A new friend was telling me about her abusive husband of long ago.

Abusive how, I asked.

Well, she said, whenever we went anywhere, he just hung out with his buddies, and paid no attention to me or the kids.

I nodded. How else? I asked.

She thought a moment. Well, she said, whenever anything got broken, somehow it was always something of mine.

Maybe a-hole is the word she wanted, instead of abusive.

A group of fathers asked me to write a reply for them. They push for Family Court reform and more fathers in the lives of children. A group of women lawyers had “denounced” them in a local newspaper.

I’ll use WLG for Women’s Law Group and FCG for Father and Child Group.

Reply

Our group was recently denounced in these pages, and we asked for a chance to reply.

The WLG publicly denounced the FCG here on [date recent].

“Denounce” is their word, not ours. We want to use words with care here. This matter is worth all the care we can bring to it.

Some 25 million American children have lost a parent. How? Not to invasion or war, disease or epidemic, drought or famine, volcano or earthquake or tsunami. The world never forgets such a disaster, from whatever far corner of the world.

This disaster is different. This disaster is self-inflicted. This disaster we in America have brought upon ourselves. This disaster we their elders and parents have brought upon our children.

We see the disasters we can do nothing about, however far away. Somehow we don’t see the disaster we hold in our hands. Somehow the disaster that comes from us is invisible to us. Somehow we don’t see what we ourselves have done.

Of all the disasters, the disaster we could stop is invisible to us. Why? Because this disaster has no end, I wonder? Because it goes on year after year? Because it is happening again today in all 3000 counties across the country? That’s my guess. Both the enormity and the nearness of this disaster make it hard for us to see. It’s everywhere. After a time we forget that it need not be this way. Maybe this does not have to happen.

Then let our two groups differ where they must, but only where they must. Done right, our differences could be valuable to our children, not damaging; if we explored our differences with care, in a way our children could take for an example. Just as many of our most successful people, including many at the WLG I would guess, come from two parents who successfully combined strong differences.

WLG warns that courts hear more often from parents who share custody of their children. Even if true, is that bad news? Does a doctor complain that he gets more calls from a patient who survived surgery? Or more visits from a patient whose leg he saved from amputation?

We agree with the WLG about money. Much of the fighting at Family Court is about money. The more a family fights, the more money their lawyers make.

To be truthful with us, the WLG should have begun with a full disclosure of this conflict of interest. Worst-case litigation is a best-case livelihood for WLG members.

Children lose years of their childhood in the worst of these fights. Children are scarred for life in worst of these fights. After the worst of these fights, the lawyers take a month in the Caribbean on money that might have sent these children to college.

If money dominates the fighting at Family Court, as both our groups agree, then what would happen if we took money out of that fight?

There are many kinds of law practice. What sort of practice is Family Law?

Lawyers themselves joke about the low-end personal injury lawyer who brings an endless stream of whiplash clients to court, all wearing the same shopworn neckbrace. Such cases clog the courts for everyone because they are hard to prove or disprove, and because one win will repay the lawyer for many losses. To that lawyer, neckbrace clients are like Pick-3 tickets from the liquor store.

In this worst economic downturn in living memory, our courts are overbooked and underfunded. The courts face steep budget cuts and a flood of new cases. This is not bad news to everyone. It is good news to our Pick-3 neckbrace specialist.
In an overwhelmed court, people with genuine needs can get lost in the clutter. A genuine claim can meet unfair suspicion. On the other hand, one flimsy claim might look as good as the next. For our Pick-3 neckbrace specialist there is no better time to clog the courts. He just might get lucky.

Don’t genuine domestic violence cases face the same challenge in court where most of the fighting is about money? Don’t genuine needs get lost in the clutter at Family Court? Don’t genuine claims meet with unfair suspicion?

One study found that where a new law gave more children two parents, claims of domestic violence also jumped to neutralize the effect. That only works where an overwhelmed court cannot distinguish geniune claims.

We would see and hear about it for days if a bulldozer driver had a stroke and drove through a fence into a schoolyard crowded with small children. But an overwhelmed Family Court is that bulldozer in a schoolyard, with a driver who has suffered a stroke and cannot see or turn. Multiply that by 3000 counties every day, and that is the disaster we have brought on our children, that somehow we don’t see.

For false claims of violence, look no farther than the WLG statement in this paper. Assault, WLG calls it, when FCG differs with judge on a ruling. Attack, WLG calls it, when FCG differs with two women jurists.

Assault in what sense? Attack in what sense? You are lawyers, WLG members, and these words mean something to the law. If you of the WLG differ with a woman jurist, is that an assault?

