While our country focuses on the war
abroad, many of our soldiers fight personal battles here
at home—or more accurately, can’t fight. They
are losing their families and getting little help from an
administration that claims to “support the troops” while
doing nothing to protect the parental rights of the fathers
it sent into combat.
All the services are facing a severe
drop in recruitment, and additional recruiters, stepped-up
advertising, and bigger bonuses have not reversed the trend.
The media points to the war itself, but the shortfall also
coincides with a dramatic rise in military divorces, which
the Army reports have nearly doubled since 2001. “We’ve
seen nothing like this before,” says Col. Glen Bloomstrom,
a chaplain who oversees family-support programs. “It
indicates the amount of stress on couples, on families,
as the Army conducts the global war on terrorism.”
It indicates much more than stress. “There
most certainly is a relationship between current recruiting
problems and an increase in military divorces,” says
Capt. Gene Thomas Gomulka, a retired Navy chaplain and writer
on military marriage.
Muffled by feminist orthodoxy, the
Army and media are not disclosing the facts behind these
divorces or publicizing the threat they pose to preparedness.
The important points are these: the divorces are almost
all initiated by wives, the servicemen usually lose their
children—which for many is their main incentive for
serving their country—and finally, they often become
liable to criminal prosecution for child support that is
impossible for them to pay.
Laws protecting active-duty servicemen
against legal actions are ignored by family courts. Deployed
servicemen have virtually no protection against unilaterally
initiated divorce proceedings that permanently separate
them from their children without any show of wrongdoing.
Child kidnapping laws likewise do not protect them from
having their children relocated, even to foreign countries,
while they cannot be present to defend their parental rights.
When they return, they have no necessary right to see their
children—and can be arrested for trying to do so—who
often join the ranks of the permanently fatherless.
The Lansing State Journal recently reported
on Joe McNeilly, a National Guardsman who “would still
have his son if he hadn’t been deployed,” according
to Maj. Dawn Dancer, public-affairs officer for the Michigan
National Guard. Invoking the correct legal buzzwords, the
mother and her lawyer claimed he lost custody not because
of his deployment but because of his “parenting skills.” Yet
his parenting skills were clearly defined in terms of his
deployment. The court attested that it stripped him of custody
because his wife was the “day-to-day caretaker and
decision maker in the child’s life” while McNeilly
was deployed. His alleged parental deficiencies also proceeded
apparently from his duties as a soldier. “My client
is making sure to turn off the TV when the news reports
deaths in Iraq,” the mother’s lawyer said, “and
(McNeilly) was engaging in behaviors that brought fear.” In
other words, he was fighting a war.
Even more astounding, vicariously divorced
servicemen can be criminally prosecuted for child-support
arrearages that are almost impossible not to accrue while
they are on duty. Reservists are hit particularly hard because
their child-support burdens are based on their civilian
pay and do not decrease when their income decreases. Because
reservists are often mobilized with little notice, few get
modifications before they leave, and modifications are almost
never granted anyway. They cannot get relief when they return
because federal law prohibits retroactive reductions for
any reason. Once arrearages reach $5,000, the soldier becomes
a felon and subject to imprisonment.
Further, states assess interest and
penalties on arrearages, which may accrue because of human
or computer errors. These too cannot be forgiven, so parents
who fall behind for reasons beyond their control can never
have these debts erased. Because state agencies are federally
subsidized based on how much they collect, they have a powerful
incentive not to reduce burdens, to extract every penny
they can find, and to make “errors.”
Deployed soldiers are also targeted
by women who falsely designate them as the fathers of their
newborns. “The military provides a steady, easily
garnished income as well as medical care,” says Carnell
Smith of Citizens Against Paternity Fraud. It is difficult
to contest paternity while fighting a war thousands of miles
away.
Spouses have other financial incentives
to divorce military personnel. A serviceman must complete
20 years of active service to qualify for retirement pay.
A woman married to the man for one day may claim a portion
of the pension for life, without regard to fault or need,
simply by filing for divorce. As David Usher points out
in Men’s News Daily, there is no limit on how many
times a woman can do this. (Men have done it too.)
None of this is hypothetical. Many
veterans face such hardships now:
• “Gary,” an 18-year
veteran with an unblemished military and civilian record,
was stripped of his child by a California court while deployed
in Afghanistan as a Navy SEAL, according to Fox News. Columnist
Glenn Sacks reports that he is now being bankrupted by child
support and legal fees.
• Bobby Sherrill, a father of two
from Parkton, North Carolina, was held hostage in Iraq for
nearly five months. The night he returned from the Persian
Gulf he was arrested for failing to pay $1,425 in child
support while captive.
