New York Times
May 8,
2005
"After tomorrow, I'll
have done everything there is to do," Jason Hatch said one night in
February, staring wistfully into a near-finished glass of beer at a bar in
Shrewsbury, England. By Susan Dominus
Just a few hours earlier, he and
some friends were enjoying a raucous, boisterous evening, all but
driving out the other diners at a decorous French restaurant. Now,
after several drinks at the bar, the lateness of the hour and the
increasing proximity of Hatch's plans for the next day seemed to be
catching up with him, and his mood took a turn toward the tense.
By the following afternoon,
Hatch, a 33-year-old former house painter and contractor, intended
to scale a government office building near the prime minister's
residence at 10 Downing Street. His friends, many of them
co-conspirators, had gone home, the revelry had died down and he was
clearly trying to regain some focus. Was he getting nervous? ''The
police say Jason doesn't have fear like other people,'' he said,
speaking of himself in the third person, perhaps hoping they were
right.
If, earlier in the evening, others at the restaurant
looked over to Hatch's table (and given the noise emanating from it,
they surely did), they would have seen that Hatch wore a T-shirt
emblazoned with the purple logo of Fathers 4 Justice, a political
group that is well known in Britain for staging high-profile stunts
to raise awareness about the custody rights of divorced and
separated fathers. (In one memorable incident, a member pelted Prime
Minister Tony Blair with a condom filled with purple flour.) Some
might even have recognized Hatch and made a note to mention their
brush with semi-celebrity to their friends: this was the man who
scaled Buckingham Palace last year dressed as Batman, unfurling a
banner in support of fathers' rights and spending more than five
hours perched on a ledge near the palace balcony as security
officers tried to talk him down. The event, which made news around
the world, saturated the British media for nearly two days.
Hatch was arrested, but he was promptly released and never
charged with a crime. ''I even got me ladder back,'' he likes to
mention. Nonetheless, the police keep a close eye on him, even
outside his own country. Several months after his Buckingham Palace
stunt, Hatch, hoping to broaden his group's support in the United
States, flew to New York, where a team of police tailed him and his
colleagues for the duration of the five-day visit. (The cops finally
announced themselves, befriended Hatch and his fellow would-be
protesters and ended up escorting them to various downtown
nightclubs, passing them off as royalty -- anything, apparently, to
keep them from putting on capes and scaling the Brooklyn Bridge.)
At the bar in Shrewsbury, as Hatch
fretted about the details of his next major stunt -- could he get a
lighter ladder by tomorrow? -- he seemed overtaken by melancholy. He
hadn't been sleeping, he said; his head ached. Three and a half
years ago, Hatch's second wife left him, taking their two children
with her. When he finally caught up with them, a family court
granted him visitation rights. He later claimed in court that his
wife regularly ignored the ruling, refusing to let him see the kids,
but, he told me, the court did little to satisfy him. ''It really
takes it out of me,'' he said. It had been so long since he'd seen
his kids -- Charlie, who's 5, and Olivia, who is a year younger --
that their mother now claims they didn't want to see him, he said.
They had started calling their grandfather Dad. (His wife has
declined to speak to the press, other than to say that Hatch's
activism has disturbed the children.)
Dad’s Army: the Men Who Stormed the
Palace follows the high profile rights
organisation, Fathers4Justice, as they plan and execute a summer of
headline-grabbing mischief, and gets to the heart of what changes
these mild-mannered dads into devil-may-care
Batmen.
Dad's Army: "The Men Who
Stormed The Palace" Channel 4 67.6mb at 150kbps
Duration: I hour
1min
Hatch first contacted
Fathers 4 Justice a year and a half ago, after reading about their
protests in the newspaper. The group's founder, Matt O'Connor, a
38-year-old divorced dad with a gift for public relations, visited
Hatch at his home in Cheltenham to gauge his commitment -- and, as
it turned out, to scope out some possible locations for protests.
Two weeks later, Hatch found himself with three other fathers,
standing atop a 250-foot-high suspension bridge in Bristol, dressed
like a superhero, hanging a Fathers 4 Justice banner. For the 28
hours that Hatch and his colleagues remained on the bridge, the
police rerouted commuters, as reporters and curious pedestrians
gathered below. After years of ineffectual legal struggle, Hatch
could finally see results: traffic had literally stopped on account
of his cause. He went on to scale a series of other targets,
including several court buildings, York Minster Cathedral and,
finally, Buckingham Palace. The grandiose, symbolic gesture had
become more satisfying than the niggling, humiliating legal
manoeuvrings that never seemed to pan out.
Hatch's sense of
despair about his estrangement from Charlie and Olivia has
apparently swept away any concern he might have had about the most
basic requirement of parenthood: his continuing good health. When he
scaled the ladder at Buckingham Palace, the guards cocked their
rifles, a sound captured chillingly on a videotape of the event.
