This is the very conversation which originally launched this multi-year dialogue between us, Clayton, and my position remains the same as always: that you personally have found an exceptional formula to produce your own desired outcome (and I applaud you for it), but that in itself this neither proves anything nor offers much long-term hope of better governing in this regard.
You always seem to be operating under what I see as an erroneous presupposition: that what you are up against is a competing social or judicial mindset, which comes to different conclusions than you do. This is where we disagree. What every father who ever darkened a courtroom door is up against are the same two laws of nature which govern all civic administration, and are untouchable by either legislative or jurisprudential means: Cover Your Ass, and Defend Your Turf.
The OJ Simpson murder case of the 1990s in Los Angeles has served two epochal roles in the history of civil intervention into domestic matters: one is the one everyone is content to forget, that simultaneous to the trial itself and its saturation coverage by the media of the time, then-Senator Joe Biden along with then-First Lady Hillary Clinton used the trial as a smokescreen of opportunity to lobby and threaten and horse-trade for the remaining congressional votes they needed to tack a rider known as the Violence Against Women Act onto the now-infamous Clinton Omnibus Crime Bill.
Once passed, the news of this enormous legislative victory for the (D) faction took a distant second place to the day's news about what that smirk on Johnny Cochrane's face that day had meant, along with endless expert speculation on the looming prospect of how yet another round of potential rioting in LA might come to influence yet another jury charged with ruling on a high-profile criminal case involving a black man.
In the trade jargon of the divorce/domestic-violence legal arena from the summer of 1994 on, the cover-your-ass rule on fathers became 'don't be the one to sign off on the next OJ'; meaning that any man who so irritated the system as to be dissatisfied with the standard every-other-weekend setup post-divorce could very well also be the next man to murder a woman in her home and get away with it.
Better safe than sorry: sign whatever one has to sign, to place that man on the system's treadmill where he belongs, and pass it on to some other schmo to deal with enforcement. If we have him on failure to pay or contempt, that will make it that much easier to hold him on any felony rap that is sure to follow, and everyone will have signed on to the safest course all along: get him in the system and keep him there, he'll do the heavy lifting of wrecking his own case himself.
Which, of course, serves to protect the turf of any office at any level of officialdom: if everyone has played ball correctly in a game whose object is not to be the office who lets the next OJ slip through, everyone gets through another day at the office without something they'd signed years before 'biting them in the ass' bad enough for them to be escorted from the building by security with their desk goods in a cardboard box.
Like I'm sure you must have been told umpteen-squared times, Clayton, not everything is about you.
How fathers get treated in court has nothing to do with how they are seen, because they are not seen at all. Not as human beings and certainly not as parents.
A justice-seeking father is an 'asshole', one who doesn't know when to STFU and let the system grind on to the next case.
He is an upsetter of routine procedures, and thereby a potential threat to careers, what with that next-OJ rule and all.
He is probably lying about his love for his children, and just trying to play the system so he can retain access to their mom, since he is probably, you know, the next OJ anyway and everyone knows what OJ got away with.
The system has its ways and means and dealing with you, so take a seat, chump, and wait for your name to be called.
If your tone of voice raises any eyebrows, we'll put you in anger management (the next OJ will have anger issues too, according to the latest VAWA circular written on contract by radical feminist lobbyists and disclaimed by the DOJ) until you learn for your own good to take your medicine and not to ever disagree with us. Next case, please.
If it turns out the social worker spotted a sixer in your fridge in a surprise home inspection (keeping an eye on that next OJ, whose obvious drinking problem fits that profile suitably enough to invent one) then do the program, attend the meetings, and maybe in a few months we'll talk. Next case, please.
If you were five minutes late bringing the kids back to mom, next time there will be a blue wall and flashing lights waiting at her house for you, and all you get is the right to remain silent (everyone knows the next OJ will probably start with the kids.) Next case, please.
Et cetera.
It ain't about fathers, and certainly not fatherhood, at all.
The system itself is made up of plenty of rejected dads who fight for every minute with the kids, and single moms who leave them with the teenager down the hall (or whoever) so they can make it to work. They know how bad the system sucks and the harms it does to children better than you do, the very system which sucks the soul out of them every day as its functionaries, and never stops harming their children in whatever way best greases the works of an industrial complex which manufactures and enforces judicial rulings.
They're all just line workers, even judges and senior officials, and if you come in making demands and talking justice, all you are is a nuisance.
It isn't personal. They don't mean anything by it. They're all under the same brutal thumb of state authority you are trying to argue with, and they don't dare even hear you out (you're the next OJ, remember?) because if they do, much less make exceptions in your own favor, it is career suicide for them. You make it personal by making your case a threat to their bureaucratic futures.
Try and write all that into a proposed legislative package. You may as well title it the Asshole Dads Rocking the Boat Act. In a mafia-run communist party-state like New York, they know how to handle assholes who rock the boat one too many times.
But it's nothing personal: the system just has to do what it does: cover its own ass, and protect its own turf.
