"Child Support Intervention (CSI) was the first private agency to begin broadly publicizing the names and identifying information, including pictures, of deadbeat parents.  The practice began in February 1995 and was covered by much of the media (CNN and Time included) when the first billboard was erected in Fort Worth, Texas. 

"The first deadbeat portrayed owed over $20,000.  Of course, he threatened to sue but could not find a lawyer to handle the case.  The reason is simple: He owed the money."--Michael 'Doc' McCoy, former director, CSI 

I am introducing a new feature on my blog--"The Child Support Official's Viewpoint." The feature will be authored by Michael 'Doc' McCoy, a prominent former child support official and one of the pioneers of the private child support collection industry.

McCoy was the Founder and Managing Director of Child Support Intervention (CSI) in Fort Worth, TX from 1991 to 2002, and held a leadership position in the American Child Support Collection Association from 1993 to 1999. He retired from CSI in 2002 and currently lives in China. He has often been a commenter on www.glennsacks.com under the name "Doc."
 
McCoy has on occasion been a critic of the private child support industry and an internal reformer--to learn more, see SmartMoney magazine's Mother's Little Helpers (8/2/02).

In the selection below, McCoy defends Fox's pilot reality show Bad Dads, which has been the target of our highly-publicized protest campaign.

Why Fox Won’t Be Sued over Bad Dads
By Michael 'Doc' McCoy
 
Child Support Intervention (CSI) was the first private agency to begin broadly publicizing the names and identifying information, including pictures, of deadbeat parents.  The practice began in February 1995 and was covered by much of the media (CNN and Time included) when the first billboard was erected in Fort Worth, Texas.  The first deadbeat portrayed owed over $20,000.  Of course, he threatened to sue but could not find a lawyer to handle the case.  The reason is simple: He owed the money.  After appearing on the billboard, television cameras were allowed into family court to document him being sentenced to jail for contempt of court. 
 
What goes on in family court is a matter of public record, unless of course the records have been sealed.  As a result, if someone is delinquent in their child support obligation they can be labeled a “deadbeat” and publicly exposed without fear of liability to those who are doing the exposing.
 
CSI went on to expose deadbeats on nightly news television programs throughout the country from time to time.  Again, numerous threats of law suits.  Again, no law suits were ever filed.  The simple reason is that CSI ensured that their information was 100% correct.
 
The deadbeats that are exposed in this manner have typically been brought to court previously on contempt of court proceedings.  At the conclusion of those proceedings a judgment confirming the arrears is issued.  It is relatively easy to determine then if the judgment has been satisfied, or attempts to satisfy the judgment have been made as the obligor is instructed to send all payments through the public agency. Read the rest of this entry »

Background: According to TIME magazine, "For nearly two years, James Rhoades...has been fighting to establish in law what science and fact already have shown beyond any doubt: He is the biological father of the boy dubbed J.A.R...the boy's mother, J.N.R., whom Rhoades met while taking an online graduate course...was — and still is — married to another man, who was stationed at a Pensacola Air Force base during their affair in 2005. And that's the problem.

"[A] divided Kentucky Supreme Court told Rhoades that he could not press his paternity claim, no matter what evidence of fatherhood he might have, because J.N.R. was, and remains, a married woman...The decision has left Rhoades devastated. 'What I wanted was not just to see my son but to participate in his life. He is my son and I love him.'"

In my recent blog post If there were ever a guy in a no-win situation, it's James Rhoades, I explained that I "have mixed emotions about Rhoades and his case." Ned Holstein tackles the difficult case in his recent blog post Sanctity of Marriage, or Discrimination Against Dads? Rhoades is pictured with his son above.

In a recent post, fathers' rights activist David R. Usher calls Rhoades "a predatory marital gigolo who for reasons of self-gratification happens not to charge for his 'services.'" He says Rhoades has "invaded the marriage of another man, and then thinks that impregnating the wife somehow entitles him to extramarital parental rights. Usher adds:

"Men who do this are disgusting individuals...James Rhoades – who imagines that becoming a biologically-successful mercenary gigolo, at another man’s financial expense and mental torture, somehow entitles him to a seat in the middle of another man’s marriage as a redundant father."

