[Indexed as: Molinoff, Daniel D., "Men's Rights Groups Fight To Change Divorce Laws, Parade Magazine (syndicated), Apr. 3, 1977]
Seventeen years ago in California a former Army captain was advised by his lawyer not to contest his wife’s action for divorce or to fight over alimony. Reuben P. Kidd was told, “The court will give her anything she wants—the moon if you can pay for it.”
And Kidd paid. But he went home that day in 1960 and wrote to a Sacramento newspaper calling divorce a racket. The response to his letter was so great that Kidd started an organization called Divorce Racket Busters (later changed to U.S. Divorce Reform, Inc.). The Men’s Rights Movement in America was born.
Today there are active men’s rights groups in at least 30 states, the District of Columbia and Canada, and the memberships— predominantly but not exclusively male—are growing.
In Virginia they call themselves Fathers United for Equal Rights; in New Jersey, Families United for Equal Rights; in Minnesota, the Men’s Rights Association; in New York, Equal Rights for Fathers; in Texas, Fathers for Equal Rights, Wives and Grandparents Coalition. The names differ, the philosophies and tactics vary, but these self-help, nonprofit corporations have one common goal: to reform, state by state, the divorce and custody laws which they feel cripple so many families every year.
They are grassroots organizations, generally short on finances but long on anger. They hold meetings in school auditoriums and public libraries and work out of basements and storefronts. They picket courthouses, bring class action suits and are sued themselves. And at times they take the law into their own hands. For the most part they are outraged middle-class, middle-aged husbands and fathers who no longer accept the American way of divorce because they feel they have been discriminated against by the courts. They want decisions made on the merits of the individual case rather than have the courts make blanket awards of everything, including children, to the mother.
“The first shock comes when you expect to find justice at court and there is none,” says Elliott H. Diamond, president of the Virginia men’s group. “What you do find is that it’s preordained— the woman gets the kids and everything else.” Diamond, a staff engineer for a manufacturing company, lost custody of his three children. Anthony J. Gil, an accountant and founder of the New Jersey organization, also lost custody of his child “without any real hearing” and knew something had to be done. W. L. Shelton Jr., founder and chairman of the Texas group, lost custody of his children after a jury trial in which six men and six women voted 10-2 in favor of his wife. “I polled the four men who voted against me,” said Shelton, chief of the Civil Service Staffing Division in Dallas. ‘They said kids belong with their mothers.”
Davids vs. Goliath
“These fathers have become modern day Davids,” says New York attorney Doris L. Sassower, who has acted as counsel to both the New Jersey and New York groups. “They decided to confront a Goliath legal system that favors the mother, judges who believe fathers incapable of parenthood after divorce and members of the Bar who never heard the term ‘paternal deprivation.’”
The men’s rights groups confront the system in a variety of ways. For an annual fee of around $25 they offer a multitude of services to their members —including helping them find a new place to live after separation and providing names of competent attorneys for hire.
“The courts will not defend your rights,” says the brochure for the Virginia group, so the men are advised on how to defend themselves. The organizations hold clinics on how to compile evidence and how to become emotionally prepared for trial; they man divorce hot lines, sponsor lectures, set up rap sessions with family court judges, publish newsletters and even, in the case of the Minnesota association, have surveillance teams available. The Virginia group sells legal briefs and memorandums of law from recent men’s rights cases; the New Jersey group sends observers to court.
“Our observers ask the judges to speak up,” says New Jersey’s Gil. “At public proceedings the public should hear what is being said.”
One men’s rights organization participates even more directly in marital disputes: on occasion it flies members across state fines to “kidnap” their own children. “Don’t call it ‘child-snatching,’ call it ‘child rescue,’” says the pilot involved in the operations. “When a father has a valid custody order from our state and the mother flees to a jurisdiction which doesn’t recognize that order, we fly the father in to get his child; We don’t like to do it, but the courts are no help.”
One of the most crucial services offered by nearly all the groups is to provide lists of “approved” lawyers. A major complaint among male litigants seeking help is that—in return for paying exorbitant legal fees—all they can expect are court orders for limited visitation, high alimony and a lifetime of support payments. The men’s rights groups recommend attorneys who charge reasonably and who are concerned about men’s rights.
Saving in legal fees
Richard F. Doyle, president and founder of the Minnesota organization, claims that members of his group who were represented by “approved” attorneys saved an average of 50 percent in legal fees. Doyle, a former air traffic controller who lost custody of his three children, says his group wants, among other things, to help “restore integrity to the legal profession.”
