Dear President Bush,
I am writing to you to express my concerns for a form of what I believe is
domestic terrorism in hopes that someone will take a stand for what is morally
and ethically correct and do something about a major problem we have as citizens
of the United States of America.
I am a divorced father of one child. I love my son as much as any father
would love his son and have continually been denied my rights to be his dad by a
court system that is completely corrupt and not about justice at all. My ex
wife, and this is not about her because if there was true justice she would not
have been able to do what she did using the corrupt courts against me, has
completely alienated my son against me. This was accomplished very easily with
lies and the use of a system that is set up to beat down caring fathers and take
the money that they work hard for and turn it over to the state and then to the
mother as “child support”.
I am not against doing my part to support my son however, as it is now, I am
doing more than my part and in fact supporting my ex wife along with the rest of
the people that she lives with. There is no accountability as to how she spends
the money that my government is taking from me and giving to her. This to me is
pure socialism and not what this country is about. Calling this legalized
extortion “child support” is a crime in itself that needs to be stopped.
As it is in Pennsylvania, I didn’t stand a chance to equal treatment by the
courts from the start. I was advised by quite a few different lawyers that “this
is all you will get” from the judge when it came to custody of my son. “This
is all you will get”, in reality turns out to be an every other weekend
visitor and a free paycheck to my ex wife. This is the common arrangement that
is forced on fathers every day.
It would be nice to think that I could go to court and at least have my
rights to my son protected instead of trampled. It seems to me that this
treatment of fathers by the courts is all being done for the profit of lawyers,
various “professionals”, and the state government itself.
Since the welfare reform law took effect back in the Clinton years, fathers
are now viewed more so than before as merely a paycheck and a visitor to their
children. The state government has an interest in this treatment of fathers
because they are in fact profiting from keeping as many fathers as possible
under the circumstances I describe above, a visitor and taking as much money as
possible from them. The more money the state of Pennsylvania can show that they
collect, the more they get from the federal government in TANF block grants.
This is breeding corruption and needs to stop now.
This is no secret and is very obvious to those of us who are court ordered to
have taken from us a large portion of our paychecks in the name of “child
support”. By using the corrupt and inflated “income shares guidelines” the
state is taking money far in excess of what my portion of financial support
realistically costs that would leave me at the poverty level if I were on my
own. I am happily married a second time and both me and my wife work full time
in order to pay our bills after this money is taken from me. My point being that
if I were on my own and had this money confiscated, I would not be able to
afford to live on my own.
There has been an explosion of what the press and certain government
officials like to call “deadbeat dads”. The reason for this explosion is
that they can’t pay what the state government expects them to pay and still
maintain some sort of standard of living because it is too much money being
taken with no basis whatsoever on any type of facts. Men quit their jobs so
their money can’t be confiscated. Most fathers that are middle class do this
because it is nothing more than a form of slavery and true Americans do not take
kindly to something like this. They go and work under the table so that their
income can’t be confiscated thus creating more and more of what they like to
call “deadbeats”. I would go as far as to say that the government is in the
business of creating deadbeats.
There are all types of legitimate statistics that demonstrate the outright
damage that the corrupt system is doing to the children of this country, but
nobody seems to have the courage to do anything about it and make the courts
deal in true justice. This domestic terrorism is not covered in what you would
call the mainstream media and I can’t figure out why when it is as big of a
problem as it is. I operate a website http://family_court_reform.tripod.com in
an attempt to get information to parents (mostly fathers) who had and will have
their rights trampled by the family court system. I also do this to let people
know who to write to try and get fair laws enacted. Please check, or have your
staff check, my website and read some of the stories that parents are sending me
so that you can see what is going on in the real world with real hard working,
tax paying citizens. Some of the things that are going on in Pennsylvania’s
“Domestic Relations” are criminal and a complete disregard of the United
States Constitution.
As an American, I should be free from slavery, and have the right to raise my
son. This means equal time with him as a court order in protection of my rights,
not being ordered a visitor to my own child. There should be no such thing as a
“custody order” as children are not the property of one parent over another
and a guaranteed source of income to the one that is awarded “primary custody”.
Each parent should “support” their child when it is their time with the
child. There should be no money forcibly extracted from one and handed over to
the other. The policies and procedures that are currently in place do nothing
more than guarantee all the people that are involved with the “divorce
industry” a job by driving up divorce rates. If one party would not have an
advantage over the other in family courts, the divorce rate would fall rapidly.
I am aware that some fathers and mothers would prefer not to be involved with
their kids and that is who the extraction of money should be saved for, not good
parents who were forced from their children’s lives by the courts.
I testified in Harrisburg at reform hearings about two years ago and find it
amazing that the only other people to “testify” were employees of the
divorce industry, meaning mostly lawyers and other so called professionals in
the psychological profession that do nothing more than aid in the separation of
father and child in reality. It is about time our government starts listening to
the people that have first hand experience, and are victims of the family
destruction machine that terrorizes America. It is time to make the appropriate
changes in order to have fair laws, moral, and ethical treatment of divorcing
and separating parents when children are involved.
I look forward to hearing a response to this letter, your views, and what you
plan on doing to enact fair laws and true justice for all. I will be posting
this on my website along with the response that I get, if any. Please visit
http://family_court_reform.tripod.com for more information.
Sincerely,
Dave Vincent
I will post any response that I get directly under this
letter. Honestly, I don't expect any response. I expect to be
ignored as usual just like all the other displaced fathers who write
letters. It is not on their agenda to fix a corrupt and harmful
system. This letter was also sent CC to Attorney General John Ashcroft,
who should be the one to do something about the corruption. I wonder if he
will respond...nahh
