The Republican-dominated legislature here in Michigan passed, and our Democratic Governor signed, a ridiculous law which forces parents who do not want their children to receive visits from their grandparents to defend such decisions in court.

The law is a bit complex. If two fit parents sign an affidavit opposing grandparent visitation, then a judge is required to abide by that decision — but parents shouldn’t have to go through such a silly process, and what if the parent is a single mother or father, or there is a divorce and the non-custodial and custodial parents disagree about grandparent visitation?

Then it all goes to court where the threshhold is pretty low. Basically the grandparents have to demonstrate the child would suffer mental, physical or emotional harm if deprived of regular visits with their grandchildren. Unless the parents can counter that the visits would not be in the best interests of the child, the court can order visitation against the wishes of the custodial parent.

Now my wife and I have very good relationships with my children’s grandparents, but I can imagine a lot of situations where this wouldn’t obtain. One of my grandmothers was a real piece of work whom I wouldn’t let anywhere near my kids. On the other thand, I’m not sure I could put together a case that it wasn’t in the best interests of the child to see such an individual.

Consider the following case — suppose one of my daughter’s grandparents was a vile racist, and my wife and I both agreed that we’d prefer he not have contact with my daughter. Under Michigan law, we could do that today, but we’d have to go both sign an affidavit and get lawyers involved. We can still do it, but its going to cost us.

Imagine a slightly different scenario. We have almost no contact with the grandparent, until he resurfaces after my wife dies an untimely death. In this scenario, I have to go to court and a judge has to weigh the emotional needs of the child to know her grandfather compared to my desire not to have this person associated with my child.

Under the law, this would be pretty straightforward — I’d win every time. But he can refile very two years, and I have to keep hiring attorneys and dealing with this crap on a regular basis.

And what if the example isn’t so straightforward. What if, for example, I convert to a religion that doesn’t believe in contact with people who are not members of my faith? What if I become a right wing religious nut and I no longer want my child to have contact with one of my parent who happens to be a homosexual?

The point is not that any of these reasons are very good or very bad, but that courts should not be making these decisions at all.

A judge ruled unconstitutional Michigan’s previous grandparents visitation law in 2003. Hopefully they’ll do the same thing to this one.

Sources:

ENROLLED SENATE BILL No. 727. Michigan Legislature, January 3, 2005.

Highlights of the past week’s action at the Capitol. Associated Press, January 8, 2005.

State Senate approves grandparent visitation law. Associated Press, December 8, 2004.

In a position that defies all common sense, the ruling Social Democrats in Germany want to make it illegal for men, including married men, to carry out a paternity test on a child without the written consent of the mother. Under the proposal, the man and the lab that conducted the test would both be liable for criminal prosecution.

The German Federal Court of Justice earlier this month ruled that paternity tests carried out in secret are inadmissible in a lawsuit, strengthening the case of the SDP to ban such paternity tests outright.

Deutsche Welle quoted Dr. Karin Jackel puncturing the idiocy in this position,

It cannot be that, as a woman, I have the right to make my husband pay to support a child that is not his own, or to deny children the right to know who their real father is. Men are, in every respect, held responsible for their children under our laws, which is why they have the right to know who their children are.

Wolfgang Zeitlmann of the Christian Social Union told Agence-France Presse in January,

A man must be able to find out whether he is the father or not. Making this right dependent on the agreement of the woman is not fair.

And, make no mistake, the express legislation of this goal is to prevent men from carrying out paternity tests without having to go through the courts. German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries originally proposed this legislation in 2003, complaining that men were seeking secret paternity tests and then divorcing their wives when they discovered that they were not, in fact, the father of the child they had thought was their’s. It being better, presumably, for German marriages to rest on a foundation of lies and deceit.

Zypries said at that time,

Secret paternity tests violate the rights of the child and the mother. They also violate data protection laws.

Sources:

Proposal to ban secret paternity tests divides German government. Agence-France Presse, January 7, 2005.