Is this the kind of assault you would clog Family Court with?

Wherever possible, the FCG wants to take money out of the fight at Family Court. Where two good parents live minutes apart and both make a home for their child, little or no money need go between them.

If money dominates the fighting at Family Court, as both our groups agree, then what would happen if we took money out of that fight?

Would most of our other disagreements follow the money, and go away?

Would more children see both parents before and after school?

Would the crowd at Family Court thin out, and make more room for urgent and genuine needs?

Would the tide of misery at Family Court begin to recede?

###

Photo: Joshua Lott for the New York Times

You too can be an illegal alien.

No way, you say, as you yawn at the news from Arizona?

Your yardman maybe, or your housekeeper, or the crew that replaced your fence, but not you?

No, I mean you. Follow me. I will guide you there. The way is long, but at the end you will live in shadows, looking over your shoulder at every step. You will have no papers. You will have no way to work except at the mercy of the black market. You won’t drive because if you are stopped any reason you’ll be arrested and taken away. You won’t be able to rent so you’ll sleep in someone’s kitchen, behind the table, away from the windows. You’ll sleep in your clothes so you can disappear at a knock on the door. You will see your loved ones only in your dreams.

Ready? We begin by wading north across the Rio Grande. With us is Fabiola, nine months pregnant.

It is 5 a.m. and CBS News national correspondent Byron Pitts is with a woman who is nine months pregnant. She’s rushed to a south Texas hospital to undergo a C-section – a $4,700 medical procedure that won’t cost her a dime. She qualifies for emergency Medicaid.

She gave birth to a healthy, 8 1/2 pound baby boy. Born in America. His Mexican mother gave him an American name: Eliot.

Eliot is one of an estimated 300,000 children of illegal immigrants born in the United States every year, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. They’re given instant citizenship because they are born on U.S. soil, which makes it easier for their parents to become U.S. citizens.

That’s because those babies can eventually sponsor their parents – when they turn 21 years old.

Joe Riley is the CEO of the McAllen Texas Medical Center near the Texas-Mexico border. Forty percent of the children born there, nearly 2,400 last year, were the babies of illegal immigrants.

Illegal Immigrant Births, At Your Expense

Why? Because a child is an American citizen the instant it is born on American soil.

It wasn’t always so. Only since the passage of the 14th Amendment to the constitution in 1868. Until then the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court said people of African descent could never be American citizens.

You’ve seen the sign that says

Illegal Immigration is Illegal

Is it, though? Illegal when? Illegal where? Legal and illegal are an endless tug-of-war.

Many people don’t care for the 14th Amendment, for one reason or another. Some lawmakers want to issue two kinds of birth certificate, one for citizens and another for illegal immigrants. That law will go on hold as soon as it passes, pending a ruling by the Supreme Court.

But you too can be an illegal by the end of the day. Come along.

Meet David. Talk fast. This is jail. Two hours from now you go back into your metal box for another 22 hours, where you won’t know day from night, or care.

You can tell David has logged a lot of hours with his five-year-old Jessica. You can almost see her when he talks with you. He knows when she’s not telling the truth, but he plays along. It’s a crack-up contest. He wins if she laughs first. If Jessica is five, he’s four, and believes every word she says. He hears her better than she hears herself. He believes her better than she believes herself. He repeats her words with big eyes and a big slow nod. When she hears herself she can’t keep a straight face.

David is of African descent. His people have been citizens since the passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868. But like all laws, the 14th Amendment is a bucket with a hole in the bottom.

David was never charged with breaking any law. He failed to comply with a court order requested by Jessica’s mother in Family Court.

What is a court order, then? It’s a law made just for you. No one votes on it. It’s a law made by just one person. Only that person knows whether you broke his law or not. There’s nothing much you can say one way or the other. Other laws for other people have nothing to say about his law for you and you alone.

Poof! You’re illegal.

This is David’s second jail term. Last time he was in for three months. The amount the court ordered him to pay was compounding with penalties and interest the entire time David was in this metal box. When got out his credit rating was shot. He couldn’t rent a place. He couldn’t get car insurance. He couldn’t renew his driver’s license. He couldn’t drive. He got work one day at a time. I imagine he stood on the corner with other undocumented workers. He began to learn their Spanish. A pick-up would come along, choose two or three men, and David would climb with the others into the back of the pickup and sit low so the police wouldn’t see. He fixed fences, he dug pools, he cleaned porta-potties.

David will never catch up with his court order. He went to court to request a change and was arrested. This time he will get out in six months.

