PRIORITY vs PURPOSE: The Family Courts
or Following the Money Can Start with Acknowledging Recognizable Priorities, but Even Financial Incentives Have an Overarching Purpose Behind Them
“Priorities must serve a purpose, but a purpose can never become subservient to its priorities.”
[TLDR:CAMERA warning]
[The following essay emerged from an April 3, 2025, international men’s discussion about the Family Court System in the United States.]
[credit: dreamstime.com]
I begin with a couple mea culpas:
I take responsibility for the fact that I ended up at loggerheads with the men with whom I was discussing this. I wasn’t fully prepared to present a persuasive argument, so I should have just kept my mouth shut.
In researching the Federal Social Security Act, Title IV, Part D, Section 458 [click here], I discovered something I’d missed in my own professional and personal contact with family court systems: the money they receive is a more perverse set of incentives than I’d previously realized, beyond even what the men in the April 2 discussion asserted. Family courts and agencies are not in any manner ‘self-funded,’ so they can’t properly be labeled as ‘making money,’ but the official language of Section 458 of SSA’s IV:D code states that money is transferred from Social Security to the states to fund various functions of the family court system on a dollar-for-dollar matching basis. However, it’s worse than that; in actuality these agencies receive a higher percentage reward than their level of accomplishment; e.g., as long as an agency is just 80% successful in their efforts to establish paternity, that agency will be reimbursed 100% for all of their expenses; similarly, as long as a child-support-collection agency collects just 80% of all child support monies assigned in child-custody cases, that agency will be paid with Social Security funds at an amount equal to 100% of the total target collection amount. By definition, this encourages the family courts to impose ever-higher child-support requirements — and is the equivalent of paying Person A $100/month to convince Person B to pay $80/month to Person C for wearing a pair of shoes Person C stole from Person B. This is a governmental definition of matching funds: woman, married or unmarried, bears the child of a man — a child whom only the mother has the power to either bring to term or snuff out in her womb — and seeks child support payments; monthly support amounts are established; father is required to pay those monthly payments to the mother; and then the agency tasked with ensuring that those payments are made is incentivized with even more financial reward than the fathers are paying to the mothers. Read this another way: the federal government forces working taxpayers to pay Social Security taxes, some of which is used — instead of financing retirement payments for those who paid into it or even to finance various disability payments to those who haven’t paid into it — to fully fund child-support-collection agencies at an amount higher than the amount of child support payments being transferred (in almost all cases) from fathers to mothers. Given that men pay the bulk of Social Security taxes, men are thus not only having to pay child support payments to the women who have taken away children they didn’t want to be separated from, but the government is stealing an additional equivalent amount from them to force them to make their child support payments. Furthermore, while politicians have justified this egregious compounded theft by claiming that men wouldn’t pay their child support payments if the government didn’t force them to do so, THE ACTUAL TRUTH OF THE MATTER IS THAT THIS IS A PROBLEM THAT WAS CREATED BY GOVERNMENT ITSELF WHEN GOVERNMENT CREATED THE ORIGINAL INCENTIVES (various welfare payments) FOR WOMEN TO EITHER DIVORCE THEIR HUSBANDS OR TRAP MEN INTO FATHERHOOD OUTSIDE OF MARRIAGE. The net effect of all this is that financial incentives are expanding the scope and power of the Family Court System (more on that later).
[credit: gettyimages]
The Timeline:
1960s: initiation of no-fault divorce laws; introduction of welfare ‘entitlements’
1975: passage of Federal Social Security Act, Title IV, Part D, Section 458, incentivizing the Family Court Systems to maximize child support payments for children from non-intact homes — further incentivizing women to divorce their husbands
early 1980s: while state and local branches of the family court systems were tasked and incentivized by the 1975 act to ensure child support collection, less than a decade after its passage those agencies began to use the Federal Bureau of Investigation to enforce payment of child support orders. [I know this, unfortunately, from personal experience in 1985, and all that was required was for a mother to make a claim, legitimate or otherwise, that payments had ceased; in my case, the FBI determined that my ex-wife had lied about not receiving my checks (they’d all been cashed, after all), but they still required me to permanently send all future checks through them for processing.]
1992: the Child Support Recovery Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by George H.W. Bush, making the FBI the official enforcement arm for all child support payment delinquency. This ultimately didn’t have as much oomph as our overlords desired, so . . .
1996: the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act mandated that the Office of Child Support Enforcement and the states establish a national database of employment information, known as the National Directory of New Hires [https://oig.justice.gov/reports/FBI/e0016/index.htm], which was followed by . . .
