The truly sad story of Welfare is not the level of poverty for which certain individuals qualify for Welfare but the choices that lead to their poverty. Sadder still are the children who were forced to participate unknowingly against their best interests in a system that continues to use them as the justification for the existence of Welfare and the Family Law system. The participants in the former Welfare system and current Family Law system decrees of Child Support obligation are poorly understood by the public at large. In the 1960s, the public thought that the largest group of Welfare recipients were African Americans, however 90% were single white women with children. The majority of these were the children of divorce not out of wedlock babies. Because of the public’s overwhelming distaste for Welfare, reforms forced hundreds of thousands off the roles by limiting their participation to three years on government assistance. However, a backdoor was made by politicians and enforced by judges, a bounty was given to States for awarding child support judgments to single parents, namely women. The politicians and judges circumvented the law through a clever loophole by privatizing Welfare.

Politicians and Judges justified for the last half century based on the stereotype that women were the only viable single parent in order to exclude men as parents. Reviewing the statistics, men as a group receive only 10% of the child custody awards by Family Law Judges. What is striking is not that women win 90% of custody awards but the reasons why 10% of the women do not. For the most part, judges will only award custody to a man if the woman is a prostitute, drug or alcohol abuser, in jail or abandoned the family. A man therefore only receives custody by default, clearly not according to parental ability or the best interest of the child. If men only receive child custody by default, then clearly a double standard exists in the decision process by Family Law Judges. Double standards by their nature are discriminatory.

By insisting on the stereotype of men not being able to be good single parents, judges in effect created the situation of children in poverty in this country. To most people, such a thought is unthinkable, deliberately sentencing children to poverty because of a stereotype. Most people realize that women’s relative wages have risen over this time period, however, by far men generally make more than women due to many factors beyond simply gender. Instead of considering all the child’s best interests by placing them with their father for economic reasons, in a misguided public policy to increase the income of women, politicians encouraged and judges awarded child custody to women and thereby forcing child support payments from men. Simply put, a redistribution of wealth scheme is practiced by state governments wishing to garner the votes of women. The politicians and judges used children to excuse and promote a devastating policy of impoverishing children for political gain.

That this policy is devastating to children has been deftly obfuscated by politicians and judges through misdirection, much like a magician performing slight of hand tricks. Politicians and judges point to the 90% male prison population. While it is general knowledge that 70% of all persons in prisons today are from broken homes, what is not told is who made the decisions that placed the children in those homes. There are approximately 2,100,000 persons in prison, 1,400,000 are from broken homes. Like the audience watching the distractions of the magician performing the trick, the politicians point to men divorcing women, leaving the family home and children to start a new life. The real mechanics of the divorce are not men leaving but men being shoved out the door by clever legal maneuvers of lawyers and judges who hold to the stereotype that men are not good single parents. As in the slight of hand trick, the public is pointed to notice the act of the man leaving to play upon and validate the stereotype.

Another clever response of politicians and judges "isn’t it terrible that children are being caught up in the dissolution of marriage. So many families are breaking up, men and women deciding that the relationship is not working and children are caught in the middle." Again the slight of hand, someone has to be responsible, i.e. only one person can be responsible and men are irresponsible because they left. This is a falsehood offered by judges to justify their discriminatory ruling. Just as in marriage, "both parents" are responsible for the upbringing of the child. Simply relegating one parent as the source of money and the other as the one making the spending decisions, completely obfuscates and ignores all the other needs of the child, i.e. both a male and a female role model and influence. The family law system and their supporters will quickly point to visitation rights for men as non custodial parents as their means to "spend time with the child." Again, this is a misdirection since spending time with is different than being responsible for raising a child and as such cuts off the necessary interactions of influence that comes from "living with the parent" than just seeing the parent.

The supporters of the family law system proclaim that a child’s personality is fully developed by age seven and therefore keeping the male out of the child raising process does not affect the child. This misdirection focuses on development and ignores environmental influence. This is a variation on the age-old argument of heredity vs. environment. It should be obvious to all that the vast majority of juvenile delinquents are not seven year olds, but teenagers. The vast majority of adults in prison today got into trouble with the law as juveniles. Juveniles from single parent homes. Homes headed overwhelmingly by women. The choice made in most cases by judges.

It is clear that judges being gatekeepers of the legal system should know the general statistics of crime and be familiar with the Bureau of Justice studies on the prison population. It is inconceivable that judges have not noticed the strong correlation between single parenting, juvenile delinquency and crime. It is equally inconceivable that judges have ignored the US Census Bureau studies regarding the strong correlation between single parenting, poverty, children in poverty. What we have here is the most ludicrous denial of facts by the legal system, their actions are a causal factor in the amount of crime and poverty. The statue of Justice wears a blindfold over her eyes, apparently the blindfold is made from the stereotype about males in order to deny the facts, i.e. the consequences of their (judges) actions.

The demand by judges that men should be financially responsible for participating in the process of creating a child on the face of it seems sound. However, when we look at the whole picture of the Court's treatment of men on the basis of their gender, we realize that this premise by the so called Family Law System is nothing more than a tactical misdirection to cover up discriminatory conduct. While we would all mostly agree that parents are jointly and severally responsible for the upbringing of children, what we will disagree on is the enforced stereotype of singling out a person on the basis of their physical attributes (genetics) to determine their abilities. This enforced stereotype by the Courts demands that men due to their gender are the primary source of finances to support children to the exclusion of women. Equality means just what it implies, the ability of individuals to choose and the consequences that flow from those choices. The Court cleverly misdirects the public by insisting that only one party should be financially responsible while the other party retains the children to impart their values.