Usher continues:

"Many men know that marriage is a risky or dangerous undertaking...There are a burgeoning number of jerks who discovered that actively pursuing affairs with married women provides all the fun without any of the risk or responsibility.

"The child does not need two fathers. He already has one right at home. Imagine trying to explain to a kid why 'Billy has two daddies' who are both making eyes at mommy and throwing icy glares at each other.

"Imagine the husband having to deal with a marital invader coming back again and again for perhaps another shot at his wife. If the husband does not mind, that is certainly his choice — and we should keep it that way. Only an idiot would suggest that the state has jurisdiction to force a good husband to accept a mercenary gigolo as a permanent fixture in his marriage...

"I hope the husband sues his pants off for child support and files a hefty marital interference tort as well. Rhoades should be listed in a state 'Marital Offenders' registry, and everyone in the neighborhood notified where he lives so they can keep a keen eye on him. Read the rest of this entry »

"[There's a] difference between how we handle Mother's Day compared with Father's Day in church. If it's like in years past, it won't be pretty.

"This Sunday we will extol the value and benefit of motherhood, which is great. But in some churches, this will be done by degrading Christian husbands, which is not great. 'Our pastor makes us husbands get on our knees on Mother's Day and beg for forgiveness. I don't want to do it again this year,' one reader tells me. Another writes, 'Our minister makes husbands write on paper all the things we've done wrong. Then we're suppose to give it to our wives and pledge that we won't do them anymore.'

"Most preachers will not be this heavy-handed. They will wait till Father's Day (Sunday, June 18) to tell men how to be better fathers. Of course there's nothing wrong with this message when taken as an isolated event. But when compared with Mother's Day, we'll discover that for some reason many ministers believe that fathers need correction on Father's Day (and Mother's Day) but women don't. Why this double-standard?

"Because much of the church sees men as a problem to be fixed when compared to women, not a gender to be appreciated."

I've often complained about anti-male bias among Christian conservatives, supposedly defenders of fatherhood and families. My friend Paul Coughlin, a prominent Christian writer and author of No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children, is one of the few Christian writers willing to take the Christian establishment to task for this.

Paul's excellent 2007 Mother's Day Crosswalk article Pastors, Don't Use Mother's Day to Bash Dads--is excerpted above. Also, see my blog post Anti-Male Bias among Christian Conservatives.

I'm not normally a fan of Dr. James Dobson, but Coughlin gives us a nice quote from him. Coughlin writes:

"[I]f there is a problem with their marriage, Christian men have been told by these sources that it is automatically their fault. Dr. James Dobson is one of a few authors brave enough to confront this false message.

"He writes in Love Must Be Tough that men are saddled with the unrealistic expectation that 'any sadness or depression that a woman might encounter is her husband's fault. At least he has the power to eradicate it if he cares enough. In other words, many American women come into marriage with unrealistically romantic expectations which are certain to be dashed. Not only does this orientation set up a bride for disappointment and agitation in the future, it also places enormous pressure on her husband to deliver the impossible...Marital conflict always involves an interaction between two imperfect human beings who share the responsibility to one degree or another.' Sadly, Dobson's common sense is drowned out by other and more shrill voices."

"Nine years ago Chris Hobbs and his wife divorced. At the time the two had joint custody. Then, Chris got a job as a Huntsville Firefighter."'So when I became a firefighter in January of 2005, the last thing I would have expected that would be used as a basis of a lawsuit and then that would be used to take my child away from me,' said Hobbs. But that's what has happened in the end result as we stand right now.'
 
"His hours as a firefighter changed his schedule, but Chris never thought it changed his ability to be a parent. The courts didn't see it that way when his wife filed for primary custody."'I have standard visitation which isn't followable because of my job as a firefighter,' said Hobbs...