Who’s Your Daddy?. Deutsche Welle, September 12, 2004.

Father’s rights suffer setback. Deutsche Welle, January 13, 2005.

In January 2002, fashion writer Christa Worthington, 46, was found stabbed to death in her Truro, Massachusetts home. So far police have had little luck solving the murder and so earlier this month announced they would use a DNA dragnet — they want each of the almost 900 adult men in the town to donate DNA samples that can be checked against DNA from semen found in Worthington’s body. Men have the right to refuse to provide samples, but police have said that men who do refuse to provide a sample will receive close scrutiny.

Do such DNA dragnets make sense? Should men ever volunteer their DNA (and reports are that there are some men who have already volunteered their DNA?)

The American Civil Liberties Union has obvious civil liberties concerns from a test in which refusal to voluntarily cooperate is apparently going to lead to increased scrutiny as a possible suspect. In addition, those men who are innocent of the crime might want to think twice about giving a sample because evidence collected from such dragnets has a habit of being preserved and could potentially be used for other purposes.

But a more basic issue is that such DNA dragnets tend to be expensive and they rarely, if ever, result in the discovery of a suspect. As forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden told Greta Van Susteren on her Fox News show,

VAN SUSTEREN: Dr. Baden, it’s been three years, it seems like an awful lot of clues. Why can’t they solve this?

BADEN: Well, Greta, about a third of all murders in this country aren’t solved. They seem to have very good DNA evidence. I think doing this kind of dragnet has certain civil liberties aspects to it but from a scientific point of view it’s been done a number of times in England and in France and other European countries and it’s proven very inefficient, costly and ineffective in accomplishing the goal of finding out whodunit.

The European cases have, to be sure, occasionally turned up suspects, but in those cases the DNA dragnets are mandatory — those asked to give DNA samples do not have the right to refuse. The BBC notes, for example, that German police tested 16,000 samples in a murder several years ago that did manage to turn up the killer.

Such broad mandatory testing in the United States, however, would almost certainly be unconstitutional, being a clear violation of individuals’ Fifth Amendment rights.

Source:

Mass DNA test for US murder town. The BBC, January 10, 2005.

DNA Dragnet. On The Record With Greta Van Susteren, Transcript, January 11, 2005.

Before election, Anna Greenberg wrote an analysis claiming that the existence of security moms — married women who would vote for Bush because of their concerns about terrorism — was largely a myth. But after the election, even the National Organization for Women seemed to concede that such women played an important role in George W. Bush’s re-election.

The bottom line is that John Kerry did horribly with women, especially if you believe as the National Organization for Women president Kim Gandy does that, “Our health, our rights, and our democracy are teetering on the brink” due to Bush’s re-election.

Whereas Al Gore won 54 percent of the vote in 2000, Kerry managed only 51 percent to Bush’s 48 percent among women. In four years in which Bush, according to NOW, placed the very health and rights of women at risk, Bush improved his share of women voters by 5 percent.

What explains the increase? NOW issued a press release shortly after the election blaming security moms,

The gender gap did, in fact, decline from its 10 point spread in 2000 for Al Gore. Women’s leaders speculate that the Bush campaign’s intense focus on security, and their active courting of women voters, drew additional support to the Republican ticket. However, the research shows that, for women, security is more than averting terrorist attacks:

“We need to broaden the dialogue about security,” said Lake. Issues such as preventing violence against women, equal pay, health care and social security are all of vital interest to women and progressive voters.

The shift of a small percentage of women’s votes to Bush occurred most notably among white women, married women and older women. Still, within these groups, women demonstrated less support for Bush than their male counterparts.

As the Washington Times noted in an op-ed, however, the very idea of a gender gap is a bit silly since it is, in fact, largely a racial gap. As the Times notes, except for Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election, Republican candidates have won a majority of white women in all presidential elections beginning in 1980, but Democratic candidates receive the overwhelming percentage of votes cast by minority women.