David would have to win the lottery to be legal again or see his Jessica again. He will live with the threat of jail every day of his life. You won’t see David on the sidelines of Jessica’s soccer game in the September sun. He lives in shadows now, in and out of prison.

What’s the idea, you ask, if this court order does nothing for Jessica or her mother. Good question. You will see.

David needed a photo ID so he applied for a passport. The passport was refused and the agency kept his birth certificate.

Poof! Now he’s an illegal immigrant. Undocumented. Without papers.

We can’t send David back to Africa, but we can send him to prison. David and thousands of others.

Eliot will sponsor Fabiola for citizenship in 21 years, unless at some point across those two decades the Supreme Court decides his birth certificate isn’t legal. Jessica is already five, so David has a shorter wait, if somehow Jessica can sponsor David for citizenship again.

Family Court has sent David and thousands of others back to the Dred Scott era and the time before the 14th Amendment.

Do we sterilize illegal immigrants? No, not yet. Not officially. But would it surprise you to hear a law like that out of Arizona?

This country sterilized America citizens for decades:

The [Eugenics Board of North Carolina] operated from 1933 to 1977 as an experiment in genetic engineering once considered a legitimate way to keep welfare rolls small, stop poverty and improve the gene pool.

New York Times

Not just North Carolina either. Thirty-one states across four decades.

Eugenics means better genes. We were improving the gene pool of American citizens, we said. Cleansing the population of undesirable specimens.

Notice the start date, though. 1933. Early in the worst depression the country has ever known. As Gunter Grass describes in The Tin Drum, Germany began a similar sterilization program at the same time. Were we concerned about inferior genes in the American population? Or concerned about money? Maybe we just didn’t want to pay for children the parents couldn’t pay for.

Notice the end date, 1977. Just after Welfare Reform discovered Child Support enforcement:

In 1974, Congress passed [ a law ] requiring … every state receiving AFDC funds to establish a Child Support enforcement agency ( a “IV-D Agency” ) … [and] meet standards promulgated by the newly established Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services.

What’s Child Support doing in a Welfare bill? Money again. As with the sterilization program (Eugenics, or Population Cleansing). We didn’t want to pay for children the parents couldn’t pay for. We made sure there would be no more of them.

This was new. The President who signed this bill went on record with his objection:

[He] issued a Signing Statement [that] expressed concern about what he saw as excessively “injecting the Federal Government into domestic relations”

So the sterilization program of 1933-1977 never went away. It got a new name, a new look, and a new address. It got a better adress. It moved from the shadows into every county courthouse in the country, all 3141 of them. Its proud new name: Family Court.

Now sterilization is done in Family Court, not at a medical clinic. Its a legal procedure, not a medical procedure. There will not be another Jessica for David, in or out of this metal box. He will die early. We sterilized David with a gavel, not a scalpel. David and thousands of other undesirable specimens.

We wouldn’t feel right sterilizing David for never making much money. Maybe in China, but not in America. Instead we accuse him of something first. Then we feel right about it. We accuse him of violating a court order, an order that he make more money. Same thing, but roundabout. We do it behind our back, like crossed fingers, where we can’t see.

Maybe we need a better name for Family Court. Family Clinic, maybe. Family Planning Clinic. Population Planning Clinic. Population Cleansing Clinic. Eugenics Clinic. What would you call it?

Most of these Davids are black, but not all. We don’t want Population Cleansing to look like Ethnic Cleansing, do we? So you could be next. Your wife visits Family Court and signs over your daughter. Your husband visits Family Court and signs over your son. Once they have your kids, they have you, don’t they?

Poof! You’re the next illegal immigrant. Get to know your yard men. Learn from them. Learn Spanish.

Next time David and Jessica play crack-up, they’ll play through bulletproof glass and a scratchy phone that smells of Lysol and bronchitis. “Isn’t this place scary?” David will ask Jessica, with big big eyes. “No,” Jessica will answer, in a big voice, and David will nod slowly, pretending to believe her.

I wonder if any Supreme Court justice ever talked to his young daughter through this bulletproof glass, or spent a night in this metal box, wondering where his young daughter was? I doubt it. Maybe the high court is too high, and can’t see from so high. In Turner v Rogers the court decided that David (and thousands like him) didn’t need a lawyer because he wasn’t charged with breaking any law. He was in civil court, not criminal court, when he lost everything: Jessica, and everything he owned, and the next 16 years of his life, and his birth certificate as an American citizen. Criminal court would have to prove David broke a law. Civil court need not prove a thing. Therefore, reasoned the Supreme Court, David should not need a lawyer. I can almost see their point. What use is a lawyer where there is no law?