"Chris Hobbs says right now he gets to see his son maybe one to two times a week, or sometimes not at all."--WHNT TV, Huntsville, Alabama   Reader Chris Hobbs has been pushing to get more time with his 11-yerar-old son Blake, and has been doing well promoting his cause. The full article is Why is a Man Posting Signs Against a Local Judge? (5/7/08).

There's also a TV interview with Hobbs which can be found on www.whnt.com. One of the things I liked about Hobbs' interview is that he stressed that he wasn't doing this out of a personal grudge against the judge, he was doing it for his son.

Hobbs' website is http://www.whyjudgelittle.com/. He is pictured above with his son--with the judge in the middle.

"[There's] fairly strong evidence that in many ways it sucks much more, at this point in American history, to be a man than to be a woman, and very compelling arguments that it’s still women who are getting the shaft from the patriarchy much more than it is men who are getting the shaft from any kind of gynocracy."--Dan Oppenheimer

Dan Oppenheimer of the blog Masculinity and its Discontents, who wrote several posts for The Feminist Dissident, discusses the recent Vanity Fair article Men Evolving Badly: American manhood is in crisis (4/21/08) in his latest submission below.

Men v. Women--Who’s screwing who, and to the benefit of whom?
By Dan Oppenheimer

James Wolcott, a critic who I admire, has a surprisingly unsatisfying review in this month’s Vanity Fair of a number of books on the masculinity crisis. Wolcott writes:

"The American man is in a sorry way. And here I thought it was just me mewling into my milk dish. But, no, my brother-men are hurting and hiding behind the adobe walls of foolish pride, unheard, unseen, unattended—until it’s too late. If the books banked around me are halfway credible, a large-scale crisis has befallen the American male, a prolonged batting slump that has bottomed into pathos, self-recrimination, and pathological dysfunction. It is a silent epidemic, a shadow plague of frustration, festering anger, and doubt, the misery held inside until it erupts into the headlines or fills up the cardiac unit. Its toll is indicated in everything from the suicide rate (four times as many men commit suicide as do women) to testosterone dips (a study in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism found a substantial decline in male testosterone levels between 1987 and 2004), to porn-addled masturbation to the point of glazed stupor (the ick-perfect cover photo of Robert Jensen’s Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity presents the partially shown face of a young man against a backdrop of bathroom tiles, his mouth ajar after presumably selfishly entertaining himself)."

Wolcott continues, describing the claims offered in these various books, and name-checking, among others, the one and only Glenn Sacks (who gets a lot of love in Guy Garcia’s The Decline of Men: How the American Male Is Tuning Out, Giving Up, and Flipping Off His Future.) What he doesn’t do, and I understand this at the same time that I was disappointed by it, is render a persuasive judgment of what it all means or how to assimilate it into our picture of the universe.

He makes two true, but disappointingly dry, points (it’s not that points shouldn’t be dry, it’s just that what makes Wolcott great is his acute psycho-cultural insight; he makes really wet points). The first is that in the realm of the super-elite, it’s clear that men still run the show. He writes:

"In his informative, provocative guide to the 'global power elite,' Superclass, David Rothkopf spells out the eight key rules for admission into the atrium of the Davos gods, among them 'Attend an elite university' and 'Get rich.' Topping the advisory list: 'Be born a man.'

"'There is no group as disproportionately under-represented among the members of the superclass as women. On a planet where 51 percent of the inhabitants are women, the global power structure is still locked in the dark ages on this issue. Only 6.3 percent of the superclass are women.' Corporate boardrooms are still predominantly boys’ clubs—'As of 2007, there were only thirteen women chief executives among Fortune’s top five hundred, twenty six among the top one thousand.'”

His second point is that it’s really the economy, stupid, that, “The primary threat to the psychological well-being of most men (and women) isn’t sexual or pop-cultural but economic, the fear that a single swing of the ax could render one destitute and undo everything one has attempted to build.”