So, to get a more precise understanding of how women have responded to the Democratic message, let’s examine how white women have been voting since 1980. In the seven elections beginning with 1980, Democratic presidential candidates have received an average of 46 percent of the white-women two-party vote. Republicans have collected an average of 54 percent. Bill Clinton’s re-election in 1996 was the only time a Democratic candidate received a majority (53 percent in 1996) of the white-women two-party vote. Mr. Reagan received 57 percent in 1980 and 62 percent in 1984. (Mrs. Smeal’s dream ticket of Mondale-Ferraro captured a mere 38 percent of the white-women vote.) George H.W. Bush got 57 percent in 1988 and 50 percent in his 1992 losing campaign. George W. Bush received 51 percent of the white women’s two-party vote in 2000 and 55 percent in 2004. Thus, beginning with the 1980 election, Bob Dole has been the only Republican candidate who has failed to win a majority of the white-women two-party vote. Since white feminists comprise the largest voting bloc based on gender and race, the repeated failure of Mrs. Smeal and her cohorts to deliver helps to explain why Democrats have lost five of the last seven presidential elections.

So why do white women vote majority democratic? After all, John Kerry tried to make sexual inequality a theme of his campaign late in the campaign, citing the wage gap between men and women in one of his debates with Bush. Conservative critics of feminism suggest that the problem is that feminists are out-of-touch with the mainstream,

Another conservative analyst of women’s issues, Carrie Lukas of the Independent Women’s Forum, said feminists “have increasingly marginalized themselves” by embracing an agenda that doesn’t reflect most American women’s priorities.

“They see government as the answer to all problems – as the national health care provider and day care provider,” Lukas said. “And they have made unfettered access to abortion the absolute centerpiece of their movement… Their ‘March for Women’s Lives’ last year seemed like a celebration of abortion.”

I’m not so sure about women rejecting big government, but suspect she’s on to something about the feminist movement’s obsessive focus on abortion. Groups like NOW often seem to focus almost exclusively on abortion, but the issue is surprisingly not a big factor in women’s voter preference. In an open-ended question in exit polls in the 2000 election, for example, only 4 percent of women listed abortion as an important factor in determining who they voted for.

In exit polls in 2004, surprisingly large numbers of pro-abortion supporters actually voted for Bush, although Kerry won the vast majority of pro-abortion voters. Bush won 25 percent of the votes of people who believe that abortion should be legal in all cases, and 38 percent of the votes of people who believe that abortion should be legal in most cases.

Sources:

Gender gap myths and legends. The Washington Times, December 18, 2004.

Feminists face tough time after election. David Crary, Associated Press, January 9, 2005.

Gender Gap Persists in the 2004 Election. Votes for Women 2004, Press Release, November 5, 2004.

Women Voters Maintain Gender Gap in 2004 Elections. Lisa Bennett, National Organization for Women, November 12, 2004.

The Security Mom Myth. Anna Greenberg, September 30, 2004.

I recently mentioned that Great Britain will soon do away with anonymity for sperm and egg donors — fertility clinics in the UK will soon be required to reveal the names of donors to children once they turn 18. This has led to dire predictions of a steep fall in donors.

Australia passed a similar law in 1998 and has seen those predictions come true. Now a Melbourne fertility clinic has written to all male politicians under the age of 45 asking them to put their sperm where their legislation is and serve as donors.

The Monash IVF clinic reports that whereas in 1998 it had about 20 donors a year, in 2004 it could only round up five such donors. So the clinic’s medical director, Gab Kovacs, wrote a letter to male politicians in Victoria saying,

We hope that if some of the leading role models within our community become donors, others may follow suit.

Kovacs says he was inspired by recent drives to improve organ donation in Australia.

Apparently this isn’t the first clinic to think outside the box to obtain sperm donors. According to the BBC, in December an Australian fertility clinic offered Canadian students a free two-week vacation in Australia if they’d agree to be sperm donors.

Source:

Australian MPs’ sperm in demand. The BBC, January 13, 2005.