Letters to the Editor
melthough
Published Letters: 1264 Editor's Choice: 102
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Pay to Play
[Read the article: A man's right to choose in Ohio]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If financial responsibility is the problem, then why not change the custody/child support law instead? Assuming you aren't married to the mother of the child, as the pregnancy comes to term, you get to make a choice: you are the father of the child, meaning you pledge your 18-year financial support and get partial custody; or you give up your right to be a parent, meaning you don't have to pay child support but you also don't get to be a dad. I am guessing there are very few adult men who would be willing to give up on that possibility permanently, though there would certainly be some.
I grew up in Ohio, and the subculture I am familiar with there is such that men who are forced to pay child support (and this is almost always because of divorce, not a paternity suit) commonly become chronically unemployed because they think there's some kind of indignity in being forced to help feed and clothe their own children. If you are already an established parent or are married to the mother when the child is born, you wouldn't get to opt out of fatherhood, of course. But it seems reasonable to let men opt out at or before the birth, assuming they would not be allowed to opt back in. Much more reasonable than allowing them to force an abortion just because of an arguably outdated paternity law system.
This issue is a little tricky for me, because child support is all that many single mothers have to help them keep food on the table. But I wonder, statistically, how many single mothers who have never been married to their child's father actually end up collecting the child support. The child support/custody law system is so broken in the poor parts of Ohio anyway. Why not fix that first? (Well, I know why they don't. That's a rhetorical question.)
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@Hans B
[Read the article: The three stooges]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]from Wikipedia: "The President may not in any case use his power of pardon in a case of impeachment, but may, as usual, pardon a defendant in the case of a criminal prosecution."
If Gonzales and others are impeached, they can't be pardoned from that ruling. They could conceivably be pardoned if a regular court ruled against them, but I'm thinking that wouldn't be a good idea, depending on the layers and layers of mud that would be excavated during the impeachment hearings. But hopefully Bush won't be there to pardon any of them, because he will need to be impeached as well.
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Even Nalgene
[Read the article: Two words: Bad plastic]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]is soaked in Bisphenol A, as it turns out. I hope that all that diligent water-drinking I did while pregnant doesn't turn out to have gone awry.
While I expect (read: hope) that we don't need to get too hysterical about the plastic we have drunk in all that cleansing, healthy drinking water, I am going to buy some of those nice stainless steel bottles (like Kleen Kanteen) for my whole family. They are light and clean, only slightly more expensive than Nalgene, and don't appear (so far, at least) to screw with animals' hormones.
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Response to one of the anonymice
[Read the article: A man's right to choose in Ohio]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You wrote: "You almost certainly have no data to backup your supposition that it is "common" for men to become unemployed because they don't want to support their kids. That is myth and bigoted stereotype. "
I quite certainly have no data! I explicitly said that my statement reflected my own observations of my native culture - i.e., an anecdote, not "data." But it is a real aspect of my native subculture - the subculture in which my closest family members still live. Unless you have observed the opposite phenomenon in the same subculture, you don't have grounds to dispute it; but I never said I had statistics, and it was a very small part of my point, anyway. The point being that you can't give men the right to abort fetuses based on the fact that the paternity law system is faulty. Change the paternity law system instead. And I am under the impression that you agree with me on that point? So why argue, except that you know I am a feminist and you are not?
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"Because I am a man?"
[Read the article: A man's right to choose in Ohio]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]No. Because you insist on arguing against phantoms regarding your pet topic despite the fact that your pet topic is tangential to this debate, and you refuse to acknowledge that at least one feminist agrees with your core principle - that under normal circustances that do not involve an abusive relationship or an addiction problem, fathers and mothers should share the privileges and responsibilities of parenting equally.
And for the last time, I am not using stereotypes. I mentioned my personal experience of a narrow subculture, and I did NOT try to argue that MOST men try to avoid paying child support. In fact, I said that, given the choice, most men would probably not opt out of their paternity rights and responsibilities even if they had earlier advocated for an abortion. You are obsessed with an ASIDE in my post, a fact that is exemplary of your entire contrarian, one-issue presence in this forum. The experience I discussed is irrelevant to my core argument, to wit: if you accept the responsibilities of parenting, you are entitled to parent. And if you don't accept the responsibilities of parenting, you are not. I know enough mothers with borderline personality disorder and other mental ailments that I would never dream of advocating that mothers should automatically have custody rights. That is an outdated assumption based on essentialist patriarchal principles. I am not afraid of Glenn Sacks or anyone else who advocates for fathers' rights in family court.