''I'm not afraid to die, but I don't want to,'' Hatch, who now has a
14-month-old daughter with his current girlfriend, Gemma Polson,
told me. ''I feel sorry for Amelia, obviously -- Amelia being me
little daughter. If anything happens, she's going to lose out, but I
still have to do it. I still have to go out there and get the law
changed, and when the law's changed, you won't see me again.''
Now a full-time salaried havoc-wreaker for Fathers 4 Justice
(the group raises money through membership fees), Hatch has a
martyr's self-righteousness but also an adman's instinct to feed the
media beast ever bigger morsels of a story. ''If I got shot, but
survived,'' he said just before heading to bed for the night, ''that
would be brilliant.''
Although some of the issues raised by
Fathers 4 Justice concern quirks of the British custody system, most
of them overlap with demands of divorced-fathers' groups in other
countries: stronger enforcement of visitation rights, more
shared-custody arrangements, a better public and legal
acknowledgment of a father's importance in his child's life. In the
United States, the influence and visibility of those groups have
waxed and waned since the mid-70's, but they appear to be agitating
now as never before. In the past year, class-action suits have been
filed in more than 40 states, claiming that a father's
constitutional right to be a parent guarantees him nothing less than
50 percent of the time with his children. And on the legislative
front, last spring Iowa passed some of the strongest legislation to
date in favor of joint physical custody -- the division of the
child's time between the two parents as close to equal as possible.
The policy, which resembles some legislation that Maine passed in
2001, encourages judges to grant joint physical custody if one
parent requests it, unless the judge can give specifics to justify
why that arrangement is not in the best interest of the child.
There are dozens of fathers' rights groups in the States,
including the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, Dads
Against Discrimination and the Alliance for Non-custodial Parents
Rights. They may not have the name recognition that Fathers 4
Justice has on its own turf, but they work quietly behind the
scenes, pushing for custody laws like the ones Iowa and Maine have
passed, lobbying Congress and generally doing what they can to
improve not just the rights but also the image of divorced fathers.
In this last task, oddly enough, these groups have benefited from
federal initiatives designed to motivate divorced or never-wed
fathers who care all too little about their kids, as publicly
financed ad campaigns remind the public how indispensable fathers
are. (''Fathers Matter,'' shouted ads on New York City buses last
year.)
Fathers' groups also benefit from a more general
recognition that fathers, at least in some socioeconomic circles,
are now much more involved in their children's lives. Some of that
involvement is born of necessity, given how many mothers work, but
necessity also seems to have effected a cultural shift, ushering in
the era of the newly devoted dad. The traditional custody
arrangement, with Mom as sole custodian and Dad demoted to weekend
visitor, may have been painful, but practical, in a family with a
50's-style division of labour; but to the father who knows every
Wiggle by name, the paediatrician's number by heart and how to make
a bump-free ponytail, such an arrangement could be perceived as an
outrage, regardless of what might be more convenient or who is the
primary caretaker.
On the other hand, divorced dads still
face some serious image problems, a function of well-known
statistics that are hard to spin. In the United States, in the
period following divorce, one study has found, close to half of all
children lose contact with their fathers, with that figure rising to
more than two-thirds after 10 years. Although child-support payments
have crept up in recent years, in 2001 only 52 percent of divorced
mothers received their full child-support payments; among women who
had children out of wedlock, the number was around 32 percent.
Fathers' rights groups have a tall order explaining those
statistics, convincing judges -- and the country at large -- that if
fathers skip town, or refuse payment, it's a function of how
unfairly family courts treat them rather than the very reason that
the courts treat fathers the way they do. Kim Gandy, president of
the National Organization for Women, told me that fathers' rights
groups are ''focused only on the rights of fathers, and not on the
rights of children, and particularly, not on the obligations of
fathers that should go with those rights.''
Some fathers'
rights advocates in the United States fear that the Fathers 4
Justice approach to image overhaul will slow the movement's bid for
respectability, but others are ready to try some kind of major
action. To date, none of the fathers' groups in the States have
managed to spark a sympathetic national dialogue in the way Fathers
4 Justice has done in England -- striving to recast divorced dads,
en masse, as needy and lovable rather than as distant and
neglectful. Without that sea change, fathers' groups here in America
acknowledge, there's only so far they can go in changing the way
judges rule, no matter what the laws can be made to say.
n
January, Ned Holstein, president of Fathers and Families, a
Massachusetts organization committed to improving fathers' access to
their children, decided to devote one of the group's bimonthly
meetings to a debate about the merits of Fathers 4 Justice-style
tactics. To date, Holstein's organization has pursued its goals
through traditional non-profit pathways: hiring a lobbyist, an
intern, a program coordinator, all financed by member-donated
dollars. The group reached a milestone last fall, when it managed to
put a nonbinding question about shared custody on the ballot for the
November elections; 86 percent of those who voted on the issue
supported a presumption of joint physical and legal custody. Despite
the results his approach has yielded so far, Holstein told me before
the Fathers and Families meeting, he was curious to see how his
constituency would respond to the idea of following Fathers 4
Justice's lead, opting for what he calls ''the flamboyant route.''
