Quote: Dear Editor
I am not a member of Fathers 4 Justice, although I am known to the group and to other parents rights activists as an occasional critic of some of their tactics and strategy. However, I would like to comment on some of the issues that Catherine Bennett raises in today's article "Dressing in party outfits doesn't make these fools harmless". End Quote.

Kens Comment: Almost all of the people in the fathers activist movement are subject to the Family Law Act (Au. Section 121s) which states that participants cannot be identified in the media. In Canada and some parts of the US the Family Law Courts are referred to as "Star Chambers", closed courts with just a judge and no checks and balances, a breeding ground for corruptio that breaks all Foundation, Constitutional and Human Rights Laws in the Western World.

If the anyone on the street thinks that "Globalisation" and the "New World Order" doesn't play a part in their life then they should make it their business to research history using the words: Eugenics, history of the Child Protection Act (UK), Family Law (Russia) and the Child Support Scheme(Russia) and this is just one facet of the plan.

If they still think this doesn't affect them then they deserve to be enslaved. These men are fightng for you too.

If you see an activist in a "funny suit" look a bit deeper and you will see the pain in his eyes.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
skitt
ski...@supanet.com
EURODADS
euro...@yahoogroups.com
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From: skitt
Date: 09/17/04 02:03:21
To: edi...@guardianunlimited.co.uk
Subject: Writing for the Guardian doesn't make these fools harmless

16 September 2004

Dear Editor

I am not a member of Fathers 4 Justice, although I am known to the group and to other parents rights activists as an occasional critic of some of their tactics and strategy. However, I would like to comment on some of the issues that Catherine Bennett raises in today's article "Dressing in party outfits doesn't make these fools harmless".

Sadly, Catherine Bennett, has reduced the columns of The Guardian to the ranks of the gutter press by publishing hearsay and unsubstantiated remarks about the Fathers 4 Justice protestor, Jason Hatch aka "Batman".

To me, Mr Hatch's chosen mode of dress is irrelevant to his desire to be a responsible and caring parent, if we were to judge all parents in this way, the conical-breasted Madonna, our supermodel catwalkers and all the female attendees on Lady's Day at Ascot would all suddenly find their children removed sharpish! Mind you, while I'm on the subject, anyone wearing stilettoes or sporting a purple rinse should definitely not be allowed anywhere near children... or what about Mark Thatcher, perhaps he turned out the way he did because of those handbags, earrings and twin-sets his mother adorned?

Seriously though, our judgmental journalists have been having a field day trying to denigrate the Fathers 4 Justice protestors - is "digging the dirt" really necessary? If the tables were turned, how many journalists could boast a lily-white past? If we were really to judge all parents in this way we would be faced with a nation of orphans.

The truth is that, Catherine Bennett and her ilk, are actually mimicking the judgmental and demeaning processes that go on in the Family Courts on a daily basis. Court contested child contact and residence disputes are the breeding ground of false allegations, perjury and hearsay which results in the wholesale destruction of families with good caring and loving parents being ripped from their children's' lives, or at best being expected to continue a meaningful relationship with their children every second Saturday for three hours... this is a serious issue, which Fathers 4 Justice and their supporters are trying raise awareness of in a light-hearted and non-violent way.

These men ARE being driven to desperate measures to get their stories heard, and while I or Catherine Bennett may not agree with their methods, to rubbish their cause and suggest they should take up angling, is exactly the attitude that drives good men to the depths of depression and suicide.

What Fathers 4 Justice and other equal parenting rights activists are actually seeking is a legal presumption that both parents have an equal right and duty to share care and time with their children. This does not mean "splitting the children like a CD collection", it means that from a 50/50 starting point, parents will be free to negotiate a contact and residence arrangement that suits the needs of both parents and their children - unlike the current adversarial family law system which pits parents against each other in a mother-biased arena resulting in much acrimony both in and out of Court. As Catherine Bennett highlights in her article, parents who have made informal [non-Court] arrangements are generally happier with the outcome, although "happy" doesn't necessarily reflect that the non-residential parents actually believe the outcomes were fairly negotiated. I recall, in my own situation, that my ex-wife and I informally agreed a 50/50 residence arrangement, but this was rescinded rapidly after only a few weeks when someone suggested to my ex-wife that this might mean she would be liable to pay Child Support for the period I had residence because she was working and I wasn't - so I was left twiddling my thumbs waiting for the weekends to be with my son while my ex paid (at a higher rate than child support) a childminder to watch him during her working week and then complained that she never got to see her son because he was with me at the weekends... I never did understand her logic, but she was definitely "happier" with the outcome!

Bleeding fathers dry, may not be the issue it once was, although this is undoubtedly down to the growing financial independence women and mothers can now enjoy if they choose, nothing wrong with that. Indeed, the scales have tipped in the mothers' favour to the point that fathers are finding themselves to be discriminated against, both in the workplace and in the benefits system. Fathers on low incomes are discriminated against nationally by social security legislation that can only award certain key benefits to mothers, the most important of these being the non-means tested Child Benefit which cannot be split between two parents and can only be paid to fathers who have the consent of the child''s mother - which flies in the face of sex discrimination legislation. Recent changes in Tax Credits have further reduced low income fathers access to benefits.

For fathers on a higher income, many find that they are discriminated against by their employers as access to flexible working hours is denied. For others, the Child Support Agency formulae creates a disincentive for mothers to agree to a shared care arrangement, when they become aware that sharing the care means a lower assessment many will and do resist/deny shared agreements for financial reasons. So many fathers end up paying more than they are legally obliged to in order to secure some precious time with their children and others, like I did, end up with time on their hands while the mother pays a childminder.