The Minnesota Stale Bar Association sought an injunction to prevent Doyle and his Men’s Rights Association from “practicing law without a license.” At his 1974 trial Doyle was found in contempt for invoking his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination and was sentenced to 30 days in the workhouse. In December 1976 the Supreme Court of Minnesota reversed the conviction.
New attitude in courts
“The way a men’s rights group helps its members most,” says New Jersey’s Gil, “is just by being there. Our presence alone has created a new attitude in the courts.” Charles E. Cornell, founder and president of the New York organization, agrees. “Because we exist,” he says, “there is an increasing public awareness of discrimination against fathers.” Cornell, a machine operator at a glass factory, was awarded custody of his two children for the summer months. He attributes his victory in part to the demand for due process brought by groups like his. ‘There is strength and hope in numbers,” he says.
One father who says he owes a great deal to a men’s rights organization is Ira Victor, a member of a medical school faculty. “When you go through a divorce you feel a tremendous sense of isolation,” says Victor, who sought aid from the New Jersey men’s group. “They gave me the courage to go on and showed me how to fight.” Appearing in court as his own attorney, Victor obtained rulings enforcing the visitation rights that had been withheld by his wife.
Donald A. Hillstrom, an “approved” Minneapolis attorney who specializes in representing men who seek custody, credits men’s groups not only with instilling in members a positive attitude that has helped them win, but also with helping to change the attitudes of the courts.
“At first,” says Hillstrom, “the Minnesota courts considered them radical organizations and ignored them. Then they realized the men’s groups were there to stay, and subtle changes-began to occur. Judicial treatment of men became more fair, and more men began to win custody of their children.”
Judge Susanne C. Sedgwick, however, Chief Judge of the Hennepin County (Minnesota) Family Court—which attorney Hillstrom calls one of the most progressive in the country—sees it a little differently.
“The courts really haven’t been influenced directly by the existence of men’s rights groups,” says Judge Sedgwick. Instead, she attributes the decline of “the stereotyping that courts have been guilty of” to a genera! raising of public consciousness first begun by the Women’s Rights Movement.
Understandably, most men in the Men’s Rights Movement say that it is masculine grit that has been responsible for their successes, and they are reluctant to acknowledge any debt to Women’s Lib. But East Coast feminist Charlotte Baum Sheedy insists that it is a valid debt.
“When feminists in the 1960’s began to challenge male supremacy in society,” says Sheedy, herself a joint custody parent, “men really awoke to the need for divorce reform. It became apparent that women couldn’t gain equality and get the children, house and alimony, too.”
Women members, too
Most of the men’s rights organizations do not consider themselves antifeminist, but rather – as Virginia’s Diamond puts it—”pro-family.” Texas’ Shelton says mat 25 percent of his members are women, mostly grandmothers whose ex-daughters- and sons in-law have prevented them from seeing their grandchildren after the divorce.
In Virginia, Diamond’s group is forming a “Second Wives Coalition” whose members have all married divorced men and whose paychecks, because of what they claim are inequities, in the alimony and support statutes, are going to help support their husbands’ ex-wives.
“If men go back to court and protest that the laws make it economically impossible for them to remarry,” says Diamond, “the judges don’t listen. But if the second wife goes in and says she can’t afford to raise a family, maybe something will be done.”
A number of other men’s rights organizations have similar projects underway to change domestic relations codes in their states. Seven divorced fathers have filed a state action against the New Jersey Superior Court alleging judicial prejudice against fathers in the awarding of child custody. In Texas, six fathers who have lost custody fifed a class action suit in federal district court against all Texas state judges charged with enforcing custody statutes.
More reform needed
“In light of the fact that in 95 percent of the cases custody is granted to the wife,” says the six men’s Dallas attorney, Edward B. Cloutman III, “we’re contending that the statutes unlawfully deny fathers and their children the fundamental, constitutionally protected right to a personal and legal relationship equal to the relationship accorded by these courts to the mother.”
It took Reuben Kidd’s men’s rights group 10 years to help bring about California’s 1970 no-fault divorce law.
“There’s more to do,” says Kidd, now 64 and semi-retired from the Men’s Rights Movement. “Males are still victims of divorce. I hope the changes get easier to come by.”
They very well may, as more and more men and women join forces to continue what Reuben Kidd started.
Daniel D. Molinoff is a New York attorney and author of a forthcoming book on joint custody.