When did you last look at your birth certificate? Maybe like money or a passport it’s worth only as much as the country that issued it. Maybe its worth a Confederate dollar now. Lincoln wondered long ago, in the years before the 14th Amendment, not just for David but for all of us: can a nation so conceived long endure?

Look again. Has the nation of your birth since perished from the earth?

###

Is Family Court is a former Eugenics (Population Cleansing) program in new garb?

The [Eugenics Board of North Carolina] operated from 1933 to 1977 as an experiment in genetic engineering once considered a legitimate way to keep welfare rolls small, stop poverty and improve the gene pool.

New York Times

Not just North Carolina, either. Nationwide. Long after Germany ended a similar program when defeated in WWII.

Dog Rescues Child, Child Rescues Dog
Surplus Males: War and Peace

Why 1977? Did we suddenly see the light in 1977, and turn our backs on evil? Did we suddenly decide in 1977 that sterilization was no way to shrink the Welfare population? Or had we found another way to curb the fertility of the Welfare population?

As we discovered in The Welfare Queen and the Deadbeat Dad, Welfare Reform assigned that task to Family Court:

In 1974, Congress passed [ a law ] requiring … every state receiving AFDC funds to establish a Child Support enforcement agency ( a “IV-D Agency” ) … [and] meet standards promulgated by the newly established Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services.

In the years since 1974, the Welfare population has plummeted and the prison population has soared.

… there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.

Adam Gopnik, The Caging of America

What’s up in the Land of the Free?

Population Cleansing, maybe? A kinder and gentler Eugenics?

Here’s the clue: Many of the people in our prisons were never charged with any violation of any published law. They violated a Family Court order that they earn more money. Or an order that they grow to seven foot six and play for the NBA.

When the cause makes no sense, maybe the effect makes sense?

In prison these undesirable specimens can’t reproduce themselves.

Have we replaced medical sterilization with legal and financial sterilization? Now there’s a step ahead! What will they think of next?

And yes, these undesirable specimens are largely of one color. Guess what color?

In truth, there are more black men in … the criminal-justice system [today] (in prison, on probation, or on parole) than were [held] in slavery [at its height].

Adam Gopnik, The Caging of America

Though to its credit, Family Court works hard to rectify this with an aggressive non-Black quota.  We don’t want Population Cleansing to look like Ethnic Cleansing.

We don’t want Population Cleansing to look like Population Cleansing either. We want it to look like help for children. Family Court helps children the way the Board of Eugenics did: by preventing their birth to undesirable parents.

Why would Child Support arrears continue to compound while the indigent parent is in prison for not earning enough money? To get children more support? Or to prevent more children?

So no, nevermind children. Family Court saves taxpayers from subsidizing an inferior gene pool, and from saying or seeing or thinking or knowing any such thing, including how vast the old Board of Eugenics has grown. We would not care to think of ourselves that way.

So no, nevermind children. Family Court saves candidates for office from taxpayers angry about Welfare.

Shall we reform Family Court? How, if Family Court is the way we reformed The Eugenics Board of North Carolina, and Virginia, and California, and thirty-one other states?

###

Do you swear to tell the truth, they ask at the start of a Family Court session.

Wrong question. If someone offers you two twenties for your family home, you don’t need to know whether the twenties are good or counterfeit. Two twenties are not enough, either way.

TLI: Too Little Information.

A professional with your life in her hands will refuse to move with too little information.

A surgeon …

… will refuse to enter surgery (or enter the patient) without blood readings taken within the last 30 minutes. She could be sued, among other things.

A  pilot …

… will refuse to move her plane onto an icy runway without knowing the wings were cleared of ice within the last ten minutes. She could be sued, among other things.

A judge …

… will cut your young daughter’s future in half in half the time. She cannot be sued.

A lawyer can be sued for malpractice. A judge, no.

A surgeon …

… gets better information every year.

A pilot …

… gets better information every year.

A judge …

… gets more cases every year, not better information.

A surgeon …

… will tell you Sorry, it’s not safe, we don’t know enough.

A pilot …

… will tell you Sorry, it’s not safe, we don’t know enough.

A judge …

… never tells you Sorry, it’s not safe, we don’t know enough.

A surgeon …

… will ask what she did wrong in surgery.

A pilot …

… will ask what she did wrong in flight.

A judge …

… never asks what she did wrong in court.

A judge …

… will cut your young daughter’s future in half

… in half the time of that flight or that surgery

… with less information by far

… and growl at you for it.

Can you blame the judge? Put yourself in her place. She will never have the information she needs. Never. Not in an hour, not in a month, not in a year, not if she lived with you throughout your ten-year marriage.