Changes are needed, children are important, and both parents are equally as important to a child's full development and future happiness. Perhaps, if Fathers 4 Justice were to change their name to Parents 4 Justice, and send out Catwoman to accompany Batman on their awareness-raising adventures... Catherine Bennett might just change her tune and agree that these heroes and heroines actually have an important message and a vital mission that doesn't merit her scorn and denigration.

Yours faithfully

"skitt"

[Full name & address supplied]

http://society.guardian.co.uk/children/comment/0,1074,1305607,00.html

Dressing in party outfits doesn't make these fools harmless

Thursday September 16, 2004

Catherine Bennett
The Guardian

Few of us, I think, would rejoice in having a person in Batman suit for a father. Particularly when the twerp in question has a record for harrassing the mother of two of his children and was allegedly overheard, more recently bragging about the prodigious number of women to have enjoyed the favours bulging to one side of his Batman knickers. And yet Jason Hatch of Fathers4Justice has got himself quite a distinguished following.

Yesterday, in these pages, Hatch and his comrades were even likened to the suffragettes. Who obviously missed a trick in not going in for fancy dress. For although F4J's children's party costumes are sometimes deprecated by those who go on to approve its campaign, it seems unlikely that anyone would have warmed to the men, even taken much notice, had they performed their various feats in civvies. In ill-fitting, babyish outfits that contrived to make them look more little-guyishly plucky (or creepy) than oikish, they elicited support and admiration from the most unlikely places.

Bob Geldof, meanwhile, thinks them "great and brave". One of our leading young historians urges them on. Even the law-abiding Daily Mail can't resist this nifty new angle for getting one over on women, whose intransigence has apparently created "these men driven to desperate measures to get their stories heard".

Although one could easily get the impression that the main reason for the stories is to get the desperate measures on telly. If we didn't know, from numerous interviews, that Hatch has the interests of two of his children at heart, his penchant for sneaking up, or into, forbidden places might look more like a hobby than a cause. In another era, perhaps he and his mates would simply have gone out poaching or ratting, grumbling about bloody women along the way.

Today, for men who crave camaraderie and thrills but can't afford to go shark-fishing or bungee jumping, Fathers4Justice presents itself as inexpensive, all-male extreme sport, with the added frisson that comes of its also being a crusade and a covert operation. If only more of its members were still cohabiting, it would be a brilliant way of getting away from her indoors. "Could you change the baby, dearest?" "Sorry love, the lads are expecting me on Clifton Suspension Bridge. Where's my Batman suit?"

(Actually, it seems that Hatch, last seen acknowledging the crowds from one of her majesty's ledges, is already in the doghouse. Gemma Polson, the mother of their seven-month-old daughter, has reportedly left him, and says: "Fathers4Justice has taken over his life. He had told me he was going to give it all up - but then he goes and does this at Buckingham Palace." If only he had chosen angling.)

Naturally, the ambitions of Fathers4Justice go beyond seeking satisfaction for its premier activists. On its website, the organisation introduces itself as "a new civil rights movement campaigning for a child's right to see both parents and grandparents". Which would not be such a bad idea, if the rights in question weren't going to be enforced by warring adults. And there is, it turns out, a reason why F4J is not called P&G4J. In practice, parents and grandparents" turns out to mean a "dad's army" which the organisation has been, as it puts it, "mobilising" to fight the authorities which support "recalcitrant mothers".

Remarkably little evidence is produced to account for this declaration of war. While it is true that some mothers behave vengefully and deny their children's best interests, there is nothing to support the view that such behaviour is either prevalent, or officially approved. On the contrary. A new government green paper, "Parental separation: children's needs and parents' responsibilities", notes that most "non resident-parents" have weekly or more frequent meetings with their children. It finds that in around 90% of cases, child contact arrangements have been agreed informally by separated parents, of whom, more than 80% profess themselves happy with the arrangement. This does not, in short, conform with the F4J blighted vision of "a nation of children without parents and parents without children
.
In reality, where there is dissatisfaction with the arrangement this is often because the resident parent - usually the mother - thinks there has been too little, not too much, contact with the the father. If F4J's main concern is genuinely that children should see both their parents, it has launched its dads' army at the wrong sex.

Compared with the number of men who say they want but are denied contact, says Gwen Vaughan, the chief executive of Gingerbread, "there are far more fathers who have no contact with their children whatsoever". The men have dropped out of their children's lives. "The idea that mothers are bleeding fathers dry and refusing them access is certainly not the main picture that we see," she says. "They would like more, not less, supportive parenting involvement from their ex partners."

If Fathers4Justice is happy to rest much of its case on anecdotes told by individual, often justifiably embittered members, it is surely reasonable to point out that there are many other stories to be told, in which mothers heroically put aside their personal feelings about unreliable, abusive, violent, or possibly criminal former partners purely for the sake of their children. There are more in which fathers, for all that they claim to have their children's interests at heart, use the courts to prosecute a feud with an ex-partner.

Since children are not, as Lord Falconer has pointed out, to be divided up like CD collections, it is not terribly surprising that when these cases go to court many more parents profess themselves unhappy with the outcome. They must have been pretty unhappy before they got there. Those of us who have never been through one of these ghastly battles like to point out, the more piously the better, that such parents really ought to put personal animosity aside. But if they can't, the courts will have to do it for them; occasionally deciding that shared parenting, in this battleground, may no longer be the best outcome. Even so, where parents go to court for contact, only 0.8% are refused. But this sort of objection is unlikely to make much difference to the F4J men's approval ratings, at least while mothers seem so reluctant to dress up as cartoon figures and throw purple condoms at people.

Still, we can agree with Mr Hatch and his gang on one thing: the children's interests should come first. Which means all the fathers in themed romper suits must get down from the walls immediately, stop showing off, and behave nicely. And what goes for them goes for everyone who has been encouraging this silly nonsense. At their age, they really should know better.