…also, he still has a requirement that he gets a copy of every official Star Wars toy. While he let his kids play with the older ones, I think he still has quite a stash, which must be worth a mint.
You left out the best one:
I think this is pretty much the context. Their (seemingly) feckless and immature 37 YO son is dating a porn star they (however it came about) let stay at their place and now “surprise” she’s pregnant and has decided that now she wants to keep the baby and be a single mom and the son needs to step up. The Hammill’s were all pressing her to get an abortion but I think that ship has sailed. Now they’re just pissed and think they are getting played .
It’s not the most charitable response by Mark Hammill and His wife but given what got dropped in their laps you can sort of understand where they are coming from.
Shouldn’t child support be based on how it costs to support a child and not how much can be wrung from the father or his family?
That is some real funny shit right there!
The answer is yes it should. The reality is different.
Why the heavy emphasis on “now”? She could hardly decide that she wanted to keep the baby before she was pregnant, now, could she?
Well, no. It depends on the extent of a parent’s moral obligations to their child, and the parent’s financial and material circumstances are obviously relevant to that.
“How much it costs to support a child” depends on the kind of lifestyle in which you think a parent should support Their child.
I assume you mean non-custodial parent. Women can and do pay child support.
And remember the laws can vary state by state. When calculating my husband’s child support to his kids from his first marriage (this was back in the 90’s, in California), not a dime of my earnings were counted in the calculation. She was living with her parents at first, and not a dime of their earnings counted either, only what each parent earned. When she remarried, again, not a dime of her new husband’s earnings was counted in the calculation. (We had it recalculated a few times over the course of the kids’ minority, the last time being when my husband became eligible for Social Security Disability, at which point the children’s benefit was deemed to equal his child support and was sent directly to their mom.)
I understand that different states do things differently, so the Hamill family’s mileage may vary.
Yes. Maybe.
I have heard where say the father had access to a family beachfront home or something and the mother got to still use it or something.
If the father is a legal adult independent of his parents, then I cannot think of a single reason why his parents should be responsible for footing child support of any sort.
Moral obligations are different than legal obligations. Legally a child of a poor family should be valued just as much as the child of a rich family.
Can anyone find a non-tabloid link on this story? Literally all that turns up on search is there Post, Daily Mail, and other websites that are somehow less reputable. I am beginning to think it’s maybe a grain of truth plus a bunch of clickbait.
Granted it’s tabloid fodder and she’s chasing her 15 minutes of fame pretty hard, but what about it strikes you as outlandish or untrue? She has picture of herself with him mugging for the camera. It’s not like she’s claiming he’s a werewolf. Just that they were sexually intimate and she got pregnant. This is hardly man bites dog stuff.
As I said, I am sure that part of it is true, the basic story. But DM et al. have a habit of sexing up stories and e.g. taking “cheesecake” shots of the chavs they feature. But it doesn’t reach the muster of an objective article.
They also have the habit of calling anyone who has semi-nude modeling shots a “porn star.” I mean, if she is in porn, I doubt she uses her real name, but you’d think GIS or something would turn up some images. I’m “asking for a friend.”
I’m also just curious as to what CNN, BBC, et al. would report on this.
But legal obligations aren’t indepenent of moral obligations. The only reason we impose child maintenance obligations on non-custodial parents is because we consider parents to have a moral obligation to maintain their children. And the extend of that moral obligation must be affected by the parent’s circumstances.
Taking your logic to extremes, if we could find one parent who was so poor that no maintenance obligation could be imposed, then we could never impose any maintenance obligation on any parents, since by doing so we we would be valuing the children of rich parents more highly than the children of poor parents.
Not at all. Just because someone is too poor to support their children it does not take away the moral and legal obligation to do so.