Holstein, now 61, resolved his own divorce amicably about 10
years ago, arranging for shared physical custody of his kids. But
the court consistently treated him, he says, like a crank, and he
started to collect stories from fathers who fared far worse. Before
long he had a cause. A doctor who frequently testifies in trials,
Holstein has an easy way with statistics and studies and evidently
enjoys his public role. As he drove me to the group's meeting at a
private school in Braintree, Mass., he made an eloquent case for
increasing fathers' access to their kids. He has no problem with the
existing ''best interests of the child'' guideline that judges
follow in reaching custody decisions, he explained. He simply
contends that, as a matter of practice, judges underestimate how
important a father's active involvement is to the best interest of
the child -- and weekend visits twice a month don't constitute
active involvement, in his view. ''At that point,'' Holstein said,
''visitations become painful, because they remind parent and child
of what they don't have, which is intimacy.''
Holstein
arrived at the school to find 40 or 50 men and a handful of women
(mostly girlfriends and second wives) already there -- a fairly
typical turnout, he said. After a short, rousing speech to start,
Holstein turned the subject of the meeting to Fathers 4 Justice.
Matt O'Connor, the British group's founder, had declared purple the
color of the international father's movement, and Holstein said he
was hoping the men in the audience would consider wearing a purple
ribbon. ''I hope you will join me, and won't decide it's too . . .
whatever,'' he said with a nervous laugh. ''Now I need someone to go
around with the scissors, so we can cut up and pass around some
ribbons.''
This apparently sounded suspiciously like sewing;
there was an awkward silence. Finally, a woman in the third row
raised her hand, but Holstein balked. ''We can't let a woman do
this!'' he said.
''She wants it done right!'' someone chimed
in, getting a big laugh. Soon enough, a middle-aged man in a mock
turtleneck and khakis rose to the challenge, and the ribbons started
circulating.
Choosing purple was one of Fathers 4 Justice's
more savvy branding decisions. The color works for the group for the
same reason Holstein worried his fathers might feel too ''whatever''
wearing it -- it's sort of a silly color, a kid's colour and
definitely not macho. Given the particular American constructs of
masculinity, it's not clear how other elements of the Fathers 4
Justice aesthetic would play in the States: could a man running
around in public in tights and a cape, mocking the law and defying
security, ever be an emissary on behalf of American fatherhood? For
some time now, O'Connor has considered starting a march of fathers
in drag (''It's a drag being a dad,'' the signs would read), which
suggests the size of the gap between his sensibility and that of the
average American.
Humour has clearly been a key to the
success of the British campaign, distancing Fathers 4 Justice from
overtly misogynist groups like the Blackshirts in Australia, masked
men in paramilitary uniforms who stalk the homes of women they feel
have taken unfair advantage of the custody system. O'Connor realized
early on that men marching in the street and
shouting look like a public menace rather than like nurturing
caretakers deserving of more time with their children. In England,
the group has managed to offset that threat with goofy playfulness
while holding on to enough dignity to
maintain respectability. That balance might be even harder to strike
in the States.
In the auditorium, Holstein's
fathers sat for half an hour and watched video footage of Fathers 4
Justice, much of it set to a stirring soundtrack of U2 songs.
''Would everyone who's willing to be arrested please get on the
bus?'' Matt O'Connor called out during one protest. There were
scenes of a father and his daughter playing with their pet sheep,
which the father had dyed purple; scenes of dozens of men dressed as
Father Christmas staging a sit-in at the children's-affairs office
of a government building; and scenes from two of the group's largest
protests: the Men in Black march (which featured about a thousand
fathers, as well as supportive mothers and grandmothers, dressed in
sunglasses and black suits, to symbolize their grief), and the
Rising, a march through London that drew more than 2,000 protesters.
Afterward, Robert Chase, a 39-year-old clean-cut Dartmouth
graduate who met with Jason Hatch and his colleague when they came
to New York, led the group in brainstorming protest ideas of their
own. Men started offering suggestions: they could protest from one
of Boston's duck boats; they could march to the harbor for a Boston
Tea Party, only throwing their divorce decrees, not tea, into the
water; they could dress up like Barney; they could dress up in
burkas! The group seemed receptive to costumes, but there wasn't
much enthusiasm for storming court buildings.
''I'm not in
the mood to get arrested,'' one man called out. ''I got arrested
enough during my divorce.'' This got a laugh.
''I like the
idea of a parade, but it needs to be funny,'' another man said.
