Governing the Divorcee: Gender and Sexuality in State-Mandated Parenting Classes (original) (raw)
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Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (excerpt)
Cumberland House, 2007
Why is the American family in crisis? Some point to cultural forces such as pornography, popular culture, and secularization. Political scientist Stephen Baskerville argues that the most direct cause is the divorce regime: a government machinery that uses divorce and child custody to forcibly tear apart families, separate children from fit and loving parents, and turn ordinary law-abiding citizens into criminals in ways they are powerless to avoid. Think you will never have to go through the horrors of divorce litigation because you don’t believe in it? Think again. Divorce is not necessarily something you agree to. Divorce can be forced upon you – entailing the loss of your children, expulsion from your home, confiscation of your property and earnings, and even jail without trial. All this is now happening to law-abiding citizens who never agreed to a divorce or gave grounds for one – in ways completely beyond their control. Nothing like this has ever before appeared in America. Driven by an extremist version of feminist ideology and highly bureaucratic in organization, the divorce machine now resembles the totalitarian regimes of the last century. Yet its slow and subtle erosion of the private sphere of life is unprecedented. Political correctness inhibits scholars and media pundits from confronting it, while clichés and euphemisms obfuscate the seriousness of government officials acquiring virtually absolute control over Americans’ private lives. In this book, you will learn the shocking truth behind the clichés like "ugly divorce" and "nasty custody battle." The family crisis originates in family law, a political underworld whose operations are shrouded in secrecy and jargon: • What drives the rash of "parental kidnappings." • Why the "deadbeat dad" is not only a myth but a hoax – the creation of government officials plundering parents whose children they first take away. • What lies behind the hysteria over "domestic violence" and how this propaganda is destroying families, endangering children, and criminalizing innocent parents. • The real causes of child abuse and how the child abuse industry distorts the truth. • What allows family courts to operate as if the Bill of Rights simply did not exist. • The "soft totalitarianism" being institutionalized in family law by organized feminism. In this book, Dr. Baskerville exposes the greatest and most destructive civil rights abuse in America today. Throughout America and other Western democracies, family courts and Soviet-style bureaucracies ignore traditional protections for basic civil liberties, enter homes, take away children, and throw their parents in jail without trial. .
Family Relations, 2003
Although divorce rates have been stable or dropping for two decades, Americans seem anxious about the state of marriage. Drawing on the sociology of knowledge and a social constructionist approach to the study of social problems, we examine reasons for this collective anxiety, documenting how the divorce ''problem'' has been framed by organizations promoting conservative family values. We examine the history of divorce and identify social contexts associated with cyclical claims that divorce reflects a breakdown of the moral order. In the contemporary context, we examine how social science experts are used to portray children as victims of divorce and how such images legitimate the political objectives of specific interest groups and mask underlying issues of gender inequality.
State, Status, and the American Family
Imagine a world where households have to apply to be considered a family by the state. They would need to document how their domestic grouping fulfills the requirements of " family " through bank statements, passports, Social Security numbers, and perhaps even recommendations from those in their community attesting to the strength and quality of their relationships or their health and fitness. In reality, this scenario is not as far-fetched as one might think. We contend that family is a status bestowed by the state. The state invokes, imposes, and relies on the family as an instrument of policy implementation and enforcement and as way of organizing and managing a productive society. In disseminating the benefits and protections that hinge on family, the state holds significant autonomy in determining whether certain households will be perceived and treated as families in the eyes of the state. Through the lens of policy debates regarding LGBTQ-headed households, single-mother-headed households, and group homes, we argue the following: concepts of family operate as an arm of the state; as more policies hinge on familyhood, more households seek that determination from the state; and state actors are at once exclusive and inconsistent in granting this status. In all, this suggests that rather than operating only as a matter of individual choice – a way of naming our private relationships – family should also be understood as a state-appointed and-anointed status. On August 26, 2015 the Maryland Court of Special Appeals determined that a lesbian mother " did not have parental standing to challenge the denial of visitation or custody " by her son's biological mother. These two women, who were now divorcing, earlier had not secured either a marriage license prior to their son's birth or an adoption certificate proving co-parentage. Consequently, although the non-biological mother had helped to choose her son's biological father (a sperm donor), We thank Patricia Strach, Maxine Eichner, and Ellen Anderson for comments on earlier versions of this article, as well as our fellow symposium contributors for panel discussions and congenial collaboration on the subject of family and politics. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for Polity for their very helpful comments.
