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CONFESSIONS OF A FAMILY LAW REFORM ACTIVIST OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE PARENTING ACT When I graduated from law school in 1987, the Parenting Act had just been passed by the Washington State Legislature. I began practicing family law shortly thereafter, under the new law. The Parenting Act introduced a comprehensive new way to address disputes between divorcing parents over their children. It replaced the terms "custody" and "visitation" with a detailed "parenting plan" addressing residential time, decision-making and dispute resolution. The Parenting Act was supposed to be the end of custody battles between parents. They were supposed to work things out, for the best interests of their children.

Well, apparently, a whole lot of divorcing parents didn't get the memo. Within a few years of beginning practice, I had been involved in numerous custody battles. Not just disagreements between spouses, but knock-down, drag-out custody wars with all the trappings: allegations of child abuse, neglect, drug abuse, alcoholism, mental problems, and that 800-pound gorilla of them all: domestic violence.

Virtually every time I represented a father in a parenting case, he was accused of abuse. I began to anticipate the dreaded "crimes list," that litany of alleged wrongs committed by my client against the wife and children, beginning with "he kicked me in the stomach while I was pregnant" (15 years ago) culminating with "his abuse is escalating," "I'm fearful for my safety," and of course, "he's inappropriately touching the children." It's as though these allegations were produced by the same scriptwriter, since so many of the buzzwords were repeated over and over.

As I would learn later, they often were produced by the same writers, the "battered women's advocates," who appeared to be taking a few extreme cases of domestic violence and applying them across the board. Men who physically battered their wives started by verbally battering them, so in their twisted logic, every man who verbally "abused" his spouse necessarily must be physically battering her too. Women who wanted an easy way of out a marriage, and to assure custody of the children, eagerly signed up for "victim's benefits." All the woman had to do was say she was abused, and the domestic violence advocates eagerly welcomed a new customer. Never mind that the wife was playing fast and loose with the real facts: she was routinely abusing the husband and children, had mental or substance abuse issues, and/or was having affairs with everyone from the milkman to the soccer coach.

It became clear to me that the Parenting Act had been hijacked by the domestic violence industry. The good intentions of the Act's progenitors had been overcome by single-issue extremists. Every factor determining the children's residential time with each parent could be trumped by one nearly irrefutable claim: domestic violence. And even if domestic violence were not determinative, fathers were still losing. The Parenting Act, although written in gender-neutral terms, was usually being interpreted to favor mothers receiving primary residential care, even when both parents were substantially equally involved in parenting.

After several years of custody battles and beat-dead dads as clients, I decided I had to do something. In 1998, I co-founded a reform group called TABS: Taking Action against Bias in the System. TABS' goals were to eliminate gender bias in the family law and domestic violence system, promote shared parenting rights and responsibilities, and reduce the incidence of ugly divorce and custody battles.

Over the past few years, we have supported shared parenting and friendly parenting bills in the state legislature. Shared parenting provided that each parent was presumptively entitled to at least one-third of the residential time with the children. In the eyes of the reformists, this would avoid many of the battles over residential time by ensuring a substantial amount of time was afforded to the "non-primary residential" parent.

Friendly parent would add a factor in determining residential placement of the children. So long as limiting factors (such as child abuse, neglect, mental illness, substance abuse or domestic violence) were not determinative of the schedule, the court was required to also consider "which parent is more likely to allow and encourage the child frequent and continuing contact with the other parent."

Essentially, the concept is that all other factors being equal, placing the children with the parent most likely to foster the children's relationship with the other parent ensures that the children benefit from healthy post-divorce relationships with both parents. The 1999 Washington State Parenting Act Study, by Dr. Diane Lye, concluded that no particular post-divorce residential schedule was best for children, but that high parental conflict was the number one detriment. Friendly parent was promoted to encourage parental cooperation and cut down on the custody wars so often fought by divorcing parents, replete with false allegations of abuse, game-playing and dirty tricks.

Several friendly parent bills have been introduced, and different versions have passed almost unanimously by both the House and Senate. But despite being a reasonable bipartisan reform, politics has prevented it from passing both houses in the same legislative session. Some opponents of the bill portrayed it as the coming of the apocalypse. They claimed it was a stealth weapon to be used against, you guessed it, domestic violence victims, who would be forced to share parenting time with their abusers. Thanks to a few brave legislators who stood up against the domestic violence perpetrator lobby, the Parenting Act was saved from defilement.

Other opponents claimed friendly parent would actually increase conflict between divorcing parents, resulting in parental one-upmanship, to see who could be the "friendliest" parent. With as much conflict as the system has already, why it would be bad for parents to compete over who could be the nicest, I could never figure out. One famous anecdote used against friendly parent was a mother who was judged to be "unfriendly" because she would not let her child go see the father immediately after the child had heart surgery. If the mother had a statement from the child's doctor recommending he not go anywhere, I can't understand how she could have been faulted.

Over the last six years, I have spent hundreds of hours working on family law reform issues, meeting with legislators, testifying at committee hearings, writing letters and articles, organizing events, talking to and assisting people, many on a pro bono basis. Both on a system and individual level, we have had some successes. But looking back at our efforts over the past few years, I now realize that I was naive, misdirected, and even manipulated, by the so-called family law reform movement that I so eagerly embraced. "Family Law Reform" is just a thinly-disguised front for the Father's Rights Movement. I was duped into supporting this radical agenda by greedy, controlling fathers who just wanted out of child support payments, and to further abuse their victims. I now see the error of my ways. I now see the fraud that is friendly parent. It's not about the best interests of the children, it's about selfishness and greed. If passed into law, it will require thousands of mothers of children with heart defects to be forced to send their deathly ill children to visit their insensitive fathers. Not to mention their no-good, child-abusing, domestic violence-perpetrating, non-support paying deadbeat sorry-excuse for a parent.

"Shared parenting" is really just a code-word for no child support. Fathers demand more time with the children only to get residential time credits, plummeting their child support payments from $800.00 per month to $49.95. Then they palm off the children, and all the costs, on the mother. Fathers complain that the child support table does not credit them for any direct financial contribution towards the children even when they have 25 per cent of the time. However, this argument lacks any factual basis in most cases. Since when does it cost anything to live in a van down by the river?

Numerous studies, interviewing both men and women, have concluded that men still don't equally share household and childcare duties. Toilet-plunging, gutter-cleaning, and spider-killing and carcass disposal, while essential household tasks, are not listed parenting functions under the Parenting Act. Oh, men may do a few things here and there, but generally they're just useful idiots, waiting for step-by-step instructions from their wives on how to do the most basic things. They're barely able to follow their wife's grocery list. Dads may take the kids to daycare, but it is the mom who researches, chooses and monitors the provider. If it weren't for mom's meticulous attention to every detail, dad would have the kids babysat by the registered sex offender down the street.

Ask a dad who the kids' doctor or dentist is, and most likely he won't know. He might be able to point in the vague direction of the children's school. But ask dad for the win/loss ratio of every team in the NFL, and he'll be able to recite it flawlessly.

Moms plan and prepare nutritious, balanced meals. Dads zap hot dogs in the microwave and pop open a can of cola. They don't know fabric softener from cough syrup. If you don't believe me, check out most TV commercials for household products, showing the husbands as big dummies when it comes to even the simplest task. The true nature of men: they wouldn't be able to punch themselves out of a Ziploc bag to save their lives.