''Humour!'' Holstein exclaimed. ''Humour works better than
anger!''
or most of American legal history, the laws
required judges to consider sex the most significant factor when
making custody decisions, although which sex had the advantage
changed over time. Until the mid-1800's, under common law, a
father's right to custody in the event of a divorce was so strong
that it practically functioned as a property right. Toward the end
of that century, this principle was reversed by the ''tender years''
doctrine -- the presumption that young children need to be with
their mothers -- which lasted in a handful of jurisdictions into the
early 80's. For the most part, however, by the late 70's, the
''tender years'' doctrine had given way to the less prejudiced, but
also less clear, directive that judges base their decisions on the
so-called best interest of the child. Today many fathers' rights
advocates -- particularly those who filed the 40-some class-action
lawsuits demanding a 50-50 split of custody -- would like to usher
in a new paradigm: one that values parental rights as highly as the
child's best interest.
Michael Newdow is one of the fathers who have been trying
to make that case. He is best known as the California emergency-room
doctor who represented himself last year in a case before the
Supreme Court, arguing that the words ''under God'' in the Pledge of
Allegiance violated the establishment clause of the United States
Constitution. Newdow, an atheist, brought the suit on the grounds
that the pledge forced the government's spiritual views onto his
daughter, impeding her freedom of religious choice. The Supreme
Court ruled that Newdow, given the particulars of his case and his
custody issues, didn't have the standing to bring the suit. For five
years leading up to his appearance before the Supreme Court, Newdow
had two driving passions in his life: fighting for more custody of
his daughter and fighting to eliminate ''under God'' from the
pledge. When the court dismissed his case, the two passions collided
and combusted, the destruction of one cause taking the other down
with it.
Though he still practices emergency-room medicine,
Newdow finds time to tour the country, speaking at conferences and
law schools about the separation of church and state. Last winter, I
met up with him at the University of Michigan Law School just after
he finished giving a talk to some students. He was carrying a guitar
and looked a little flustered, two details that turned out to be
related: during his talks, he likes to sing a song he wrote about
the establishment clause, only this time he flubbed the lyrics.
Fast-talking and faster-thinking, Newdow, 51, is a tall,
thin man who manages to look crisply dressed in even informal
clothing. Conversationally, he toggles between two modes, aggrieved
and outraged, and he has an expressive face that seems well designed
to reflect those emotions. That evening, sitting in the lobby of the
Michigan Union, he talked for close to two hours about his troubles
-- the custody battles he endured with his daughter's mother (whom
he never married); the impassioned exchanges that alienated the
family-court judge; the injustices he feels he suffered at the hands
of foolish mediators; the court appearances over all manner of
arcane disputes, including whether he could take his daughter out
hunting for frogs one night (no) and whether he could take her to
hear him argue before the Supreme Court (again, no). Although the
courts deprived him of final decision-making power over his
daughter, who is now 10, he does spend about 30 percent of the time
with her, a relatively generous arrangement. Nonetheless, Newdow,
who has spent half a million dollars on legal fees, the lion's share
of those incurred by his child's mother, claims that the
family-court system has ruined his life. He's a second-class parent,
he said; he can't do the things he'd like to do with his daughter.
The system allows his daughter's mother to stifle his freedom to
care for his child the way he'd like. ''It's as bad as slavery,'' he
said.
As a spokesman on behalf of fathers' rights -- or
rather, as he makes a point of stressing, all parents' and
children's rights -- Newdow is a brilliant, confident speaker, but
sometimes he lacks a light touch. Hyperrational, occasionally
tone-deaf, he'll admit that he knows enough to know that his logic
often offends people, sane as it seems to him. Early on in our
conversation, when he started to digress about the imbalance in
reproductive rights -- women can choose to end a pregnancy but men
can't -- he cut himself off. ''That's another issue, and it
alienates people, and I don't want to alienate you,'' he said.
''Although I will eventually.'' It wasn't a threat, or a joke, or a
regret -- it was just, to him, by now, a probability.
he
following day, Newdow delivered a second talk at Michigan, this time
on the subject of family law, to 50 or 60 students who filled a
classroom. (Newdow himself attended Michigan Law School before
becoming a doctor.) While the students listened, tossing back free
pizza that a student group had provided, Newdow began discussing
Troxel v. Granville, a 2000 Supreme Court ruling that has been
warmly embraced by fathers' rights advocates. In that decision, the
court held that a grandparent's visitation rights could not be
granted without a parent's consent, even if a grandparent's visits
were in the best interest of the child. In Troxel, Newdow noted, the
court stated that parental rights are ''perhaps the oldest of
fundamental liberty interests recognized by this court.'' If to be a
parent is a fundamental constitutional right, he asked, how can the
government violate that right without a showing a compelling state
interest?
A hand went up. ''Isn't the best interest of the
child a compelling state interest?''