The Politics of Family Breakdown: How No-Fault Divorce Turns Fathers into "Deadbeat Dads"
Family Policy, 2002
Most attempts to address America's family crisis have emphasized the cultural dimension, though increasingly the importance of economic factors has also been recognized. Less attention has been devoted to the politics of family breakdown. Yet the effectiveness of our other efforts is likely to be limited until we come to terms with the political realities underlying marriage dissolution. First, the media image many people have of marriages simply and mutually "breaking down" is inaccurate. Under "no-fault" divorce laws, some 80% of divorces are unilateral and over the objection of one spouse. Contrary to another persistent myth, when minor children are involved, the divorcing parent is overwhelmingly likely to be the mother. Arizona State University psychologist Sanford Braver has shown that at least two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women. Few of these divorces involve grounds, such as desertion, adultery, or violence. The reasons usually given are "growing apart" or "not feeling loved or appreciated." More disturbing, researchers Margaret Brinig and Douglas Allen found that "Who gets the children is by far the most important component in deciding who files for divorce." No-fault divorce, often blamed for leaving wives vulnerable to abandonment, has left fathers with no protection against the confiscation of their children. No-fault laws were passed not as the result of any popular clamor or following any public debate but largely for the benefit of divorce practitioners. "The divorce laws . . . were reformed by unrepresentative groups with very particular agendas of their own and which were not in step with public opinion," writes Melanie Phillips in The Sex-Change Society. "Public attitudes were gradually dragged along behind laws that were generally understood at the time to mean something very different from what they subsequently came to represent." It is usually assumed that these groups profit from divorce but do not actually create it. Yet any bureaucracy develops an interest in perpetuating and exacerbating the problem it ostensibly exists to solve. By offering incentives to divorce and rewarding the parent who initiates it,divorce courts encourage divorce, which is their bread and butter. In some cases it appears mothers are actually being forced to divorce with threats.
West Virginia Law Review, 2012
Stone, and Robin F. Wilson for their helpful comments. I also thank Melanie Bruchet, Tiffany Gardner, and Cora Tench for excellent research assistance. Ben Cooper, Chris Green, Dean Richard Gershon, and their colleagues provided useful comments when I presented an early version of this paper at the University of Mississippi School of Law. This paper also benefitted from audiences at the 2011 Southeastern Association of Law Schools New Scholars Workshop, and particularly Professor Barbara Cox, who mentored me and offered excellent suggestions. I thank Mercer University School of Law and Dean Gary Simson for their confidence and the summer stipend that enabled me to write this article. Dean Simson's insights and suggestions were also invaluable. Finally, I'd like to thank Robert Bush and Greg Nevins for their useful comments on this article and for all of the extraordinary work they and their colleagues do at Georgia Legal Services and Lambda Legal. Of course, any mistakes and opinions expressed in this article are entirely my own. 205 WEST VIRGINIA LAW REVIEW regimes increasingly extend to all couples, and why these gender-neutral marriage alternatives-once established-tend to be permanent. In the end, all couples could be left with cafeteria options for legal relationship recognition. This may be a good solution, but it is certainly not a conservative one. I.