What can the judge do but hammer for silence and bark “Next”?

The judge can’t say Sorry, it’s not safe, we don’t know enough. She will never know enough. She would never open her doors again.

Where does Family Court go wrong? Take a wrong turn and get lost? At the words “Do you swear … ?”

Counterfeit or not, two twenties won’t buy the family home.

###

Where are all the personal injury lawyers? The ones called ambulance chasers by other attorneys. PIL, let’s say for short.

Vinny (My Cousin Vinny) was a PIL (when at last he passed the bar exam on the sixth try). He’s arguing with a guy in a pool hall, a guy who owes Vinnie’s girl $200 for a game they bet. Eyeball to eyeball with the guy, Vinnie stops in mid-sentence when someone limps past on crutches. “Where’d you get that injury?” he asks, on autopilot. “At home,” says the guy. Vinnie turns away disappointed. On second thought he turns back: “Whose home? Yours? Or someone’s elses?”

John Edwards, presidential candidate from North Carolina, was a star in the PIL world, winning $60 million dollars for various clients (an alcoholism drug, a botched Caesarean, a defective pool cover…. ). A PIL gets a third of the win. Or a third plus expenses, which can come to a much higher number.

If John Edwards is the upper end of the PIL spectrum, and My Cousin Vinny is right in the middle, where do we find the lower reaches of the PIL world?

Yes, I felt demeaned, I did.

Belittled.

Slighted.

Undermined.

Intimidated.

Dismissed.

Unheard.

Robbed of my will.

Made to feel my feelings didn’t count.

Blamed for my upsets.

Who could take the shaming?

The swearing?

The put-downs?

The loud voice?

The name-calling?

The silences?

I felt battered.

Assaulted.

Violated.

The stress left me unable to move.

Not even my head.

Then 3:00 A.M. one night I heard from Mr Milbeenr here.

It was almost like a godsend.

Don’t laugh, but to me it was like a message from God.

Who else could have gotten to me, in my condition?

I feel like I am back from the dead.

I will be eternally grateful to Mr Milbeenr.

Mr Milbeenr showed me how I could take control of my life again.

I would never have known about Family Court….

###

The communal gun was stored in one of these mailboxes in a Bronx building, the police say. Such hiding holes abound.

In a Mailbox: A Shared Gun, Just for the Asking

That mailbox has just delivered the answer to a much larger question: Why the breakdown in the American political process? Why are our two parties so far apart, and so unable or unwilling to work together? Why do they only work destruction for one another, nothing constructive for us all?

Isn’t government our Waka Flaka? Our community gun?

In the housing project, the community hides their shared gun in a mailbox or in a trash can beside a desk no one uses or behind the wiring plate in a lightpole or in the wheel well of a car that doesn’t run or behind a hallway radiator that doesn’t heat.

“Get the Waka Flaka,” calls someone, meaning the community gun. Soon someone takes nine bullets to the head, in self-defense. Maybe even someone with rights to the same Waka Flaka, who thought of the Waka Flaka too late. Get it first, the Waka Flaka, or die.

Anyone can use the Waka Flaka, but they have to return it.

Yeah? Return it? Sez who? How does that work, I wonder? Someone takes the Waka Flaka and doesn’t return it. Now what? What are you gonna do? Ask around, maybe? Make a few inquiries? Ask: “Did you take the Waka Flaka and forget to put it back?” OK, but gingerly, the way the old library lady might mention an overdue book.

There’s the problem with public life today. Government is our Waka Flaka.

Abortion? Get the Waka Flaka.

Mortgage fraud? Get the Waka Flaka.

Declining church membership? Get the Waka Flaka.

Debit card fees? Get the Waka Flaka.

Another nickel on a gallon of gas? Hell, no. Get the Waka Flaka.

Another nickel to educate the next generation of Americans? Hell, no. Get the Waka Flaka.

The wrong people want to get married? Get the Waka Flaka.

The Zales commercial didn’t come true in your marriage? Get the Waka Flaka.

Your wedding-day dreams didn’t come true? Get the Waka Flaka.

Your spouse dissed you? Said an unkind word? Made you uneasy? Made you feel small? Get the Waka Flaka.

If we get to the Waka Flaka first, we don’t want to put it back. The next person might point it at us.

The Waka Flaka is yours for the asking at Family Court. If  you get there first, that is. Race you!

When the Waka Flaka hits a child in the housing project, it’s an accident. A tiny girl on a swing, maybe, who swings into a stray bullet. No one wanted to hit her. The Waka Flaka is free, but the shells cost money.