1998: the Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act (DPPA) created new federal felony categories for egregious child support violators.
1960 - present: insufficient evidence that fatherly failure to pay child support payments has ever been anything close to as prevalent as either:
the incidence of mothers cavalierly breaking up homes and dooming their children to the statistically-obvious life scripts that tend to be associated with children raised by single mothers; or
the incidence of mothers creating false abuse allegations for the purposes of obtaining divorces, increasing child support payments, or punishing fathers with undeserved legal fees and jail time.
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“[The Child-Support Collection Agency in America] is the equivalent of paying Person A $100/month to convince Person B to pay $80/month to Person C for wearing a pair of shoes Person C stole from Person B.”
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But I digress . . .
DEFINITIONS
priority
/prī-ôr′ĭ-tē, -ŏr′-/
noun
Precedence, especially established by order of importance or urgency.
An established right to precedence.
An authoritative rating that establishes such precedence.
purpose
/pûr′pəs/
noun
The object toward which one strives or for which something exists; an aim or goal: synonym: intention.
[Her purpose in coming here is to talk to you. The purpose of an airliner is to transport people.]
The actual point of this essay is to correct the minor train wreck I created April 3, when, without sufficient mental preparation to do so persuasively, I challenged something said by the leader of our group.
It started with my making the following assertion, and it’s one I continue to stand by but couldn’t fully articulate due to interruptions brought on by the Mexican stand-off I started:
“The number one purpose of the Family Court System in the United States is to disorient, diminish and emasculate the masses of ordinary, average men so that those men will be more easily managed and controlled by elite men who not only don’t respect average men but consider the average man to be useful only to the extent that he can be controlled or profited from.”
Of course, despite making four foolish and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to state this and explain where I was coming from, I was interrupted each time by men informing me that I was flat wrong, repeating that the number one purpose of the Family Court System is to raise funds for itself — and point me toward Title IV:D, as well as a very informative video by Carol L. Rhodes, in which she reads the Q&A for Chapter 13 of her out-of-print book:
Given my personality, which assumes based on my general but not universal success persuading audiences, I wasted too much time before crying uncle — and, for that, I apologize. I was wrong to assume I was communicating, because I wasn’t.
However, and despite the fact that this may seem like a matter of semantics, I believe that the difference between purpose and priority is quite often (and certainly in this case) a crucial distinction.
In essence, we were all just talking past each other, and I take responsibility for the initiation and continuation of that scenario. In an attempt to disagree with an assertion that women might soon be paying more child support than men, I asserted that the Family Court System’s highest purpose is to diminish men, and those interrupting me were arguing that the main purpose of the Family Court System is to make money, but that’s an apples-and-oranges thing that begs the purpose vs. priority distinction. I kept saying, “Fine, I’m not arguing that the Family Court System doesn’t want to be funded or even how it’s funded; I’m talking about what its overarching purpose is,” and mistakenly thought for a bit that I should soldier on. Sometimes this devil doesn’t know when to hold his silver tongue.
[credit: Etsy]
That was a recipe for disaster, and, again, I apologize, but the disaster recipe lacked even an index card, eventually I realized that I was probably giving the impression that I was saying I didn’t believe acquiring funds wasn’t a top priority, and now I get to take a stab at setting things right in writing. And . . . I’ll debut this essay with those same men, so they’ll have their chance at whatever stabs they want to take at what I’ve written.
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Every bureaucracy, by its very nature, whether public or private, naturally seeks to not only justify its existence but expand that existence. In the private sector, more guardrails exist on this tendency, because shareholders demand a profit, and customers can’t be coerced into buying products or services. In the public sector, however, the standard comes closer to, “What can we get away with coercing taxpayers to fund in this round of budget talks?” So, of course, all facets of the Family Court System will do what they need to do to acquire funds, pretty much no matter how perverse the incentives are. At the individual level, an employee doesn’t want to lose his or her source of income, so s/he’s going to behave in whatever manner ensures job perpetuation. At the departmental or agency level, that same motivation structure prevails. Which means that, just as with any other branch of government, entities associated with the Family Court System will milk the Treasury in whatever ways they can, and it can even look like this is their primary purpose: to perpetuate themselves. In this case, the incentives are complex in their perversity, because the Family Court System has come to be primarily funded through an entirely separate agency, one the public views as primarily providing retirement income and secondarily providing disability payments: SSI and SSDI.