Social Forces, 2014
Katrina Kimport's Queering Marriage: Challenging Family Formation in the United States focuses on San Francisco's "Winter of Love," a month-long period of time in 2004 during which then-mayor Gavin Newsom declared that same-sex marriages could be performed at City Hall. Ten years later, when over 30 U.S. states plus the District of Columbia have legalized same-sex marriage, it is hard to remember what a landmark decision this was. Media from all over the globe focused in on the thousands of samesex couples who stood in line outside City Hall in the rain, waiting to marry. Although six months later, the California Supreme Court invalidated all those marriages, the event set the stage for the vote in California on Proposition 8 and its subsequent repeal by the U.S. Supreme Court. Through in-depth interviews with 16 lesbian and 11 gay male couples married during the Winter of Love (15 couples interviewed jointly and 12 cases in which only one member of the couple was interviewed), Kimport considers the ways in which same-sex marriage both challenges and maintains heteronormativity. Utilizing a compelling combination of scholarly theory and qualitative data, Kimport convincingly argues that "the disruption of heteronormativity can take place only when (same-sex) marriage is accompanied by an articulated critique of hegemonic heterosexuality" (p. 158). Whether or not same-sex marriage can meaningfully disrupt pervasive heteronormativity is hotly contested among activists and scholars. Yep, Lovaas, and Elia (2003) have presented a model of two competing sexual ideologies in the United States. The assimilationist position argues that all people have the right to get married, and that marriage results in stable relationships. In contrast, the radical position asserts that marriage is an oppressive institution, and that same-sex relationships should be unique and freely chosen, not mimicking heterosexual norms. These perspectives are echoed in the reflections of Kimport's participants. In her chapters, "Marrying for the Movement," "Marrying for Rights," and "Marrying for Love," Kimport demonstrates the variety of reasons why participants chose to marry. Although many of the respondents viewed their
This article analyzes the author's experience performing public sociology on same-sex marriage and gay family rights issues in order to illustrate the paradoxical and tacitly conservative conditions that structure contemporary public sociological discourse. It demonstrates how, under contemporary conditions of globalized, market-driven communications technologies and neoconservative discursive frames, performing public sociology reinforces positivist epistemology, regardless of one's goals. Paradoxically, the arena of sound-bite sociology exploits reflexive and semiotic knowledge to convey research in rhetoric that reinforces the positivist, normalizing ideological regime that the former seek to deconstruct.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2009
There is a growing trend in family law to sever family rights from family status. Courts and legislatures increasingly recognize a variety of different family forms by granting the legal incidents offamily relationship (such as civil unions for same-sex couples or de facto parenthood for caretakers), without granting family status (marriage or parenthood per se). This Article explores this trend by unpacking the constitutional treatment of family relationship. It argues that when state constitutions and the Federal Constitution recognize a right to family status (marriage and parenthood per se), they are not only affording people the legal incidents of family relationship, they are honoring an expressive right to a label everyone understands. Yet this Article suggests that legal actors also often feel compelled (possibly even constitutionally compelled) to award the legal incidents of family relationship even in the absence of awarding status because the rights and obligations of family relationships provide critical sources of identity and autonomy for the people in those relationships. This Article concludes that although courts and legislatures may be attracted to the idea of severing rights from status because it seems to protect alternative families without altering traditional family status categories, ultimately this trend to disaggregate rights from status may undermine legal protection of both traditional and nontraditional family relationships.
Framing Divorce Reform: Media, Morality, and the Politics of Family
Family Process, 2007
No-fault statutes changed divorce from an adversarial system pitting victims against victimizers, with the state acting as enforcer of marital norms, to a private decision between unhappily married but legally blameless partners. Divorce reform following no-fault primarily focused on making divorce more fair for the parties involved. Over the last several decades, divorce reform has transitioned from making divorce better to making marriage healthier. The good divorce has slipped from policy attention, elevating the potential for restigmatization of divorced couples and their children. We trace the trajectory of media framing of divorce reform discourse in three general circulation newspapers from the start of the no-fault revolution, noting how media framing parallels and naturalizes the transition in divorce reform policy. We conclude by observing the prevalence of divorce and the related need for therapists to be cognizant of this naturalization process, thereby keeping the good divorce as a goal for those who desire to end their marriages.