"Kenneth S." wrote in message
...
On Thu, 29 Jan 2009 10:24:23 -0800, "Chris" wrote:

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Any man that's good enough to pay child support is good enough to have
custody of such child.

"Strengthen Families
Promote Responsible Fatherhood: Obama will sign into law his Responsible
Fatherhood and Healthy Families Act to remove some of the government
penalties on married families, crack down on men avoiding child support
payments, and ensure that payments go to families instead of state
bureaucracies."

So Obama is going to "strengthen families" by maximizing the amount of
"child support" extorted from men? Wait a minute, the answer is blatantly
obvious. By "family" he means a woman and her children. How could I be so
dumb...........

http://www.barackobama.com/issues/po...gthen-families


Chris's comment is very much to the point. Unfortunately,
there are two crucial messages that fathers' groups and genuine
defenders of traditional two-parent families have never managed to get
across to the general public in the U.S. and to policymakers:

(1) There is conclusive evidence that the best measure to prevent
childhood poverty is the two-parent family, and fatherless families
are a very good way of promoting childhood poverty.

(2) The "child support" system and the continued glass ceiling on
paternal custody are major incentives for mothers to create
single-parent families.

In 1990 a think-tank linked to the Democratic Party (yes, the
Democratic, not the Republican, party) laid out some of this in a
report titled "Putting Children First"
http://www.ppionline.org/ppi_ci.cfm?...entID=2 54874.
Unfortunately, in the years since then, nothing has been done to
strengthen the two-parent family. The only measures taken to remove
the incentives for the creation of fatherless families were the
welfare reforms of some years back.

One problem I see with recent family programs coming out of Washington is
they have titles that sound great but they get implemented in ways counter
to what the title suggests they are about. And even more alarming is the
way these programs define "families" in various combinations of
relationships without a biological father being included in the definition.

A good example is the Fatherhood Initiative passed during the Bush 43 years.
The program was purported to be aimed at strengthening the perceptions about
the role of fathers and the importance of fathers in children's lives. In
reality the money appropriated to do what sounded like a fine program turned
out to be hijacked by the states and morphed into programs aimed at
encouraging fathers to pay their CS.

The bureaucratic mindset gets exposed over and over again to have
perceptions of fathers as deadbeats who don't pay CS so government needs to
educate men to provide money if you want to be a good dad. All of the
social science research that shows the value fathers bring into children's
lives gets distilled down to just pay up.