This is very clearly a prominent priority for those who work in the realms of the Family Court System, because if they don’t do what they need to do to get ‘matching’ funds from the Social Security Administration, they won’t continue to exist in their current ongoing incarnation. However, while acquiring funds is most definitely a priority, that doesn’t make funds-acquisition their actual purpose, because one requirement for something to qualify as a purpose is motivation for a particular endeavor to have been created in the first place. This is in a sense a chicken-or-the-egg thing: after the Family Court System was established, keeping the system going became a priority, but originally it wasn’t created for the purpose of being a funds-generation machine; in fact, it only became that somewhere along the line because a structure was put in place to handle some political quagmires, perhaps most prominent among them being the Welfare Queens Vs. Deadbeat Dads culture war raging from the 1970s through the 1990s.
[credit: The Nation and gettyimages.com]
The Family Court System had its roots in and evolved from a set of existing philosophies mostly held by elites that defined below-average, average and even a large swath of above-average people as being an undesirable and unworthy side effect of the human race. These elites have been known primarily as aristocrats, the enlightened or the nobility, but in recent historical past they’ve also been prominent members of movements like Eugenics, Progressivism, Globalism and Feminism. From the Ancient Greeks (who invented centralized governments and devised a slow-burn incremental plan to strip allegiances from extended families; created the first relationship ‘licenses;’ and invented the nuclear family, all for the purpose of dividing citizens into the smallest possible groups to enhance the State’s ability to control them) to, in more modern times, manipulative robber-baron figures like John D. Rockefeller (propagandized against all forms of medicine but surgery and prescription drugs primarily manufactured from oil, the substance that made him a tycoon) and soulmates Margaret Sanger and Adolf Hitler (he cited her writings on Eugenics to be his primary inspiration) to Bill Gates (JDR Mk2) and Hillary Clinton (with her comments about “the deplorables”), these self-appointed individuals (historically mostly men) have considered themselves our betters, which in their way of thinking convinces them that most of us are interchangeable and expendable, even “useless eaters,” in the words of Yuval Noah Harari — and thus justifiably managed and controlled to suit the whims of the upper crust.
Those movements and individuals have long shared a common sense of purpose — one that I would uncharitably define as motivation to necessarily enslave all but a small percentage of the human race — and that shared ‘vision’ created sufficient justification to create the purpose that conceived, birthed and sustains the Family Court System and its equivalents around the globe, and which has guided its existence ever since its inceptions: most especially to keep men in what the elites consider their proper place, which is in an emasculated state, willingly subservient to the master class, using women and children as ignorant, disposable pawns (one of a series of ‘useful idiots’ in a parade of isms), while utilizing a separate court system that, at best, pays lip service to hallmarks of the true justice system by eliminating requirements like probable cause; due process; the right to confront one’s accuser, etc. — and, more commonly, at its worst is little more than kangaroo court. All a man has to do to qualify for being adjudicated by this separate, inhumane system is to appear to have made a lifetime commitment to care for a woman (as evidenced by states still enforcing common law marriage), and if a man wants to subject himself to the highest levels of reputation impairment and life destruction, that requires just the addition of fathering a child. Family courts and their adjuncts thus essentially criminalize fatherhood and being male in general within a system that assumes guilt until innocence is proven despite extreme prejudice against that possibility.
And that is the primary purpose of the Family Court System wherever one encounters it. One can glean priorities by observing the nuts and bolts of what an organization is doing, but in order to determine an organization’s purpose, one must be able to identify what function or agenda it serves, its overarching set of effects, and what originally inspired its creation. Conversely, one can also determine what an entity’s actual agenda was once it stops being funded — either because mention is prominently made about how it supposedly fully achieved its objective, or because it was unmistakably failing to do so; in either case, the purpose will be fully articulated, even if during its existence the purpose is, perhaps even purposefully, obscured by either priorities or misleading false purposes.
In the case of the Family Court System, the purpose is most definitely purposefully-obscured but still obvious in its outputs if one just pays attention:
children separated from their fathers;
men separated from their meager fortunes;
major reputation damage to men;
increased incidence of divorce and increased initiation of divorce by women (now topping 90%);
expansion of Child Protective Services and its tyranny of families;
increases in babies born out of wedlock and children raised in broken homes; and
inseparable rises in rates of crime and drug abuse.
If one observes a vendor selling knives next to a living man tied to a tree, the superficial conclusion is that the knife vendor is primarily there just to sell some damn knives — but it should be clear that the net effect (and likely the purpose) of permitting or encouraging that vendor to set up shop next to the man bound to the tree is to ensure that the bound man is stabbed to death.
