Beware The Results Of Government-Sanctioned Marriage
by Vince Daliessio
The conservatives who advocate a constitutional amendment to "protect" marriage should read this article by Steve Baskerville on lewrockwell.com;
Viola Trevino...discovered she could obtain a child support order against a man without the inconvenience of actually having a child. Steve Barreras was forced to pay $20,000 for a child that, it turns out, never existed. Barreras protested for years and produced documentation that no child could possibly exist, but he was ignored by New Mexico's Child Support Enforcement Division.
The federal Department of Health and Human Services has an Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) that subsidizes this state function, doing so even when they know for certain that the given state's child support collection system supports fraud;
Though officials try to dismiss such shenanigans as aberrations, they proceed logically from the child support system, which was created by lawyers and feminists not to provide for children but to plunder fathers and transfer their earnings to other grown-ups. In an increasingly typical decision, a Massachusetts Appeals Court ruled in November that a mother could collect full child support from two men for the same child.
OK, the legal status of marriage (and parenthood outside of marriage) in most states is that it is a contractual arrangement arising out of common law. This contract has specific features which vary slightly from state to state, but the whole legal theory rests upon the presumption of a set of defined, precedented legal obligations, particularly regarding the care and financial support of children. Federal moneys being used to support fraudulent and capricious collection of funds from unfortunate non-custodial parents is simply an outrageously unconstitutional use of federal power. But the whole involvement of the state in the issue beside basic rulings on contractual issues distorts and actually degrades the quality of marginal marriages in particular, and the institutions of marriage and contractual law in general.
As I once told one not-so-smart young man who worked for me years ago; "Once you are exposed to the family court system, your life, liberty, and property are no longer your own, they then belong to a judge and a bunch of lawyers who will do with them whatever they wish".