. The New Jersey family court invokes feminist jargon to argue that allowing due process protections to abuse defendants “perpetuates the cycle of power and control whereby the [alleged?] perpetrator remains the one with the power and the [alleged?] victim remains powerless.”

My niggling interpolations are no doubt annoying for prosecutors whose careers depend on their conviction rates. They have effectively institutionalized the archetypal loaded question, “When did you stop beating your wife?”

Stephen Baskerville [send him mail] is a political scientist and president of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children and author of Family Violence in America: The Truth about Domestic Violence and Child Abuse.

Copyright © 2006 Stephen Baskerville