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The man tied to the tree represents fathers in America and elsewhere. The Family Court System is represented by the knife vendor, who innocently declares that s/he was just raising funds to help out the woman who accused the tied-up man of various forms of abuse — without sufficient evidence of criminality, of course. Which also leads to the following kind of dynamic in our cultures’ intersexual relationships:
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Men are exhorted to be nice guys, while women are rewarded for stabbing the fathers of their children in the back.
Children introduced into the CPS branch of family court systems are demonstrably more at risk of sexual and physical abuse from foster parents than they were in the homes that mostly-single-female employees of CPS yanked them from. Decades of sociological research confirms that, other than girls under the age of 6, all other children raised by single fathers have statistically-better life outcomes than those raised by single mothers — and yet the Family Court System remains entirely biased towards incentivizing divorce, giving custody to women, and separating children from their fathers.
None of this is an accident — in modern parlance: it’s a feature, not a bug. When immersed in the system — whether as a plaintiff, defendant or employee — that the system is designed to destroy men is palpable.
“Consequently, from their fruits you shall surely be recognizing them.” Matthew 7:20 [CLNT]
What’s the evidence of the primary purpose of the Family Court System?
The argument-among-serious-men referenced above began because I wanted to dispute — not whether the top purpose of the Family Court System was bringing in cash or beating down men to accomplish subservience — but another assertion made by one of the men: that, because women’s incomes have been rising significantly while men’s have been declining, we should anticipate — within the lifetimes of some of us in the group — that family court systems would shift from seeking child support payments from men to seeking such payments from women (because, if the purpose is raising funds, more funds could be obtained from women).
I assert that the Family Court System will be entirely dissolved before it changes its focus to targeting women instead of men for child support payments. Family courts and the entire range of associated agencies are overwhelmingly populated by
(a) elitist judges who consider the average man to be subhuman, unworthy of respect — judges are increasingly female, but the remaining males tend to be not only elitist but weak feminist sympathizers;
(b) caseworkers who are predominantly unmarried females, disproportionately lesbian;
(c) welfare workers, again, disproportionately female;
(d) women’s shelter employees, again, well, of course, disproportionately female but even more disproportionately lesbian;
(e) foster parents who only financially benefit if they neglect their charges and among whose ranks are a disproportionate amount of sexual predators; and
(f) paternity investigators who’d have nothing to do if that switched to maternity investigation.
The mindset of the system is Men Bad, Women Good — and it would take reeducation camps to turn that around. As Carol Rhodes herself points out at 19:13 in the above video, the courts have historically refrained from enforcing child support orders on women except in highly-egregious, mostly very-public cases. Rhodes asserts quite clearly that “the system is organized to represent women.” Not men.
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But the biggest reason why the family courts and all their related agencies will never switch to holding women accountable is that those who share the mindset of those who originated and have perpetuated the Family Court Systems will not stand for it, and I predict that, even if in some parallel universe’s way of looking at things, the system itself were to attempt to make that change, the funding would dry up overnight — which would bring the system to a dead halt, because employees within that system tend to be the opposite of altruistic individuals eager to work long hours for no pay. At best, politicians would pony up a ‘Mission Accomplished’ sign to celebrate the full conquering of Deadbeat Dads, but much more likely would be taking the whole thing out of the federal budget as quietly as possible, transferring all employees to other government agencies (or disappearing them if necessary). This is a system rotten to the genesis of its core — and thus cannot be reformed from within. It begs to be eliminated.
Self-perpetuation; maximizing staff, salaries and supplies — those are clear priorities for every job environment, again, most especially for those in the public sector. No doubt — given the incentive of being overpaid to perform Family Court/Children’s Services/Foster Care/Child Support functions — maximizing transfers of Title IV:D funds from the Social Security Administration might even appear to be the #1 Priority of that conglomeration, but that isn’t its #1 Purpose. Obviously, investigating alleged abuse and neglect, identifying paternity, adjudicating divorces and custody battles, and collecting child support are all purposes and priorities of the Family Court System, but its overarching #1 Purpose is keeping men in general on their heels, not because anyone at the upper decision-making level really believes that females are superior to males, but because disoriented, emasculated, defeated men are easier to keep in line — especially in a country with the 2nd Amendment.
And I believe, as men, we ignore that overarching Purpose at our peril, consigning our fellow men to perpetual enslavement. The Ku Klux Klan was originally formulated to be the military wing of the Democrat Party, but it could easily be said that it was just one branch, with the Family Court System functioning as a much-more-successful one.