At Family Court it’s no accident. When the Waka Flaka hits that tiny girl in Family Court, it’s no accident. In a Family Court shootout you grab that tiny girl and the Waka Flaka at the same time. You squat behind her and rest the Waka Flaka on her bony shoulder.

Can we stop pretending Family Court protects children? That tiny girl would be safer in the housing project than in Family Court. In the housing project she’s an afterthought. In Family Court she’s the target.

We could find out, you know. Take the money out of Family Court, and see who shells out for the Waka Flaka after that. Take the money out of the child custody fight. Let’s see who shells out for the Waka Flaka then.

Am I wrong? Oops. Here comes the Waka Flaka.

###

One case too many, decides The Closer at the end:

Lindsey:

“OK, yes, if you insist.

“The constant undermining and belittling/mimicking took their toll — I could no longer hold back…… I hit her.

“Because the victim is so unheard, so belittled, so undermined, there comes a time when she too might lash out in violence.

“Usually this is after trying to communicate in every other fashion.

“Then, having achieved what she has been looking for, the abuser can say clearly “I have never hit you but you have hit me.”

“This is very dangerous and very subtle!

“One thinks ‘well, I have…….I am no better than her – I have struck out – I too have hurt and therefore, I must be more understanding of her rages’.

“This is a very dangerous trap for those who try to take responsibility for their own lives….

Kyra:

Honey, if I may interrupt…

I think maybe you were looking for Family Court. That would be one door down…

[ with thanks to VerbalAbuse.com ]

###

What could I possibly know about Domestic Violence?

I have an MFA from Columbia University. Is Domestic Violence just a story to me?

While there I studied with Joyce Johnson, author of What Lisa Knew, about Lisa Steinberg who came to school battered week after week, and her battered mother who sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed at taking a beating for Lisa when her husband Joel, battered by his drug use, attacked. As a single mother Joyce Johnson knew more than a little about the hard choices for Lisa’s mother.

While there I also heard Russell Banks read an account of an eleven-year-old boy who one night and for the first time stood between his cowering mother and his raging father. Though he told about one boy on one night, it was more physically painful to sit through than such beatings by the thousands. Sitting six feet from me, Banks told the story tick by tick in the silent moments before the first crack, while everyone still held their breath, including those of us who listened years later to the story. Russell Banks was that boy of eleven, and that woman was his mother.

So yes, this Domestic Violence is just a story to me, told second hand. As it is for a small army of experts in Domestic Violence and crusaders against Domestic Violence. Like a cancer, Domestic Violence works where most of us can’t see it.

But I write now against Domestic Violence of another kind. Another kind, a worse kind, and a kind I know.

We have too often called something a cancer, and sting has gone out of that word.

What is a cancer? In cancer the body turns against itself. The cells that defend the body go too far. The body attacks itself inside.

In the cancer of Domestic Violence, a family attacks itself inside the safety of the home, and the defender attacks those he defends.

A man attacks a woman with a fist.

A woman attacks a man with scissors, in his sleep, or Drano in his eyes.

A man attacks a child with a belt.

A woman sinks her car in a pond with her children sleeping in the back seat, or calling from the back window.

That we might see on the news. The bodies, and marks on the bodies.

But if Domestic Violence is a cancer, where would we find Stage IV Domestic Violence?

In a Stage IV cancer, the cancer cells spread throughout the body, far from the spot where they began. A Stage IV cancer is harder to see. It rarely makes the news. It’s hard to point a camera at a Stage IV cancer. Unless maybe in the face of John Wayne at the end, in his last public appearance, eaten by cancer inside, a ghost of himself. Or Patrick Swayze at the end, beaten inside worse than he had ever been beaten outside, with his grinning skull showing through. Or Hubert Humphrey at the end, on his last honorary return to the White House, where his colostomy bag broke, and his heart.

Where would Domestic Violence go, if like a Stage IV cancer it spread far from the spot where it began?

Yes, to Family Court. To Family Court in 3141 county courthouses. Where the crusade against Domestic Violence goes too far and too fast, and no longer distinguishes healthy from diseased, true from false, or good from bad. Where the crusade against Domestic Violence becomes Domestic Violence on an industrial scale, violence rolling off an assembly line, violence of another and staggering magnitude.

This is Domestic Violence as I know it. I have seen it and felt it. My sister lost her father to it, and my daughter hers. I lost everything to it: my daughter first and last, who was everything to me.

Let’s shorten the name, then, because like cancer this violence is not going anywhere. It’s everywhere.

How about DV-IV, for Stage IV Domestic Violence?

