MND Roundtable Discussion on
Fathers' Rights and the Marriage Movement

In 1973, The Hague Convention on Recognition and Enforcement established an international standard for cooperation in the enforcement of child support orders. In 1974, apparently lacking any sense of coincidence, Senator Russell Long ”perceived a connection” between ”fathers who abandon their children ” and a growth in welfare spending. This led to the creation of the Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE), establishing a beach head for a federal invasion into family life the likes of which the United States had never seen before.

Mainstream welfare analysts and advocates had not been interested in the proposal. Neither had most politicians. The federal plunge into child support only passed as an amendment to more popular social services legislation. When signing the bill, President Ford said it took the federal government too far into domestic relations and promised to suggest legislation to correct it. By the late 1970s, a few  politically involved academics showed an interest in promoting the new bureaucracy, but did not carry out a thorough objective analysis to test Senator Long's perceptions. By the early 1980s, a few entrepreneurs awakened to the possibility that the flow of tens of billions of dollars in annual child support payments might be controlled. Anyone who could position themselves to take a significant cut would rather automatically become rich. Lobbying to place a new private child support collection industry into the center of a radical reform package was intense.

I am certainly not opposed to private enterprise and can give examples of what might be described as public-private partnerships that have been a benefit to the nation. But what happened next cannot in any honest terms be described as one such success. An academic at the Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty plagiarized the Russian Soviet child support system and transformed it into the national model for welfare reform. This defined a mode of policy implementation independent of the rule of law based on the U.S. Constitution. Congress backed the scheme with billions of dollars a year in promised spending and began a course of concentrating constitutionally distributed power to the OCSE and expanding the rule of the welfare system to all Americans, independent of need and  individual interest. OCSE effectively transferred control of new en masse procedures for deciding the amount of child support ordered, and for enforcement, to a representative of the emerging private child support collection industry who would personally profit from arbitrarily high award levels and the debt they would create.

States were given the incentive to support the plan in the form of federal funding in proportion to child support award amounts. Private collection industry representatives acting as government consultants advised states to maximize income from the federal pork barrel. States in turn bought loyalty from virtually everyone involved by the way funds were distributed. By the early 1990s a massive hate campaign was underway, selling the public on the idea that fathers (code name: "deadbeat dads") deserved the fate that awaited them. Tens of millions of US citizens lost their fundamental rights. The "public-private partnership" in child support became one of the largest examples of political corruption in US history. The financial and political interests are so well entrenched that it's still going on today, years after they've been caught.

Under the guidance of international conventions and treaties, child support reform spread throughout western civilization, having a disproportionate effect in countries with classic liberal foundations. In countries that traditionally upheld individual rights, populations were used to dealing with private issues, including family issues, on their own. Intrusions of government, and certainly of private interest groups, were limited by the rule of law. Fathers had never before had reason to respond as a politically defined group, under siege from hate groups, political extremists, bureaucrats, corrupt lawmakers, and profiteers. The American public was ill-prepared to recognize, let alone respond, to such a massive departure from the basic rules that every public official has sworn to uphold.

Roger F. Gay