Veronica’s Fate: Indian Child Welfare Act Vs US Family Laws Mess

There is one thing I understand in Adoptive Couple vs Baby Girl, which is currently being heard by the Supreme

Veronica (Indian Country Network.com)

Court:  If Veronica was the daughter of rich white folks, we would not even be talking about her in the first place. Ain’t no rich kids embroiled in messy adoption.

But Veronica is the daughter of Dusten Brown, a member of the Cherokee nation, and  Christy Maldonado, an Oklahoma resident. At some point, their relation turns sour. According to Jacqueline Pata, Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indian (NCAI), when Brown learnt about the pregnancy, he asked Maldonado to marry him, move with him in a military housing – Brown is a military- and quit her job. He pledged to financially support her and their unborn child.

That’s not the Nina Totenberg’s version of the story, tough. According to Totenberg, Brown texted Maldonado he was giving up his parental rights and would not support the girl. Maldonado then decided to put up the child for adoption. Through an agency, Maldonado found a couple she liked, Matt and Melanie Capobianco. Through her lawyer, she notified  the Cherokee nation, but not  Dusten. Why? There is a law, the Indian Child Welfare Act from 1978, that prevents Indians, who have been stolen everything, to have their children taken away by adoptive parents with the blessing of family courts always eager to work in “the best interest of the child,” understood as a childhood outside Indian nations.  This law establishes that in case neither parent can claim custody, preference should be given to other Indian family members.

What bugs me with Totenberg’s story (and also, to some extent, Adam Liptak’s from the New York Times) is that Brown would have renounced his father’s rights to Maldonado and then changed his mind, when Maldonado renounced hers to the adoptive parents. That’s an interesting piece of news: we fathers have parental rights we can just forfeit through text message. Second nugget: the adoption lawyers working on the case knew Brown was a Cherokee and knew about the Indian Child Welfare Act; they were also lawyers seeking  to win.  Hence when they inquired if Veronica was an Indian Child, the paper they submitted to the tribe had Brown’s first name misspelled, and the wrong date of birth. At this point, the adoption case moves to South Carolina, where the Capobiancos live. Last but not the least telling information about the way US family laws value parental rights, especially fathers’ rights: just before he ‘s about to be deployed in Irak, Brown is served with the paper about the adoption of his daughter, Veronica. Minor detail.  The striking thing of the story is that without the Indian Child Welfare Act, Brown would be fried. The case would not be before the Supreme Court.

Is it too much to ask – for children’s sake- that regardless of race, income, religion, sexual orientation etc… adoption require the formal consent of both living birth parents before any procedure be undertaken?

From Unemployment to Jail,Via Family Courts

It took me a week to swallow Ethan Bronner’s piece in the New York Times, “Right to Lawyer Can Be Empty

Russel Davis (Raymond McCrea Jones for the New York Times)

Promise for Poor,” on March 16. The punchline: everybody has a constitutional right to a lawyer in the US since 1963 (bless the sixties) in criminal courts, but Gideon v. Wainwright does not guarantee this right in civil matters. Hence, there are a bunch of folks in Georgia (the State that Bronner gathers his evidence from) who end up in jail for cases as varied as foreclosure, job loss, spousal abuse and custody, for lack of proper representation; like Bill Jerome Presley, no criminal record, who spent 17 months in jail for failing to pay… $2,700 in child support.  Mr Presley lost his job in the recession, could not pay child support, was sent to jail and brought back to court shackled to be sent back to jail again, cause, I guess, the judge could not understand why Presley had not saved enough in jail to come up with the child support money; or Russel Davis, Navy veteran with post traumatic stress disorder, also jailed for failing to pay child support.

Like the other guy, I can’t but lament the dire political times we are in, when debt is made a national priority by the republican aisle in Congress. Were this not the case, perhaps more public money would flow into family justice – among others- and lawyers would be provided to poor folks who cannot afford their services. But it’s only part of the problem. Poor folks – mostly poor non- custodial fathers – would not be facing jail in the first place if not for those imbecile family laws – obviously  in Georgia, but in New York State too, as readers of this blog know- that bloomed in the wake of the dismantlement of “the welfare system as we knew it.” The free-market feminist underpinnings of these laws was that idleness is an incentive to more idleness. Stop subsidizing idleness and everybody will lift oneself up out of poverty. And if that does not happen, at least  family courts will make sure the bastards pay child support. As for the right to see their kids, they have the market.