IV sounds like intravenous, doesn’t it? Intravenous DV. Intravenous Domestic Violence, dripping silently into the veins of a generation in every county courthouse in the country.

Or how about MDV, for Mass Domestic Violence? Domestic Violence with a polished walnut hammer that leaves no marks. The bluntest of blunt instruments. Rap rap rap, and children die inside.

What can we do?

We had the answer long ago, if we knew.  From a teacher who talked about paying vineyard workers, of all things. Who talked about accounting, it seemed to me, in double entries I could not account for.  The second mile. The other cheek.

Here it is again, if you’ve forgotten, as we do again each day.

When you feel called to strike a blow against Domestic Violence, or strike a blow of any other kind, don’t. Just don’t.

In that moment you are the first cancer cell. Don’t spread.

That’s all. That’s it. That’s everything.

Put down your fist. Put down the baseball bat. Put down the gavel. Strike no blow. Be one less cell in the raging cancer of Domestic Violence.

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The presidential primaries are in full swing again. They have two important clues for anyone with Family Court in his or her future.

I have just seen a commercial for Newt Gingrich in which he chops at the air with his arm while the announcer says “He cut welfare and put welfare recipents to work.”

First clue about Family Court: As in a presidential primary, it takes money to be heard in Family Court. What are Gary Johnson’s views on Welfare and Family Court? You don’t know because Gary Johnson couldn’t raise the kind of money Newt Gingrich did. We wouldn’t be hearing Newt Gingrich on Welfare either, without a fast ten million dollars from a Las Vegas casino owner.

Second clue about Family Court: The Family Court of today comes from that angry remark Newt Gingrich made about welfare. We don’t often hear attacks on Welfare now, and Family Court is the reason.

For years and years Republican candidates devastated Democratic candidates with attacks on Welfare. Yes, candidates for president point our hopes in one direction or another, but they also direct our resentments at one target or another.

Richard Nixon denounced Welfare with great success for eight years, as did Ronald Reagan for another eight. They borrowed their attacks on Welfare from George Wallace, who directed white anger at blacks that way. While loudly attacking Welfare, Republicans captured the once-Democratic south and the Wallace vote. Ronald Reagan elaborated the attack by repeating a story about a Welfare Queen in her Cadillac. Republicans won five out of six presidential elections in those years.

In a long battle with Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton broke the Welfare curse on Democratic candidates. How? He gave voter anger a new target. He steered public resentment away from the Welfare Queen and the female Welfare population. The new target? Yes, the male. The Deadbeat Dad. The Deadbeat Dad leaves behind all those Welfare waifs, goes the story. A damsel in distress replaces The Welfare Queen. The Deadbeat Dad is the unchivalrous knight who fails his damsel in distress.

Contending with Newt Gingrich, Bill Clinton pushed through Welfare reform and redirected voter resentment from The Welfare Queen to The Deadbeat Dad. With that he lifted the odds of success for all future Democratic candidates. That’s why Newt Gingrich sounds of out-of-date in this commercial, thundering against Welfare recipients. Bill Clinton broke the power of that attack.

Since then the Welfare Office has gone empty and silent, and Family Court next door is booming, jammed, and bursting at the seams.

Children of course are forgotten in all of this. When elephants fight, ants are crushed by the millions, as Nikita Khrushchev put it. In the nasty battle for presidential power, we crush our children by the millions. We rarely pause to count the carnage at our feet. By the millions children grow up fatherless and angry at their missing fathers. Their fathers are priced out of their lives, defamed, imprisoned, driven into hiding, and ruined.

Children too grow up with the story of The Deadbeat Dad, though like the Welfare Queen before him, The Deadbeat Dad is a mythical creature conjured by angry imaginations and forged in nasty battles for national power. These mythical creatures devastate actual lives and actual children by the millions.

Who oh who has seen The Welfare Queen?

Not me, not me.

But I have seen The Deadbeat Dad.

I saw him take my daughter’s father.

My sister’s father too.

And yours?

Or Soon?

Is this a healthy notion to teach young boys? The Deadbeat Dad? Or to teach young girls either? Or does it further fuel the war between the sexes, and poison the wellsprings of love and marriage?

God willing, before I die I will redeem fathers in the eyes of their sons and men in the eyes of their daughters, and direct a healthy anger at Family Court instead, and the nasty battles for power that spawned it.

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The costly misconception begins early. Parents teach it to children at an early age.

My sister and I found a nest of baby birds on the ground and took them into our garage. We fed them there each day. One day we came home from school and they were gone. So was the nest.

