Showing posts with label Equal-time rule. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Equal-time rule. Show all posts

Monday

NO Presumption of a Right to Equal Time-Sharing

Florida Bill Addresses Equal Parenting Time When Parents Separate

Demand Family Court Reform Florida - 2015

Children of divorced parents are better adjusted when mom and dad get equal time with their kids. That is the conclusion and basis of a bill working its way through the Florida Legislature" Florida Legislature that would change the way courts calculate time-sharing when couples call it quits.

causes.com/causes/409526-children-s-rights
causes.com/causes/409526-children-s-rights
"I didn't like it. I didn't think it was right. I didn't think it was fair," said Terrence Bostic. It's the way he felt 28 years ago when the court made, what Bostic felt, was an unfair assumption that his now ex-wife should be awarded primary custody of their daughter.

"Because I thought, 'I was just as good a parent as she was, if not better.'" Three years later, Bostic's ex-wife moved away with their daughter. Three years after that, he went back to court to regain custody.

Now, under a proposed change to Florida's divorce law, judges may have a little leeway when giving divorcing parents anything other than equal time with their kids.
The assumption?

"That it is better for the children to have both parents equally involved in their lives," said Family Law Attorney Peter Farren with the Valrico law firm, Gallo Farren.
Courts must work toward a shared parenting norm – Miami Herald
Farren posted the proposed change on his Facebook page Wednesday, and spoke with us about the pros and cons such a law could present.

On one hand, he says, it would give parents – often the father – a presumption of a right to equal time with their kids.
"We're definitely in different times now," said Farren, "And these generations of fathers are just as involved, in many cases, with their children."
But critics say in some cases the law will force couples back to court, asking a judge to amend their equal-parenting plan for several possible reasons.

Work schedules. Challenges getting the kids to school.

There are also more serious factors to consider, said Farren. "If there's a psychological issue, or a drug issue, or if one parent is just refusing to cooperate and communicate with the other parent."
The Senate bill’s sponsor provides that judges weighing time share would still be able to use the same 20 criteria they currently have at their disposal to decide what's in the children's interest.

The change, they say, would start with the presumption that an equal 50-50 split is what's best.

"I think you can't get any fairer than that," said Bostic, it would've been a lot easier on me."

The law would apply equally in cases where the parents are not married.

So far, the bill has moved its way through the State Senate, not get making its way to the House.

To see the full text of the proposed law, click here.
Supporters say equal time with parents is what's best for children of divorce.

View my Flipboard Magazine.

Sunday

Another year of children being forcibly separated from their fathers.

Another year of children being forcibly separated from their fathers in secret courts.

Another year of fathers driven to suicide by the loss of their family and their barbaric treatment at the hands of our secret courts and the Child Support Agency.

Another year of broken promises from our politicians who scurry into hiding at the mere whisper of Fathers4Justice.

Another year of often willful ignorance, disinformation, bigotry and lazy prejudice in the media designed to malign a group whose sole aim is to ensure a child’s human rights to their fathers are enshrined – not abused behind closed doors.

No wonder they call this pitiful excuse for journalism the ‘lamestream’ media when we haven’t heard a single media outlet accurately report the facts.

Ian Douglas in today’s Telegraph writes “Fathers4Justice have just set back dads’ rights by decades.”

That’s an inflammatory accusation, so where is the evidence for his claim?

As the 2011 Norgrove report confirmed, fathers have no rights and should have no rights. 200 dads are losing contact with their children every day in secret courts by judges who sit under the Crown. Many of the legally binding court orders fathers have to see their children simply aren’t enforced. The CSA has reduced fathers to the status of sperm banks and cashpoints. (If Ian wants to read our fact sheet he can find it here )

We are a nation of first-class fathers, treated as second-class parents. And increasingly, many of us feel like outlaws in our own country.

As a result of this demonisation and denigration of fatherhood, millions of children will have little or no contact with their fathers this Father’s Day. 

As the Centre for Social Justice said this week, up to 75% of children in inner cities live without their fathers in what they called ‘father deserts’.

So what do we do? Just sit back and do nothing?

Did Ian Douglas want us to engage with our political classes? If he had been paying attention he would know we spent five long years, engaged with the political establishment. For what? Ten broken Tory promises, and for just three MP’s out of 650 to turn up to the Shared Parenting meeting held by George Galloway MP in Parliament on Wednesday.

If journalists like Ian Douglas really cared about this issue, it shouldn’t have taken a man with a spray can sending a message to the Queen in Westminster Abbey for Father’s Day to make him write about it.

To that extent, Ian Douglas has proven this point, rather than made his. As far as I can see – he hasn’t written a single article about the family courts.

The media simply can’t help themselves. The coverage for our cause is at best grudging, maligning, loaded with disdain and insult. ‘Heavy handed’ said Channel 4 news earlier this week. But thus as it ever was.

There is an old man dying in South Africa at the moment. 30 years ago he was called a terrorist by the mainstream media. I know, because I was in the anti-apartheid movement. Now he is venerated. We’ve just celebrated 100 years of the Suffragettes, yet we are expected to condemn a man for carrying out similar actions

Back in 1914, Ian Douglas would have been the journalist calling suffragist Mary Richardson ‘deranged’, accusing her of ‘setting back the cause of Women’s suffrage back by a decade’.

If Tim Haries had sprayed ‘help’ on a portrait of the Chinese Premier, he would have be a dissident hero celebrated by the West. God knows, if he had committed this act in Russia wearing a neon pink Balaclava and his underwear, Madonna would be singing about him and Angelina Jolie would have adopted him.

But the vision of our society has become so distorted and twisted, that our Prime Minister (who condemned dads on Father’s Day 2011) today says he wants the ‘Syrian opposition to succeed’ by violence, but says nothing about dads succeeding in their fight to see their children using peace and love.

The state have destroyed this man and his family in an act of capital punishment, and yet we expect him to do nothing. We have suffocated him, denied him any voice or representation in our country – by the very people who are the first to condemn him. Yet we expect him to comply, quietly, conveniently as the rest of society turns a blind eye to the national emergency that is mass fatherlessness.

I hope Ian Douglas doesn’t have any children and I hope his children don’t have any either. For his sake, statistically, the cancer of family breakdown will happen to him and when it does – when he can’t see his children or grandchildren 

– I want to see how far he will go for his family.

I know I would do anything for my children. What would you do Ian?

As Martin Luther King Jr wrote fifty years ago in his letter from Birmingham Jail, “…though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love? Will we be extremists for hate or for love?”

Matt O’Connor, Father’s Day, 16th June 2013

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