Poverty breeds crime, as the proverb says. Nowadays, it sure breeds jail time irrespective of crime. That’s the upshot of these brillant legislative changes.

The funny thing, at least for New Yorkers, is that city’s ads against teen pregnancy are covering these days the subway trains and bus stops. This campaign has been highly criticized, and rightfully so. The gist of it: poor, black, latina, female teen, don’t get pregnant. The campaign did not forget any cliché: on one of these ads, one can read “chances are he won’t stay with you.”  You know, men. Irresponsible deadbeats.

Every time I am in the train and I see the whipping children of Bloomberg’s ads, I have popping up in my mind a poster with a man, race indifferent, casually dressed, and the slogan: “Dude, if you cannot foresee 21 years of uninterrupted employment, beat it. Don’t have kids. You may end up in jail if you don’t pay child support.”

And below the picture of this fellow: “And if you are not happy with it, take it to Congress, or wherever you have to, to the street or on cranes.”

Louise

Girls,

Since we are incomunicado, I have to keep you posted about the part of your family you don’t see. Remember Jean-Baptiste, your cousin? He and his girlfriend, Pia, had a little girl,  on December 8.

Her name is Louise, like Madame de Rênal, one the heroins of Stendhal’s the Red and the Black, my favorite novel. I don’t know about you, but just looking at her on this picture, I can’t wait to be formally introduced to her.

Rodriguez Is My Man

Since I live in America, I have been growing a distaste for the word “dream.” Rodriguez, the unwitting main character of the documentary “Searching for Sugar Man” (2013 Oscar to the best documentary) has reconciled me with it.

Perhaps because Rodriguez did not have dreams, or because if he had any, they were not aspirational. It must have to do with his Mexican blood or the fact that he’s from  f…    Detroit.  Not even:  from Dearborn, in the suburb of Detroit.

In the 1960s, Rodriguez for sure has a voice that gives you the chills and lyrics that kill. A few people in the music scene in Detroit noticed it,  and an album of his songs was produced but it did not go anywhere. A few years later, Rodriguez was bigger in South Africa than Dylan or the Beatles. An American had indeed brought a tape with Rodriguez’s songs and the tape was duplicated. The upshot was a “viral” success that nobody could ever dream off, some forty years before the advent of social medias. Except that Rodriguez did not have a clue about it. In 1998, he finally does and he’s invited to give a concert – in front of thousands of people. He gave some thirty concerts there. And he then went back to his job – construction worker- and his house in Dearborn:  no tour in the US or in Europe in the pipeline, no move in a glorious mansion in Marta’s Vineyard, no lawsuit against the record company  he never got a penny from.

At some point in the documentary, a music journalist said about Rodriguez “that home is acceptance.”  You don’t pay much attention to this sentence if you get it inside a fortune cookie. While watching the movie, I was weeping in the bucket of popcorn of my neighbor.

What does it have to do with fatherhood?  Rodriguez has three daughters, and they talked about him in the documentary;  About him and them being poor and working class. Not proudly  -pride assumes somebody in front of whom one is proud of-  but calmly, peacefully. That’s just what it is. From what the three daughters say, you sense how much they acknowledge what he gave them. That’s when I started becoming jealous of Rodriguez.

Missing “Searching for Sugar Man” may not be unamerican, but it is inexcusable.

Domestic Violence Doesn’t Just Harm Women, but K Street Doesn’t Want to Know About It

Since 1994 when Congress passed it, the “Violence Against Women Act” has been the weapon against domestic violence.  The act was to be reauthorized in 2012 to include gays, undocumented immigrants, American Indians and students.  Republicans in the Senate joined Democrats to approve the reauthorization, Republicans in the House did not.  Then the Republicans took a beating in the 2012 Presidential elections, and the reauthorization of the bill is back on the floor of the senate in February, with Republicans now more accommodating to compromises, as they hope to lure women and latinos back  (or finally) into their ranks.

One may think that at least, this  hard-learned lesson in political realism is for the greater good – the end of domestic violence. Wrong: the tackling of this problem has been nothing but petty, parochial politics (PPP) and PPP it remains.