This is one of Newdow's
favourite questions. ''How do you prove what's best for the child?''
he asked. ''Somebody tell me what's best for the child. Let's take
lunch. McDonald's or make tuna fish at home -- what's best? O.K.,
lunch at home, you don't risk a car accident, maybe the food's
healthier. McDonald's, on the other hand, maybe it's more fun, maybe
the kid sees something new, gets the confidence to go down the slide
for the first time. When you're talking about two fit parents, who's
to say what's best?''
But what also worried Newdow, he
continued, was not the problem of how to determine what's ''best''
for the child, but rather the assumption that you can deprive
someone of his or her fundamental parental right simply in order to
make a child's life more pleasant. Of course, he conceded, society
has an obligation to protect those, like children, who cannot
protect themselves. But there is a world of difference between
protecting someone from harm and improving his life more generally.
''We've gone from protection to suddenly 'make their lives
better,''' he said. ''And that's a violation of equal protection --
because you're taking one person's life and ruining it to make
another person's better. If you can show real harm to the child, the
kind of harm that the state would protect any child in an intact
family from -- abuse, neglect -- sure, of course, protect it. But
when it's just what someone thinks might be better for the child,
you have to weigh that compared to the harm suffered by the
parent.''
In short, forget for a moment about tending to a
child's optimal well-being: what about what's fair? If a child's
parents are still married, courts don't worry about whether it's in
the best interest of the child to go frogging late at night -- so
why should they have the power to weigh that issue the instant two
parents separate? Split the custody 50-50, Newdow proposes, and let
each parent make independent decisions during his or her time with
that child.
A young woman with long dark hair raised her
hand. ''So you want to just split the kid 50-50, like Solomon?'' she
asked. All around her, students looked either amused or incensed by
the argument Newdow was making.
''Why is 70-30 so much
better?'' he countered. ''And if 50-50 is so terrible, why do courts
have no problem with parents who mutually agree to 50-50
arrangements?''
A quiet girl in the front row had a trickier
question. ''What about when one parent wants to do something that
permanently prohibits the other parent's freedom to exercise their
own constitutional right to parent the way they see fit?'' she
asked, searching for an example. ''Say, getting her daughter's ear
pierced. You can do that on your own time, but it's permanent.''
For that kind of thing, Newdow conceded, you go to court.
Here his logic seemed to be leading him to strange places: a father
could take his teenage son to a strip club, but over an
ear-piercing, he'd have to go to court?
The young woman's
question illustrated the particular thorniness of parental rights.
By exercising his or her own right, a parent may end up negating the
other's. An accuser's right to hire an attorney doesn't complicate
the right of the accused to legal defense; my right to free speech
doesn't inhibit your right to the same. But if two parents are at
odds, parental rights become a kind of zero-sum game of
constitutional freedom.
David Meyer, a University of
Illinois law professor who specializes in the intersection of family
and constitutional laws, agrees with Newdow that the courts have
recognized a fundamental parental right. The problem, Meyer says, is
that so-called strict scrutiny -- the process by which the court
determines whether there's a state interest so compelling that it
should override a fundamental right -- is complicated when multiple
people in a single family are asserting their fundamental
constitutional rights. In Troxel, he notes, ''the court was forced
into a mushy kind of balancing test, balancing the interests of the
children and the parents and all kinds of facts.'' In his opinion in
Troxel, Justice Clarence Thomas raised the question of why strict
scrutiny wasn't being applied. ''None of the other justices answered
him,'' Meyer told me. ''But implicitly the answer is: it just
doesn't work here.''
Although Newdow rarely loses his
temper, his complicated rationales for simple solutions can
exasperate those who engage him in any conversation about the
subject of custody. Joining Newdow at an informal law-school dinner
the night before he spoke, Christina Whitman, a former professor of
Newdow's, lost little time on congratulations before challenging
him. ''Your [constitutional] right guarantees you equality in making
your case before the judge,'' she pointed out, ''but it doesn't
guarantee you equal custody. You have the right to an answer, not an
answer you'd like.'' Only if the court's decision was arbitrary, she
pointed out, would it be a violation of his constitutional right.
Newdow replied that the judges' rulings are, in fact,
arbitrary, often depending on the expert opinion of psychologists to
whom he grants zero scientific credibility. He cited textbook cases
of judges making absurd decisions based on their own value judgments
about what kind of parent would be the better custodian.
''But just because unfair decisions happen doesn't mean
50-50 is the answer,'' she said. ''That's a child's approach to
equality.''
The two went round and round until Whitman took
a breather to ask how old Newdow's daughter was. ''Ten,'' he told
her. Whitman laughed. ''Just wait two years,'' she said, clearly
speaking from experience. ''You won't want her anymore.''
Standing on the plaza outside Boston City Hall, an
observer had to take a close look, amid the sea of Red Sox caps, to
see the signs of romance on Valentine's Day. A teenager walked
across the plaza with a handful of red and white carnations; a
minute or two later, a man in a business suit passed by briskly, a
Mylar balloon trailing behind him. As another man in a suit helped a
young mother get her stroller down the plaza stairs, a deep chanting
from the street below made its way to the plaza -- the echoing,
slightly eerie sound of shouted slogans magnified by a bullhorn:
''It's Valentine's Day, and we can't see our kids!'' And then:
''What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!''