• While serving in Iraq, Taron
James was ordered to pay support for a child he knew could
not be his, and DNA tests confirmed his claim. The district
attorney and Los Angeles County Child Support Services nevertheless
seized his tax refund annually, blocked him from renewing
his notary-public license—which caused him to lose
his job—ruined his credit, blocked him from obtaining
a passport, and forced him to drop out of college.
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These are not aberrations. They proceed
from the ideologically and bureaucratically driven logic
of the custody-support industry, which depends for its justification
on removing children and criminalizing the fathers.
The Army’s response has been
to spend millions on therapeutic gimmicks in a futile effort
to reduce the divorces: counseling services, support groups,
romantic getaways, even advice to single soldiers on how
to pick partners wisely.
“Our hope is to change the culture,” says
Bloomstrom, who also adopts civilian-sector jargon. “Initially
there’s a stigma about any program to do with relationships.
We need to teach that there’s nothing wrong with preventive
maintenance for marriage.”
The Army is burying its head in the
sand. We can only hope that communications workshops and
cultural understanding are not the approach they take to
opponents in the field. They do so in this case because
the threat is not Islamic radicals but feminist radicals.
Those affected see through the obfuscation. “This
is outrageous,” said Kathy Moakler, deputy director
of government relations of the National Military Family
Association. “It’s a scary precedent to set,
charging the parent with abandonment because he was deployed.”
Obviously these men have not abandoned
their children. Yet what justifies criminal penalties, if
it is not to catch those who have? If these fathers are
being stripped of their children and criminalized through
no fault of their own, why should we assume that others
are being treated any less unjustly? This points to the
larger issue, since the obvious injustices to soldiers,
sailors, and airmen are simply the logical next step from
what has been inflicted on others for years. The dysfunctional
effects on military efficiency are also paralleled elsewhere
in society.
The flight of men from the military
strikingly parallels the flight of men from marriage, with
its attendant drop in birth rates, that has come to preoccupy
policymakers up to the level of president. Men are staying
away from both institutions for the same reasons: for many
they have become a ticket to jail.
The National Marriage Project at Rutgers
University reports a continued drop in the marriage rate.
They too ignore the criminal penalties that men can incur
when they marry, instead urging therapy and formulaically
excoriating men for their lack of “commitment.” Citing
the Rutgers study, Assistant Secretary of Health and Human
Services Wade Horn promotes federal marriage programs inculcating “conflict-resolution
skills.”
Men do not risk their lives, fight,
and die for a country that is an abstraction. They fight
and die for their families and homes and freedom, all of
which are being taken away by the courts. “Sometimes
I wonder what I risked my life for [in Afghanistan],” “Gary” tells
Sacks. “I went to fight for freedom but what freedom
and what rights mean anything if a man doesn’t have
the right to be a father to his own child?”
Gordon Dollar was a reservist for 16
years in the National Guard and Naval Reserves. “I
have friends that are very motivated and dedicated people,
Frogmen/SEALS, Green Berets, and Rangers, and they were
getting out too,” he tells Usher. “I think people
who served this country are feeling betrayed by it, and
see no point in serving it.”
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger
has just signed legislation protecting military personnel
in custody and child-support cases. Missouri is the only
other state to protect reservists on active duty by requiring
automatic adjustments in their child support. More states
need to act.
Federally, the Servicemembers Civil
Relief Act, which protects deployed military persons from
other civil suits, should be amended to include specifically
the actions of divorce courts and child-support bureaucracies.
The Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act,
designed to prevent parental kidnappings, could also be
modified to protect service personnel whose children are
snatched away. Finally, Congress should repeal the infamous
Bradley Amendment, so that judges can exercise reasonable
discretion to modify child-support debts downward as well
as upward in cases in patent injustice.
It is ironic that, as we defend a questionable
military policy with patriotic appeals to support the troops
who must execute it, we allow the breakdown of traditional
morality and the erosion of ancient legal protections for
the family to ruin those same troops once they return home.
This undermines not only the military, of course, but also
the patriotic appeals. But even more, in the long run it
also undermines our national defense. It would be difficult
to find a single policy that so simultaneously weakens the
nation within and without.
What we are seeing here is only one
vindication of now forgotten prophecies from critics like
G.K. Chesterton that easy divorce would destroy not only
the family but civilization itself. Yet as the prediction
is fulfilled before our eyes, our leaders obfuscate it with
cliches and psychobabble.
The much-belabored parallel with Rome
is irresistible. External threats are successfully withstood
until the internal moral decay that accompanies the breakdown
of republican freedom and virtue. For Islamists who regard
the West as a morally and sexually decadent culture, the
prospect must be encouraging.
Stephen Baskerville is a political scientist
and president of the American Coalition for Fathers and
Children.
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