This is the very conversation which originally launched this multi-year dialogue between us, Clayton, and my position remains the same as always: that you personally have found an exceptional formula to produce your own desired outcome (and I applaud you for it), but that in itself this neither proves anything nor offers much long-term hope of better governing in this regard.
You always seem to be operating under what I see as an erroneous presupposition: that what you are up against is a competing social or judicial mindset, which comes to different conclusions than you do. This is where we disagree. What every father who ever darkened a courtroom door is up against are the same two laws of nature which govern all civic administration, and are untouchable by either legislative or jurisprudential means: Cover Your Ass, and Defend Your Turf.
The OJ Simpson murder case of the 1990s in Los Angeles has served two epochal roles in the history of civil intervention into domestic matters: one is the one everyone is content to forget, that simultaneous to the trial itself and its saturation coverage by the media of the time, then-Senator Joe Biden along with then-First Lady Hillary Clinton used the trial as a smokescreen of opportunity to lobby and threaten and horse-trade for the remaining congressional votes they needed to tack a rider known as the Violence Against Women Act onto the now-infamous Clinton Omnibus Crime Bill.
Once passed, the news of this enormous legislative victory for the (D) faction took a distant second place to the day's news about what that smirk on Johnny Cochrane's face that day had meant, along with endless expert speculation on the looming prospect of how yet another round of potential rioting in LA might come to influence yet another jury charged with ruling on a high-profile criminal case involving a black man.
In the trade jargon of the divorce/domestic-violence legal arena from the summer of 1994 on, the cover-your-ass rule on fathers became 'don't be the one to sign off on the next OJ'; meaning that any man who so irritated the system as to be dissatisfied with the standard every-other-weekend setup post-divorce could very well also be the next man to murder a woman in her home and get away with it.
Better safe than sorry: sign whatever one has to sign, to place that man on the system's treadmill where he belongs, and pass it on to some other schmo to deal with enforcement. If we have him on failure to pay or contempt, that will make it that much easier to hold him on any felony rap that is sure to follow, and everyone will have signed on to the safest course all along: get him in the system and keep him there, he'll do the heavy lifting of wrecking his own case himself.
Which, of course, serves to protect the turf of any office at any level of officialdom: if everyone has played ball correctly in a game whose object is not to be the office who lets the next OJ slip through, everyone gets through another day at the office without something they'd signed years before 'biting them in the ass' bad enough for them to be escorted from the building by security with their desk goods in a cardboard box.
Like I'm sure you must have been told umpteen-squared times, Clayton, not everything is about you.
How fathers get treated in court has nothing to do with how they are seen, because they are not seen at all. Not as human beings and certainly not as parents.
A justice-seeking father is an 'asshole', one who doesn't know when to STFU and let the system grind on to the next case.
He is an upsetter of routine procedures, and thereby a potential threat to careers, what with that next-OJ rule and all.
He is probably lying about his love for his children, and just trying to play the system so he can retain access to their mom, since he is probably, you know, the next OJ anyway and everyone knows what OJ got away with.
The system has its ways and means and dealing with you, so take a seat, chump, and wait for your name to be called.
If your tone of voice raises any eyebrows, we'll put you in anger management (the next OJ will have anger issues too, according to the latest VAWA circular written on contract by radical feminist lobbyists and disclaimed by the DOJ) until you learn for your own good to take your medicine and not to ever disagree with us. Next case, please.
If it turns out the social worker spotted a sixer in your fridge in a surprise home inspection (keeping an eye on that next OJ, whose obvious drinking problem fits that profile suitably enough to invent one) then do the program, attend the meetings, and maybe in a few months we'll talk. Next case, please.
If you were five minutes late bringing the kids back to mom, next time there will be a blue wall and flashing lights waiting at her house for you, and all you get is the right to remain silent (everyone knows the next OJ will probably start with the kids.) Next case, please.
Et cetera.
It ain't about fathers, and certainly not fatherhood, at all.
The system itself is made up of plenty of rejected dads who fight for every minute with the kids, and single moms who leave them with the teenager down the hall (or whoever) so they can make it to work. They know how bad the system sucks and the harms it does to children better than you do, the very system which sucks the soul out of them every day as its functionaries, and never stops harming their children in whatever way best greases the works of an industrial complex which manufactures and enforces judicial rulings.
They're all just line workers, even judges and senior officials, and if you come in making demands and talking justice, all you are is a nuisance.
It isn't personal. They don't mean anything by it. They're all under the same brutal thumb of state authority you are trying to argue with, and they don't dare even hear you out (you're the next OJ, remember?) because if they do, much less make exceptions in your own favor, it is career suicide for them. You make it personal by making your case a threat to their bureaucratic futures.
Try and write all that into a proposed legislative package. You may as well title it the Asshole Dads Rocking the Boat Act. In a mafia-run communist party-state like New York, they know how to handle assholes who rock the boat one too many times.
But it's nothing personal: the system just has to do what it does: cover its own ass, and protect its own turf.