Robert Chase, the Dartmouth grad from the Fathers and Family
meeting, didn't have much luck persuading those fathers to take to
the streets, but he had managed to round up 30 or so protesters, a
few from New Hampshire, his home state, to march under the banner
''Fathers 4 Justice US.'' (Similar protests were organized in 11
other cities across the country that day.) An entrepreneur who runs
his own consulting business, Chase has custody of his two sons every
other weekend. Several years ago, he lost the right to a third
weekend per month when a judge determined that it was logistically
onerous for the kids, which is what their mother argued in court. It
was the last in a series of outcomes over the years that
disappointed him. Chase, who speaks in considered,
wholesome-sounding phrases, says that he has made peace with the
arrangement now, especially since his children are teenagers with
lives of their own. But he mourns the opportunities lost.
''We can't reclaim the together-time we lost while they were
growing up,'' he told me. ''When you're spending only two or four
days a month with your kids, you can't really teach them values, the
difference between right and wrong. All you can do is love them,
provide a positive example and hope they're getting what they need
when they're outside your influence.''
In the years after
the breakup of his marriage, Chase initially sought the help of
various fathers' groups, but he told me he felt that most of them
''didn't do anything but sit around and complain.'' Like Jason
Hatch, he got interested in Fathers 4 Justice after reading about
the group in the news. A father for the first time at 22, Chase, now
39, said it suddenly occurred to him that his older son, now 17,
could be a father himself in five or six years. He decided he should
take whatever action was possible to make sure his sons and any
future grandsons wouldn't encounter the same custody system he
faced, should they ever suffer an unhappy divorce.
Outside
City Hall, Chase and his team, mostly men but including a few women,
started shuffling their way down Congress Street, some of them
blowing whistles and horns. One man wore a devil's mask, with horns
atop his head, and a judge's robe; another man in a judge's robe
looked even scarier, with a mask of blue eyeballs, no nose, missing
teeth, a misshapen skull and several well-placed boils. Other men,
including Chase, were dressed in sunglasses and white
decontamination suits that had purple hand prints (a Fathers 4
Justice symbol) smeared on them. Something about the mix of white
and the flowing robes lent the men a vaguely Klannish aesthetic. As
they whistled and bellowed their way down the street, they seemed to
have lost sight of Ned Holstein's exhortation to try humor, not
anger. A mother with her child approaching them on the street
crossed over to the other side.
After a half-hour or so of
chanting and marching, the group arrived at the main family-court
building in Boston. At the plaza of the courthouse, one protester
started beating a drum. A compact man with a neatly trimmed beard, a
green tie and a houndstooth cap left the courthouse and passed the
protesters. ''It could happen to you!'' the protesters chanted.
''It did happen to me,'' the man said. ''She went nuclear on
me.'' In the fathers' rights community, the real weapons of mass
destruction are false allegations of abuse. Fathers' rights
advocates claim it's all too easy for women to use that strategy;
feminists counter that too many family-court judges dismiss women's
valid concerns about domestic violence. ''Two years and
three-quarters of a million dollars later,'' the man continued, ''I
got full custody of my kids, and was fully exonerated. But I've been
living this for two years.'' Now the man, who declined to give his
name, watched as some of the protesters performed some street
theater: a monster in a judge's robe tearing up a kid's photo, one
of the fathers punching him to the ground, a man in a
decontamination suit with a broom pushing at the heap of a human on
the street. ''I don't know about this,'' he said, gesturing at the
protesters' garish pantomime. ''But the system does need fixing.''
While they were marching, members of Chase's group passed
out fliers promoting fathers-4-justice.org and detailing all the
harms that children without fathers are more likely to suffer --
drug problems, depression, less education. Unlike Michael Newdow,
Chase pays little attention to legal rights, arguing exclusively
that the interests of the father are aligned with those of the
child, given all the social-science research that suggests that
fatherless children fare poorly.
But some scholars argue
that this reasoning mistakenly assumes that children's welfare works
roughly on a sliding scale -- that if children with no fathers at
all suffer various emotional and social setbacks, then children who
see their fathers only, say, every other week might suffer roughly
half those setbacks. Margaret Brinig, a professor of family law at
the University of Iowa, has examined a longitudinal study of a
national sample of more than 20,000 junior-high and high-school
children, close to 3,000 of whom had divorced parents and lived with
their mothers. Studying that select sample, she found that there was
only one sort of custody arrangement that noticeably harmed
children: having the child visit the father for sleepover visits
only several times a year. Children in such arrangements, Brinig
found, were significantly more likely to suffer from depression and
fear of dying young. But whether a child had a sleepover with his
father a few times a month or a few times a week didn't seem to
influence that child's well-being in any measurable way. (Kids who
had sleepovers with their fathers several times a month were less
likely to abuse drugs and alcohol than kids who didn't, but Brinig
posits that result as an exception to her overall conclusion.)
