Presumably it works a similar way there as it does here, and the child support reduces the amount of assistance the government will pay them, or will count as income that may make them ineligible for things like medicaid.
I’d like to hear more about that, but I’m afraid you’d end up at the bottom of a pile on, and I’m not totally sure you’d understand why.
The article quotes Stephanie Mott, state chair of the Kansas Equality Coalition
and the article goes on to explain
This is the issue, that straight couples are also doing the same thing and have options which lesbian couples do not. It’s hard to tell from the article but it sounds like the state is treating them differently.
Oh, I’d understand why, and I’m not willing to end up at the bottom of the dogpile.
It’s not so much that I have an absolute problem with the concept in an abstract sense…but cases where men who aren’t even the biological father are forced to pay child support end up poisoning the well. The policies and court decisions around this are so fucked-up it’s unbelievable.
I had a friend who was getting 70-hours a week every week at work, with 30 of that 70 being overtime. His child support was calculated with that number as his total income. 6 months later he got dropped back (along with everybody else in his job title in the state) to about 40 hours a week. He still had to pay the same amount. The court refused to recalculate. He was paying almost his entire take-home pay in child support. That’s not cool.
It’s not the state’s business who the father of a child is? Um, okay. State birth and death registries - which list both biological parents - are pretty much a ubiquitous feature of the developed world.
It may be hard to tell from the article but it’s already been mentioned like three times in this thread. Including be my:
There are plenty of birth certificates out there with no father listed, both from sperm bank situations and from women who aren’t sure of (or don’t want to list) who the father is.
In fact, I think my own birth certificate doesn’t list the father, although my mother actually knew who it was.
IMO, the state’s right to know my business is directly proportional to its ability to provide equal protection under the law. Kansas does NOT provide such protection. Ergo, it’s not their business.
I guess that’s not a totally unreasonable position, but your opinion counts for squat.
My opinion counts if is shared by judges and lawmakers, which is appears it increasingly is, on the subject of gay rights.
As far as playing dumb with the government on the issue of paternity, that’s common sense. What they don’t know won’t hurt them, and their lack of equal protection under the law removes any semblance of authority on the issue.
The scary thing is I wasn’t even referring to that case, which I do not recall hearing before.
I was thinking of this one:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7024930/#.UOcjFKzNmSo
This is why I don’t like those laws, and why I ESPECIALLY don’t like the legal precedents that have been set by judges in these types of cases.
There’s actually another one, which is briefly mentioned in the old thread. The summary below is actually in the footnotes of the case you linked to.
The thing is…I can see why the courts err on the side of ordering child support. It’s basically a he-said she-said case where a baby was made, and if the precedent is to side with the allegation that there was no sex and she impregnated herself with condom-semen then every deadbeat dad in the nation would be arguing they never had sex.
Not to say it doesn’t or can’t happen. I’m just saying that I can see why it’s hard to side with the person with no evidence that sex didn’t happen, rather than the person with a baby as a result of sperm meeting egg somehow.
Right, but by that logic, it is indefensible to take the money from the mothers. The thing is, that’s not what child support money is about. It’s about saying that the parents have a responsibility to pay for their children, and the state stepping in to punish them if they do not adhere to this responsibility.
If all you cared about was making sure the child was supported, then the amount of money rewarded would be the same for every child, and it would come from the same place all other welfare comes from–our taxes. There’s no reason to involve the parents if the parents didn’t do anything wrong.
The relevance in this case is that, if none of the parents, biological or otherwise, want to press charges against the other, it is not the State’s business to decide that they need to be punished anyways. If the state cared about the child’s welfare, they’d would have given the benefits rather than force the mother to invalidate her contract.
Yes, if punishment were their primary goal, they’d go after the other mother, or, at least, modify the laws so they could do it next time. But neither is their goal, and they’ve made that quite clear. They are doing it for the money.
never mind
Nobody anywhere has said that punishment is the primary goal.
This brings up what I think is a more pressing question. Gay, straight - doesn’t matter. If the mother can’t afford to raise the kid, why did she have it in the first place? Children are not cuddly dolls and playtoys that you have to make yourself feel better.
If I didn’t support gay marriage before, I would now just for the possible Coraline references.
Because she was in a committed relationship in the confines of which she could afford to raise the kid, apparently.
I’ve been thinking about this, and a slightly different angle occured to me.
There’s nothing ‘special’ about the government/society not honoring a contract between a woman and a ‘sperm donor’ which calls for the man to have no financial responsibility for the child.
The government would also not feel bound by a similar contract between husband and wife. We – aka society – have a basic beliefs that 1) Children are entitled to be cared for and 2) That first in line to care for children are the people who brought them into existence.
We’ve modified it a bit to allow for someone else to stand in for one or both of the biological parents, but we make sure that the stand-in is legally committed before we allow the biological person to step out.
In this case, the pair didn’t do it legally, and so the ‘out’ isn’t available to the sperm donor.
So… he was stupid to agree to this back road method, and we all know you mostly get to pay a price for stupidity.
And if you think that’s unfair, well, carry it to extremes: a M/F couple draw up a contract. They will have a child and NEITHER of them are to be held financially responsible for the child. Neither of them have to buy food or clothing for the child, let alone pay for college.
Do you imagine a judge would do anything beyond snort as he ignored that contract?
Is there a reason to assume that the couple didn’t use a doctor because they couldn’t afford it? The first article doesn’t say anything like that, but I’ve certainly not read everything on the case.
There are other reasons they may have done it the way they did. Based on minor Googling, Kansas only has IVF clinics in Wichita and Kansas City. If there weren’t doctors in their area who could do it, it may not have made sense to them to take extra time off to travel when they were hoping for a baby within the year, especially since the bio-mom didn’t have reproductive health issues. I know I’d prefer to save my vacation and sick time for the actual kid. Or maybe the doctors they went to were bigoted or had full schedules or were just not people they trusted.
This doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have known the law and understood the potential ramifications, but it’s a complicated situation, made even more complicated by their sexual orientation and the backwards attitudes of the law towards it. Are there other cases in Kansas where straight couples did a similar thing without problem? Or maybe they just took a gamble - which people do all the time, with worse odds - and ended up losing big. My blame is still on the state, and any state, that refuses to allow equal rights to everyone. This wouldn’t have happened if the couple were allowed to marry and adopt one another’s biological kids.