Why? We now know  that domestic violence is not only the deed of men against women, but also that of women against men and children: physical violence along with a less apparent but as pernicious a form of violence, parental alienation, which is given a free ride in family courts, which are women-biased courts. The very fact that domestic violence is defined as domestic violence against women gives women leeway to overuse of the accusation of domestic violence, to get the divorce they want and expel their ex from the life of their children.

Want to solve domestic violence? Change course and instead of adding categories of victims, throw universality into the law already. Just pass a Domestic Violence Act, that will aim at protecting women, gays, immigrants, American Indians and… men, too.

Of Fathers and Cranes

Since Friday February 15, Serge Charnay, has been on top of an abandoned crane, in  a Nantes (France) old shipyard. Charnay spread a banner with these words: “Benoit, two years without his dad.”  Benoit is Charnay’s son. He has not seen his father for two years. Serge lost his visitation rights when he sequestered his son for ten days in 2010 and two months in 2011.

Serge Charnay (Photo Frank Perry, AFP)

Also Charnay wrote on top of the crane: “Let’s save our children from the justice system.”

What is it with some fathers and cranes ? Five years ago, in September 2008, Paul Fisher (Ohio) and Donald Tenn (California, President of Fathers for Justice USA) climbed on a crane near Ohio State University. They were requesting a non-partisan investigation into the family court system by the governors of their respective states – then Ted Strickland in Ohio, Arnold Schwarzenegger in California.

I love it. Men perched on a phallic piece of machinery screaming their lungs and their powerlessness at the unfairness of the justice system and claiming their rights to see their kids, like their exes do.

In any case, Serge Charnay may have made significant breakthroughs for the fathers rights movement in France, perhaps because awareness on the topic has previously been raised by Moreno’s protests against the family justice system (Moreno went to Nantes to support Charnay). On Friday night, Serge Charnay was told – by  the Prefet (a high government official) that he could benefit from a request before family court to review his case. As Charnay refused to get off his crane, Jean Marc Ayrault – Mayor of Nantes and Prime Minister, mind you- asked the Minister of Justice (the French Attorney General) and the Minister of the Families to meet next week with father rights organizations.

When has any high- ranked government official ever met with fathers rights organizations in the US? Did governors Strickland and Schwarzenegger ever ask their Attorney Generals to investigate the family court systems in their respective state? I guess not. And  I think it may have to do with the fact that father rights movement are no lobbyists with big pockets.

Serge Charnay, you are most welcome to talk about your experience on this blog when you will get off your crane.

Nicolas Moreno’s Way of Saying “I Want to See My Kids”

That’s the bottom line: for fathers claiming their rights, it all starts with the desperation from not seeing their kids: Jason Hatch (England) could not see his, Charlie and Olivia. He joined Fathers 4 Justice (UK) and stunted Buckingham Palace in September 2004 (The New York Times Magazine, May 8 2004). At the end of 2007, I had not seen my girls for almost three years and was harassed by ex via Manhattan Family Court. I was seeing myself going straight to jail and at least, I wanted my girls to know why; I started this blog.  Nicolas Moreno, from Romans (France), has adopted a bolder way: hunger strike.

Dauphiné Libéré, 01/21/2013

Let me say first that if I could trade the New York State family justice for the French one, I’ll do it in a second. There, I bet justice may be slow but there ain’t no trial for child abuse that lasts more than 6 years; no judge arrogant enough to tell you, after having found you innocent of child abuse, that your relationship with your kids is “damaged” hence your kids and yourself are doomed to therapeutic visitations for an indefinite period of time; finally,  joint-custody is the default option in divorce.

Is the French justice system faultless? On paper, it acknowledges the right to fathers to be part of their kids’ life; Yet it did not protects Nicolas Moreno’s when ex moved with Luca and Evan, their sons, some 400 miles away from him, for no justifiable reason.

Nicolas is part of SVP Papa, a father rights organization which is asking for the inclusion of alternate staying of the kids with each parent into family laws. There is a fathers meeting in Nantes, the city whose mayor is Jean-Marc Ayrault, the Prime minister, on February 20; to help him hear the Nicolas of France.

Hat Tip: Scott Gabriel Alexander Reiss