Fathers' advocates like Ned Holstein argue that Brinig's
study might have found more positive results if more of the fathers
in it had 50-50 custody, creating more intimate relationships,
rather than measuring the difference between, say, one night a month
and two nights a month. ''It's like prescribing one aspirin for
cancer or two aspirin,'' he said. But Brinig remains wary of a
presumption of joint physical custody. ''There's quite a bit of
evidence to suggest that joint physical custody is definitely not
good for kids when there's a high-conflict situation between the
parents,'' she told me. The more shared the custody, the argument
goes, the more the parents have to interact and the more the
children are exposed to nasty exchanges and power plays. Fathers'
rights advocates, by contrast, contend that it's the current
winner-take-all system that creates conflict by forcing fearful
parents into vitriolic attacks.
Since the early 90's, scores
of studies on the subject of joint custody have been fired back and
forth between the competing camps -- studies suggesting that joint
physical or even joint legal custody, which gives each parent some
decision-making power, fuels conflict; studies claiming that sons
fare worse with a mother's sole custody; studies suggesting that
children crave stability; studies suggesting that joint physical
custody improves child-support payments; and so on. Some of the
studies, accurate though they may be, can lead to difficult, even
distasteful conclusions. Should policy really be based on studies
that basically conclude it doesn't matter how often a father sees
his kid, so long as it's more than a few times a year? On the other
hand, it's almost impossible to measure how a presumption of joint
physical custody affects the motivations of parents on both sides,
how that extra bargaining chip might be abused. In one particularly
influential study, researchers at Harvard and Stanford found that
even in cases in which joint physical custody was granted, the
arrangement often devolved into a primary-custodian situation, with
the mother taking more responsibility -- but perhaps receiving less
child support under the equal arrangement.
Robert Mnookin,
director of the Harvard Negotiation Research Project and a professor
at Harvard Law School, is the rare expert who concedes that each
side has legitimate concerns. A presumption of joint physical
custody would have ''some nice symbolic attributes,'' he told me;
but he worries about how it would play out in practice. He notes
that the parents whose custody negotiations end up going all the way
to court tend to be the parents who fight the most. In those cases,
he argues, forcing judges to implement joint physical custody is a
bad idea for the kids, since it only perpetuates their exposure to
the conflict. He contends, however, that if divorced parents know
that a judge is disinclined to award joint physical custody in
circumstances with a high degree of conflict, it creates an
incentive for a parent who wants sole custody to create conflict.
Mnookin says he doesn't favor the presumption of joint physical
custody, although he concedes that without one, the system gives
mothers an advantage. ''In times of cultural transition like this,''
he said, ''the law struggles.''
As Chase's group was
marching through Boston, men all over the city paused to nod grimly
and unload stories of how they felt they'd been abused by the
custody system, or of how a friend had been. They weren't offering
broad theories about constitutional rights or citing chapter and
verse from social-science studies. Their complaints were mostly
about the logistics of the system, its (to them) arbitrary rule over
their finances, its judgments about their life choices, the
punishments it doles out, its power to splinter into useless small
pieces whatever relationship they'd struggled to build with their
children -- all complaints that probably would have been echoed by
as many women, had it been women marching down the street protesting
about mothers' rights to custody.
One man in a blue oxford
shirt ran down from his third-story office to get some contact
information from Chase's group -- his brother-in-law, he said, was
about to be arrested because he could no longer keep up with the
child-support payments the court demanded. Another man said he had
lost custody because he was home with the kids. ''And a man who's
home with the kids isn't a homemaker; he's just unemployed,'' he
said. Another passer-by had lost custody of his kids, he said,
because he wasn't the primary caretaker; the child-support payments
were killing him, he said (in Massachusetts, they can run up to 30
percent or more of gross income) and even still, he didn't have
nearly as much time with his kids as he would have liked. The court
held his wife in contempt for blocking his visitation, ''but she
didn't care,'' he said. ''It's a slap on the wrist.'' A man with a
Scandinavian accent, wearing a black zip-down sweater, said that he
was supposed to see his kids every third weekend but that his wife
moved out of state and uses every legal loophole she can to stop him
from seeing them.
