Child Support Letter 1
The child support enforcement laws that have been enacted in the past few years are unfair to non-custodial parents. A primary difficulty with these laws is their inflexibility. Due to any number of circumstances, non-custodial parents (NCPs) may find their earnings decreased due to lay-off, injury, illness, or many other reasons. But the mechanism for modification of support orders is very slow to respond. In fact, as is often the case, NCPs are faced with huge arrears due to the inability to make full payment of child support for months at a time. Once there’s an arrear, it can not by law be modified. This is clearly unjust. Under current law, NCPs who fall behind in their child support payments can be judged criminals, even felons, and imprisoned. If NCPs fall behind in the court-ordered support payments, they can lose their driver’s license, in addition to their professional license to conduct business and they can also be denied a passport. Measures to extract the maximum possible amount of money from non-custodial parents have become increasingly extreme and often violate the basic principles of human dignity and privacy upon which this country was founded. States are now posting pictures and biographies of parents with outstanding balances on the internet in an attempt to humiliate them into compliance. Millions are being spent on developing linked computer systems and databases in order to locate and seize the “assets” of “deadbeat parents,” when in fact the primary reason that most NCPs fall behind in their child support is the inability to pay. We believe that these measures all violate the constitutionally guaranteed civil rights of tens of thousands of fathers and other non-custodial parents. The specific rights violated include the right to equal protection, due process, the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, and arbitrary fines and penalties. The new measures simply will not work for the following reasons:
1. Criminalizing parents cannot be good for the children. It drives a wedge between the parent and the child and is not only unfair to the parent but may severely damage the self-esteem of the child.
2. The new laws will clog the court system.
3. They will result in ever-increasing numbers of parents withdrawing from participation in their children’s lives.
4. They will result in ever-increasing numbers of parents opting out of mainstream society, to hide out from what they consider unfair prosecution.
5. They will result in parents being sent to prison simply for experiencing financial hardships and falling behind in support payments.
6. They will increase divisiveness in our society.
7. They will further reduce our civil liberties.
*Consider This:
100% of the perpetrators of fetal alcohol syndrome are women but are they really to blame for this? Who wants to legislate behavior in a free society? If alcohol kills kids, then ban alcohol….which we know will never happen, just as it’s legal to smoke but the government punishes smokers. We are in a government that promotes drinking, smoking, and gambling….because if people don’t get drunk, smoke and gamble….the lawmakers don’t get paid. Same with dads…once those revenues do go down, it seems to be in almost everyone’s best interest to simply remove all fathers from the home and make them work multiple jobs to stay out of jail just to fatten lawmakers’ paychecks (more tax revenue)! There’s simply no incentive for the government to discontinue this. I urge you to contact your elected officials and support groups about this problem.
Sincerely,
Marcus J. Echols