The European Court of Human Rights to Rule on Whether a Child Is Part of the Dowry (and the Hell with His Father)

A few months ago, I blogged about Karen Atala -a Chilean judge- being restored in her

King Solomon’s justice

parental rights by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Atala had been  deprived of her rights to see her three daughters because she was involved in a lesbian relationship. Fortunately so for justice, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights overruled the decisions of several Chilean Court as discriminatory.

Now check out what is on the plate of the European Court of human Rights in the case of X and others vs Austria. Once upon a time in Austria, there was an unmarried heterosexual couple who had a child, a boy. The couple separated, the mother got custody of the kid and the father would have visitation and pay child support. One day however, the mother started a new relationship with a woman.

That’s when problems started. The new couple gets greedy. The “new mother in law” wants to adopt the boy. Obviously, the child is not adoptable, since he has a father.  For this to happen, the father has to renounce his parental rights and accept to never see him again.  He does not want to.  The couple asks the Austrian courts to strip the father from his parental rights, which would clear the way for the adoption of the boy. Austrian courts reject this claim. The couple then brings the case to the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that Austrian Courts had denied their rights to private life and have discriminated against them as a lesbian couple. Hearings are to start on October 3rd 2012.

It is not the right of a lesbian couple to adopt a child which is at stake here, it is its right to adopt this child.  This couple seems to suffer from a very common disease nowadays: considering a child as a property, or a good rival in consumption, as economists would say: if I enjoy it, I prevent you from doing the same. Folks like these forget something crucial: what is inalienable is the link with each parent and the child and that of the child with each parent, not the property of the child, which does not exist.

May the spirit of Solomon be with the European Court of Human Rights!

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One More September 10, Seven Years Later

Some readers of this blog may know that September 10 is a special day for me. Seven years ago, September 10 2005 was my last supervised visitation. Looking back at it, this last supervised visitation had to be the inevitable fall off a cliff of a supervised visit process that was not ever seriously monitored by Manhattan Family Court.  It’s all about regulation and public scrutiny having deserted family justice for a long while.

But today I want to rejoice with the haves fathers, like this man:

Just wish the haves would give a thought to the have-nots.

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Ann Romney, Families and the Well-Meaning Bureaucrat

Every four years, I forget; in the US, people do not only elect a candidate for President, but also a family.  And every four year,  we  have to watch the self-righteous -yet apparently modest and restrained- display of familial intimacy of the candidates at both parties conventions.

In her speech last week, Ann Romney set new heights in this indecent exercise. She claimed “it was about love;” yet there was nothing cuddling in this display of love. She loves the guy who took her to the high school prom, alright.  The rest of us? She doesn’t know who we are.

First, the lady claimed she had a “real marriage.” Are there people who don’t? Would she mean, perhaps, that some – gays (?)- are not having ones? Second, she talks to and about people who have a role in a family, even a broken one – single dads, for instance (she mentioned them and these were perhaps the best two words of her speech). Singles, just singles, as Condoleezza Rice? It ‘s about families, stupid. Even the guy who brought her back from the dance said it. Raising kids was the most important thing. Ann did it. Why wasn’t he more involved with his five kids? We kind of understood that was a story of comparative advantage: she had the women thing with kids, he was more gifted making money for Bain, before putting himself to saving this country.

Back to Ann. “We don’t want easy,” she says.  She does not know anything but easy, and in any case, we, divorced fathers, want it right and legit. From 1993 to 2009, the share of women getting sole custody of the kids has increased: to 84% from 83%. In addition to their parenting rights going down the drain, divorced fathers had to cope with family courts busy to enforce laws designed to satisfy the desires of all the Ann Romneys that were not brought back from the dance: pay – no matter what, even if you loose your job. And if you can’t, just go to jail.

This brings us to the only guy one wanted to meet in this Republican convention, and perhaps the democratic one. The fellow Ted Cruz said the immigrants did not come to meet in America: “the well-meaning bureaucrat.  The guy who puts his arms around your shoulders and says: let me take care of you?” The fellow delivers goodies that are part of a just society in some other parts of the world: a justice that guarantees equal parenting rights; paid pregnancy leaves; public and free nursery schools and even, minimum income for single parents up to the kids reach a certain age.

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