Our mother told us a tomcat had gotten them.

A tomcat? Maybe. But do female cats not eat birds? Females who are feeding their young probably catch more birds than males. Why were we more ready to believe that of the male?

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What I wish I had known…

Like the courtroom in the movie State and Main, hammered together in a few hours by the set crew of a movie production…

Or the off-track betting parlor in The Sting…

Family Court looks like a court…

Except that Family Court goes on decade after decade, like Angel Street at the Gaslight Community Theater, where anyone can act because everyone has said and heard the same lines for forty years, and could say them in their sleep…

Anyone can act: the guy who runs the local body shop, the guy who runs the local pizza parlor, the guy who runs the local insurance agency…

Family Court calls it a hearing, but it’s not a hearing, it’s a reading, the way the insurance guy learns his lines in a reading, reading the script of Angel Street (AKA Gaslight) while sitting in a chair at a table, helped along by someone who would know the lines in her sleep…

If the insurance guy forgets his lines or gets them wrong, that’s OK, because everyone hears the lines right in any case, just as they have been said thousands of times over the years, by one amateur after another…

At a Family Court hearing YOU do the hearing. You listen as your part is read to you…

You might not like the part they give you. Don’t take it personally. It’s just Gaslight.

The insurance guy wonders, though, whether his part in Gaslight might hurt business. Surely no one in the community will confuse him with the part he plays onstage,  in Gaslight? Yet some people do. Some people look at him differently after Gaslight. In the bright daylight, on the same sidewalk where they have passed him for years, they now see him as he looked in the glare and shadows of the stage, in flickering gaslight.

When you hear your cue and step through the door into Family Court, remind yourself: Gaslight. The Sting on Angel Street.

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When I talk about contempt at Family Court, I want to be sure you’re clear what I mean: not my contempt, but the court’s.

But let’s judge the law more judiciously than it judges us.

I will always be the last person in the room to give up on due process and the rule of law. In me that is both a disposition and a commitment, by now a lifelong disposition and commitment.

The law parades all its finest traditions in a capital case, before it takes a life. Yet we find every week now, as forensic science advances, how often the law has gone wrong, how often courts and judges and prosecutors and detectives and yes, juries too, have rushed to judgment and given the wrong answer, even in capital cases; compounding the wrong, spreading the damage, multiplying the injury, and promoting injustice on a scale the worst offender could never dream of.

That may be our fault, may begin with us, for expecting too much of the law. But if our expectations should take a deep breath and take a step back, they should not drop everything and run for cover.

I told my Alice to trust this process. I still hope to make good that promise. What’s left if I shrug and turn away? And leave Alice good reason to doubt anything I or anyone ever taught her?

No, Family Court is not law at its finest.

We bring law at is finest to capital cases and accused murderers, but not to Family Court where the law has our children in its hands, with whole lives before them, and innocence no one doubts. My child today, yours tomorrow, and the children of their children a generation from now, like the parents of their parents a generation back, then just children too.

Is less at risk in Family Court than in a capital case? In Family Court where a man can lose the child who is more to him than life? A child who would carry on his life after he is gone? Where a man can lose what he loves most, and loves more than life? Where a child can lose half her family, half her childhood, half her future? Where a man can lose everything he owns, and have nothing for her? Can lose his reputation and his liberty and spend his remaining years in and out of prisons, a stranger and a shame to her? All without being charged with any infraction of the law?

With no infraction of the law, did I mention?

With no infraction of the law, remind me to mention.

In Family Court you envy the capital case and the murder suspect. The accused murderer knows what charges he must answer, and what proofs he must disprove. In Family Court you sense a bad odor instead, a bad odor where law and charges and evidence should have been; the odor of a world without law.

As measured against a capital case, Family Court is a gas-passing contest; a gas-passing contest with the highest stakes in life.

Only with a high regard for courts of law can you see and feel this court’s contempt for law; but their contempt for you can be smelled for blocks, like the smell of a stockyard or animal shelter. Does Family Court see people as livestock, as domestic animals? No. Worse. Even factory farms at their worst trust pigs and chickens to raise their own young.

Where officials can take your children without law, they can take anything. Where officials can take anything, everything is lost already, lost from the start, though with luck you may never know it, never awaken to the loss, never wake to find your girl of nine gone from her room.

Is that reason enough to call this the American dream? Dreading to wake up? Afraid to search the dark for the noises that woke you? The noises you hear at this moment, for example, from me, another dreamer wrenched from sleep?

Would you invest in such a place, make a future in such a place, raise a family in such a place, fight and die for such a place, teach your children such a place?

In your dreams…

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