Boston that morning felt like a city of
walking wounded -- men who stopped on their way to or from their
workplaces to compare notes with one another about their losses; men
who seemed eager to get someone to pay attention to what they saw as
the tragic absurdities of their lives. Their stories came out
fragmented, no doubt one-sided, but moving nonetheless. They were
short chapters in much longer novels that could be written, that
have all but been written, in fact, by those who have best captured
modern-day male alienation -- Andre Dubus, Robert Stone, Richard
Ford, David Gates -- with their stories of imperfect men and
frustrated women and misunderstandings and low expectations all
around. The city blocks that Chase's protesters walked must have
contained thousands of divided families, and every one of the
fathers in those families has hundreds of stories, every one of
which he would happily tell to a family court, if only the judge had
the time to really listen.
he morning Jason Hatch was
scheduled to scale the building on Downing Street, Matt O'Connor,
the Fathers 4 Justice founder, was sitting nervously at the coffee
shop of the Thistle Hotel in London, a few blocks from Downing,
waiting for a phone call. Leaders of social movements may have once
hailed from the ranks of unions, sweatshops and churches, but it
seems inevitable that in today's culture, O'Connor, one of England's
most successful activists, had a career as a brand designer for hip
restaurants. Sitting with his girlfriend at the time, Giselle, a
yoga instructor, O'Connor left his cellphone out on the table,
waiting for it to sound its customary ring: the theme song from
''Mission: Impossible.'' In the days before, whenever he spoke to me
about Hatch's plan, he would take the battery out of his phone to
thwart the government agents he was convinced could otherwise listen
in. The police, he suspected, had been given advance warning of a
few recent Fathers 4 Justice stunts they had managed to disrupt. As
he waited for the phone call, he rehearsed for me some of his sound
bites: ''Our government is turning a nation of fathers into a nation
of McDads'' was one; ''We have a government of dysfunctional misfits
who are trying to create a generation of dysfunctional kids'' was
another.
O'Connor wasn't sure he'd have the chance to use
his one-liners. Fathers 4 Justice had had a string of bad luck
lately, and the security at Downing Street was thick. He was in the
process of describing to me how Hatch had cased the building when
his phone rang. It was a colleague on the scene at Downing Street
calling from his cellphone. ''He's up!'' he yelled. O'Connor, in his
camel's-hair coat and snakeskin boots, and his girlfriend, chic in
oversize sunglasses and a broad hat, ran out the door of the coffee
shop and hailed a cab. Heading for the site a few blocks away,
catching their breath in the taxi, they could hear the sirens of
police cars heading in the same direction.
When we arrived
at Downing Street, the area surrounding the building had been
cordoned off. High up enough that he looked quite small, Hatch,
dressed as Batman, was standing on a ledge, along with two other
men, both Fathers 4 Justice members, one dressed like Robin, the
other dressed like Captain America. The three men had driven a truck
up to the side of building and onto the pavement, mounted a ladder
and, without a hitch, climbed up. They had made their way across the
balcony to the corner of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office
building, where they stood on what looked like a fairly narrow
perch. They hung a large banner, reading ''Access Denied.'' The
police apparently didn't notice anything until the men were already
up and a crowd of onlookers had started cheering.
A cluster
of boys in their school blazers waved wildly up to the men. Hatch
put on his mask and twirled his cape. Six or seven teenage girls,
also waving wildly, started screaming, Beatles-fan style, and
blowing Hatch kisses. He blew a few back. Some more tourists and
locals joined the crowd, and several large men in sunglasses and
street clothes seemed to be keeping a particularly keen eye on the
crowd. ''How are you, darling?'' Giselle said into O'Connor's
cellphone, looking up nervously at Hatch, who had his own phone
pressed to his ear.
Reporters lined up to get their sound
bites from O'Connor. The press turnout was solid but perhaps a bit
perfunctory. The media in England had already addressed the security
angle in previous coverage, and after Buckingham Palace, every
possible angle on paternity in Britain had been thoroughly worked.
''Right, we don't need to hear their message again, do we?'' I
overheard a BBC reporter say into his cellphone to his producer. The
press had also already exhausted its love affair with Hatch as Hero
Dad. It had become public knowledge that Hatch had been convicted of
threatening his second wife and that he had another child, with his
first wife. After he scaled Buckingham Palace, his girlfriend told
the press that she had dumped him because he was devoting too much
time to Fathers 4 Justice and not enough to their baby. (The two
have since reconciled -- ''I was very post-partum'' at the time, she
told me -- but that story hasn't received as much play.)
As
the afternoon wore on, the already gray day turned a little grayer,
and a cold, wet wind picked up. The reporters down below, in scarves
and boots, complained about their chilled feet. Several hundred feet
up, on the ledge, it could only have been colder and windier, with
superhero tights providing little protection. The three men had
brought a knapsack filled with chocolates and Red Bull, but
eventually the cold and the fatigue got to Captain America, who came
down around 5 p.m. An hour or two later, Robin capitulated, too. By
then, the crowd of bystanders had pretty much dissipated, but Hatch
stayed put, his cape wrapped around him for warmth. Long after
everyone else had gone home to dinner and kids and, finally, bed, he
was still on the ledge, an outraged father, determined, cold and
alone.
May 8, 2005
New York Times
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