Another avenue for recognizing that the true purpose of the Family Court System is ideologically-tyrannical rather than financial is to take into account that not a few people over the years have suggested that it would be cheaper to just let men pay their child support and adjudicate deadbeat dads and moms in criminal or civil courts rather than spend more than the amount of revenue it ‘earns’ [aka steals] from the Social Security Administration. The problem, though, is that getting government fiscal transfers and enforcing child support orders wouldn’t satisfy the kind of people who brought the system into being and keep it in place. The percentage of compliant fathers hasn’t remarkably increased as efforts to improve that percentage have ramped up (i.e., paying family-court-systems to enforce child support payments hasn’t made a significant dent in the amount of money collected by mothers, so family-court-system spending itself de facto qualifies as waste, fraud and abuse) — but that doesn’t matter to those who perpetuate the system, because holding men down is the main point — and they’re getting rewarded for holding men down — not just with SSA dollars but in terms of keeping men on their knees, which is right where they want all of us.
Treating women as sainted victims is the point.
Treating men as predators, victimizers and impregnators is the point.
Keeping men off balance is the point.
Divesting men of their fortunes is the point.
Taking away their rights as fathers is the point.
Enlisting women in all of the above is the point.
And holding men down is the main point.
Therefore, no matter how much job-preservation may seem like the main objective to individual workers within the Family Court System, raising funds isn’t the point. If it were, the System could change itself into a league for promoting amusement parks and likely make more money — without having to steal it from taxpayers.
But making money is simply an incentive structure to fulfill the purpose of keeping men in as powerless of a position as possible. Destroying families and advancing the ability of macro centralized governments to control our micro existences is the purpose, so if the Family Court System or any branch of it ever even hinted that purposefully targeting women for child support payments were to be on their radar — those who had the power in the first place to create and sustain the System would immediately bring the hammer down on any such effort.
I’ll wrap up with this, knowing that by this point I’m likely preaching to the choir: the Family Court System won’t reform itself, because that would be biting the hand that feeds itself. We should also not hold our breath for a time when a sufficient number of women will be red-pilled to the point of women collectively rejecting the Family Court System — because they’re the ones benefiting from it, or at least, in their emotionally-non-logical way inaccurately concluding that women overall benefit from it — if for no other reason than that it does give them undeserved power over men. Fathers and children are the primary casualties of the Family Court System, and its employees and aimless female clients are the beneficiaries.
Change will never come from within. The only avenue for hope is for men to collectively rise up and demand an end to the Family Court System, including demanding that
any actual crimes must be handled in criminal court;
divorces must be handled in civil contract courts with an expectation that allegations must be backed up by evidence;
in the case of divorce, legal custody should be assumed to be granted to the father, unless he is proved ineligible or unless the parents agree that the children should go to the mother;
the practice of child support payments should be entirely eliminated, because no parent incapable and/or unwilling to bankroll it should get legal custody; and
any false allegations must be prosecuted and upon conviction punished commensurate with what the falsely-accused would have faced had they been convicted.
These would collectively have a deterrent effect on women possessing the inclination to cavalierly break up their families. Just imagine all the problems that would solve, but, unfortunately, we don’t appear to be ready for that just yet. Men aren’t yet even willing to stand up to their own wives and daughters in their individual families, much less being willing to thwart the inevitable mainstream caterwauling about how women would end up in danger of being dragged back into the Dark Ages.
Remember this, though: to be successful, priorities must serve a purpose, but to be successful, a purpose can never become subservient to its priorities. Beyond the Family Court System, this is an apt metaphor for what has, by design, gone off the rails in Western Culture. We’ve lost the moral, effective, natural, common-sense order of relationships. Patriarchy — successfully but very inappropriately equated with bullying — is the natural order of things, but it has been demonized, which has derailed our civilization. Whether one looks at it as a role assigned by our Creator or the common-sense approach based on logic and biophysiology, it comes much more naturally to men to be leaders and to ensure that they create purpose for themselves. Until the last couple centuries, part of men’s purpose was to make their wives and children one of their most important priorities. During childhood, people don’t make their parents their purpose, but it’s useful for those offspring to ensure that their priorities are aligned with the family’s purpose as defined by the father — or the patriarch in the case of an extended or tribal family.
As men, even if only through abdication, we have participated in turning this natural order of human relationships on its head.
We’re probably not on the cusp of seeing men collectively locking arms and refusimg to put up with their own generalized semi-incarceration. But that day will come. It may involve a long, slow build-up toward organized courage. Or it may come about almost by surprise due to some unpredictable transformative series of events that wakes people up en masse.
Men are waking up, and it’s unlikely that they’ll all just slip back into a cultural coma.