What he doesn’t get into is the subjective emotional experience of gender relations in America, and how they radiate out into the political culture (and vice-versa). He doesn’t clarify at all the painful ambiguity that’s flummoxed me so much in trying to navigate between the fairly strong evidence that in many ways it sucks much more, at this point in American history, to be a man than to be a woman, and the very compelling arguments that it’s still women who are getting the shaft from the patriarchy much more than it is men who are getting the shaft from any kind of gynocracy.

I’m still left wondering: Who’s screwing who, and to the benefit of whom? Or is everybody screwing everybody, to the benefit of no one? Wolcott’s answer, I suppose, is that it’s the super-elite who are screwing everyone, using whatever divisive tools they have at their disposal—racism, sexism, classism, reverse-racism, reverse-sexism, reverse-classism, xenophobia, multiculturalism, political correctness, political incorrectness, etc.—to set all the different categories of sub-people against each other so that no one notices that the only ones really making out are Greg Marmalard and the other boys in the Davos Phi Davos fraternity.

To the extent that this quasi-Marxist, the base determines the superstructure kind of perspective is true, it does point to where there could be, or at least should be, some overlap between men and women in trying to address a gender situation that doesn’t seem to be working out all that well for any of us who aren’t members of the superclass [universal health care, for instance, might ease some of the painful insecurity that adds stress to so many marriages, and paid maternity and paternity leave would enable mothers and fathers to devote more attention to both their children and to each other in the (usually very stressful) early months after a child is born].

I guess my instinct, at the end of the day, though, is that in addition to whatever conspiracies or establishments or oppressive classes are out there screwing us to advance their own interests, there’s also a pretty substantial chunk of what’s going on that’s just effed up in a way that serves no one’s interests.

We’re a neurotic society. We just don’t know how to be normal, how to be excellent to each other (as Bill & Ted recommended), how to find some sane equilibrium between individualism and the common good, how to nurture the entrepreneurial dynamism that fuels the growth of our economy while also providing enough economic security to the masses so that it doesn’t feel like we’re all climbing over each other to get to the top. In a lot of ways, we just suck.

Most fathers would do anything to protect their children, and here's another example.

Like hero fathers James Kim and Albert Collins, Chicago father Joseph Richardson gave his life to save his child.

From Mitch Dudke's Dad died saving his little girl: Father's last act protected 4-year-old from crash (Chicago Sun-Times, 5/7/08):

"With an out-of-control car bearing down, Joseph Richardson grabbed his 4-year-old daughter and held her up out of harm's way.

"It was his last act -- and one that apparently saved his daughter's life.

"Richardson, a 39-year-old father of three, was killed Monday evening by the car, driven by a man who police say was drunk.

"The car pinned Richardson and his daughter Kaniyah against a wrought iron fence at 95th Street and Wentworth, police said.

"Kaniyah survived and was listed in critical but stable condition Tuesday evening at Comer Children's Hospital, where a spokeswoman said she was doing well.

"'He held the baby up to keep the car from destroying the baby, but it totally destroyed him,' said Richardson's father, the Rev. L.V. Richardson.

"Richardson was walking his daughter to a McDonald's for burgers at 6:40 p.m. Monday when a 1990 Chevy Cavalier jumped a curb and careened towards them, police said, citing witness accounts.

"He grabbed his daughter just before the car slammed the two into the fence, police said...

"Joseph Richardson, the father of two girls and a boy, all under the age of 11, was described as a devoted father. His other love was music. He was a gifted pianist and organist and performed in choirs at Cottage Grove Baptist Church and Greater Revelation Missionary Baptist Church, where his father ministers. His idols were Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, his family said..."

Read the full article here.

This article by Rebecca Eckler, author of Toddlers Gone Wild!, is so offensive in so many ways it's hard to know where to begin.

Here's one. Rebecca writes:

"On behalf of my four-year-old, who has a Yahoo account in her name, I recently sent an e-mail to her father, who lives in Alberta.

"'Hi Daddy,' I typed, as my daughter was fast asleep. 'Mommy has been talking about Mother's Day. I only have 143 pennies in my piggy bank. She's the best mommy ever. She's been pretty exhausted. I'd like to get her something nice. Can you help? Love you.'

