Obama Missed The Point

[FreePress]

While Hillary Clinton was sweeping upstate New York in the early Presidential Primaries, I was one of the few Democrat leaders supporting Barack Obama. As a civil rights attorney and endorsed Democrat candidate for state Senate in 2006, I remained anxious for change when the field of Presidential candidates narrowed this year.
Then came the presumptive nominee’s statements on Father’s Day which produced grave concern about his command of domestic policy. As I see it now, fatherless America may well become a self-fulfilling prophecy under any Obama administration.
The more ominous trend behind fatherless families of all races and origins is not the minority of irresponsible fathers being exploited by politicians for the feminist vote, but the failed policies which have expanded the reach of law enforcement to unconscionable extremes. Today, good fathers are being systematically removed from their children’s lives as a result of what I call the final frontier of institutionalized discrimination remaining in America today.
Consistently statistics nationwide have shown that 85% of child support obligors are men. Corrective shared parenting legislation held up in New York cites 95% of custody orders favoring women. In my own 21 years as a trial and appellate attorney, I have found gender bias in domestic relations to be profound, quietly accepted and wholly contrary to the rights upon which our nation was founded. It is a human rights tragedy which continues to explain a full range of societal ills that regularly swallow up our tax dollars.
When a divorced or unmarried father petitions a court for meaningful involvement in his children’s lives, he is quickly remanded to the back of the bus. Few take notice of the parenting hierarchy created by state law which ultimately reduces him to a subclass species of parent forced to pay for the very process that takes his children away from him.
This process begins with the state’s seizure of a superior role at the outset of every parenting case. Even cooperating mothers and fathers are forced to engage in a separate but unequal framework which features the arbitrary custodial and non-custodial status. A primary caregiver doctrine operating from the time of child conception then favors the mother in nearly all parenting contests incited by these titles. The “loser� father is typically relegated to third class status.

[FreePress]

cont'd.

In short order, this oppositional framework can easily lead to costly professional and forensic services that severely impair a child’s financial future. Along the way, a father is reduced to fourth, fifth and sixth class status through various parenting figures which the courts routinely place above him in child rearing authority. These include child lawyers, school personnel, transient caregivers and even babysitters.
Ultimately, subclass status is achieved when the state applies a child support formula upon a non-custodial father who is at all times presumed to be a deficient supporter. Little or no practical account is taken of his “visitor� site (home) in this formula. Child support orders are not uncommon which extort half or the whole of a father’s income under penalty of incarceration.
Civil and criminal penalties combine uniquely in this area of law to restore debtor’s prisons and involuntary servitude notwithstanding their long prohibition under the American Constitution. The child’s best interest propaganda is exploited to rationalize this criminalization of fatherhood when in reality, a socialist state is fueling its own revenue interests. Federal aid is awarded on the number and size of child support orders entering the states’ collections systems. These systems, which also draw interest off the sums collected, would collapse without the custody framework.
All manner of discrimination has historically shared one common root, the economic exploitation of an arbitrary victim. In the case of good fathers, especially African-
Americans, fugitive status under existing laws may become the most practical survival
remedy as our economy declines. With so many parallels to a fictitious 19th century railroad, Obama should reclaim history on Independence Day before making it at the expense of a gender subclass which our forefathers intended to retain as part of the American dream.
Leon R. Koziol, Esq.
Legal Counsel
National League of Fathers, Inc.
www.nlfathers.com
Authors Note: Leon Koziol is a practicing civil rights attorney in upstate New York who has filed a test case in addition to individual challenges to the constitutionality of various parenting laws in New York State. He was an unsuccessful candidate for Congress in the 24th district and state Senate in 2006. In 2004 he argued the case of Peterman v. Pataki, which resulted in a state Supreme Court ruling that declared unconstitutional the gaming compact at Oneida Nation’s Turning Stone Casino. A former city councilman, Mr. Koziol has secured numerous verdicts and recoveries for victims of race, gender, religion and free speech discrimination as well as government abuse and police brutality. Over the years, he has been featured on the CBS program 60 Minutes, CNN and New York Times. He is currently legal counsel to the National League of Fathers, Inc.
Mr. Koziol can be contacted at: [e-mail]