SENATE  BILL  424

STRENGTHENING  LEGAL GENDER  BIAS

 

 

For centuries, women were discriminated against: up into the 19th century they could not vote; even further back, they could not own property; up till the 1980s, if a female was the victim of a "family dispute"--legalese for a husband kicking the stuffing out of his wife--the law would not protect the female. In the past couple decades, though, the shoe has been on the other foot, and now it is men who complain of receiving the short end of the legal stick.

 

Oregon family law statutes include a small "gender neutral" section that states that the husband in a divorce proceeding is not presumed to be the worse parent, nor the wife inherently more capable of raising the child or children, by virtue of gender. Men across the state, if they knew about this section of ORS would doubtless be thankful for it, for men love their children as much as women, and as more and more women take jobs and pursue careers, there is less and less basis for automatically assuming the female to be the spouse with the greater time and ability to handle the demands of a child's custody.

 

This bill, we think, would reverse the effect of that "gender neutral" statute--to the extent it has been effective, which many men would say is but slight. Courts already have discretion in awarding custody when the court issues a restraining order under the Family Abuse Prevention Act. Obviously, the exercise of that discretion will usually give custody to the parent alleged to have been the victim, not the abuser, and hence, not to the husband, who is usually alleged to be, and in fact usually is, the physically abusive parent (the question of emotional abuse may be another thing entirely).  Thus, the child is already  ordinarily already given into the custody of the "petitioner"--the mom--in most cases.

 

This bill would not just write that into stone. It would write the father out--also in the stone tablets of the law. It allows the court to exercise its discretion to award the custody to the petitioner, "or, at the request of the petitioner, to the respondent." It does not give the respondent any statutory basis for requesting  custody of the child or children. We recognize that whoever the alleged abuser is, he (or she) will seldom be awarded custody now, and that is not unreasonable.  Yet there may be circumstances where the respondent  (i.e.,  the husband)--for reasons of closer ties to the children, for instance, or the lack of a drug or alcohol problem the petitioner may have in her record--can be and should be the custodial parent. This bill would make that virtually impossible. In disguise of giving a discretion to the court, it actually reduces the court's discretion. In the guise of granting a new (but actually long-established) power to the petitioner (mom) it would destroy a weak, but still extant, power of the respondent (dad). 

 

With or without this bill the courts will likely, in most cases, customarily award custody in the manner in which custody is already ordinarily awarded, i.e., to the mom. But SB 424 would, by its silence as to any right of the respondent to seek custody, eliminate the ability of the father to request that custody. It might even eliminate the power of the court to give him that custody on its own. To the extent the court already has such authority, if it is independent from statute, that power might remain; or it might die. That death would be consistent with the intent of the bill. At the very least, SB 424 would give an argument for those who would disempower men entirely in family court.

 

If this passes, where do we go from here? Do we next take away the father's right to vote? His right to hold property?  How far must the pendulum swing into the realm of injustice against men, before we admit that the goal should not be statutory gender revenge, but equal justice for both genders--men and women?