"It was a slightly pathetic, but possibly cute, way of reminding my daughter's father about Mother's Day.

"On what is perhaps the Hallmark holiday of all Hallmark holidays, what's a single mother to do to get some sort of recognition? It's certainly not going to come from a child who still licks glue and is too young to understand the concept.

"But modern single mothers, whether they've chosen to be single, still get along with the father of their children, or have no contact with the father at all, are finding new ways to make Mother's Day special (and, in some cases, more fruitful)...

"As for me, the e-mail worked. I'll be at a spa, thanks to my four-year-old's request via her mother's e-mail."

I love that--mom is so entitled to even more of dad's money that she brags in the national media about her need to "remind my daughter's father about Mother's Day," as if it's his problem.

Here's another:

"All mothers of young children rely on gifts made by someone else. For the single mom, feeling the need for something more than a crumpled card in a knapsack - something that comes with a gift receipt - presents a particular dilemma. You can't very well hand over $20 to your three year-old to do your shopping.

"So some have learned to lobby on their own behalf.

"'I've drilled it into him,' says Toronto-based Vanessa Craft, the author of Out of Character, about her three-year-old daughter's father, who lives in England.

"Growing up, Mother's Day, like most holidays, had always been recognized in my house. So it's a big deal. I even remind my daughter's father that on her birthday I should also get something, for the fact that I gave birth,' Ms. Craft says.

"'Her dad knows to make me cards, at the very least, on behalf of our daughter,' says Ms. Craft, adding, 'I've never had a bad Mother's Day being a single mom.'"

Huh? Her ex owes her a Mother's Day gift?

One other note--in both cases (Rebecca Eckler and Vanessa Craft) the children are very young and the fathers live far away. Rebecca dumped the father of her child, to whom she was engaged to be married, for another man. I don't know what happened in Vanessa's case, but statistically the odds are good that she was the one who initiated the divorce/breakup. In both cases it was probably the women who moved away. So having already severed most of the loving bonds between the fathers and their little children, the women now feel deprived and entitled to even more from dad.

Here's a third section:

"Stacey Otis, a single mother of three, says that without a partner there is 'such a greater connection with your children,' and that Mother's Day is always 'awesome.'

"She celebrates the day at her house, or at one of her siblings' houses, and has turned it into 'Family Mother's Day.'

"Unlike many of my mother friends, who moan about husbands forgetting Mother's Day entirely, or who complain about partners not even giving them two hours of alone time, Ms. Otis says, 'My Mother's Days are always special. When my kids get excited to give me what they made at school, it's like gold. When you know all you have is each other, it makes the day really special.'"

So Stacey Otis' kids are better off because they don't have a dad? That's odd, since being without a dad greatly increases their chances for most youth pathologies, including drugs, crime, teen pregnancy, and dropouts.

And of course Stacey is better off, because all of her friends' husbands are louts who spend much of the their time working to support their wives and children. And Stacey's excessively critical female attitude probably gives you a good clue as to why her and Rebecca's and Vanessa's relationships ended, too.

The full article is--get this--Get what you want this Mother's Day. Twist the ex's arm (Globe and Mail, 5/6/08). To write a Letter to the Editor of the Globe and Mail about this piece, click on Letters@globeandmail.com.
 
Thanks to Luc Chagnon, a Canadian reader, for sending the article.

I'm looking for a reader or two to volunteer to do a men's activism journalism project which is long, long overdue, and which will be of interest to those who read this site. Upon completion, the project will become a permanent fixture on my website and will be available for reference by other activists and the media.

The project will take a fair amount of work and must be done in a serious, journalistic manner. The authors of the project will be credited publicly for their work if they want, or they can choose to remain anonymous if they prefer. The project will be done under my direction and will be the property of Sacks Media Group, LLC.

If you are interested, click here and send us your name, phone #, and a brief explanation of why you're interested and why you're a good candidate for the job. Either I or my assistant will contact you.