Author: Brian Carnell

‘Alienation of Affection’ Lawsuits A Backward Relic

ABC News’ 20/20 show recently reported (Thief of Hearts) on a phenomenon that should have died at the end of the 19th century — the alienation of affection lawsuit. Alienation of affection is a common law legal remnant of a period when women were considered little more than property of their husbands. Since a wife was property, stealing a wife was theft, and hence alienation of affection allowed aggrieved men to sue a man who lured his wife into leaving him, thereby depriving him of his rightful property.

A lot has thankfully changed in the past 200 years, but unbelievably alienation of affection remains in the law codes of 9 states — and people are suing each other using it.

In the case 20/20 reported on, a man left his wife after 9 years of marriage after a woman he met at a business convention pursued him by writing him letters. The aggrieved ex-wife, Candie Vessel, sued her husband’s new flame, Cathy Nolen and won a half million dollar legal judgment from a Utah jury. In an infamous 1997 North Carolina alienation of affection lawsuit, a woman won $1 million from her ex-husband’s lover. And don’t think it’s just women using the law. In 1997 a North Carolina jury awarded Jacques Moryoussef $250,000 after he sued another man for alienation of affection after Moryoussef’s wife left him — part of that included a $50,000 award for acts of adultery committed by the other man with Moryoussef’s wife.

That these sorts of laws are still on the books anywhere in the United States is an outrage. They encapsulate a view of women, men, and marriage that deserved to die. It is ironic that some conservative elements in places like North Carolina and Utah have championed these laws as protecting traditional marriage, when in fact they champion a very bizarre view of self responsibility which holds external forces responsible for the philandering spouse who is, under this sort of law, a victim when he or she abandons his or her mate.

Alienation of affection laws should be repealed in every state where they are still in force.

A Paternity Law In Need of Reform

Dennis Caron, 43, was recently sent to jail for refusing to pay child support (Child support activist jailed in Ohio for failing to pay alimony). Caron, in fact, has been withholding his child support since 1997 for what he thinks are pretty good reasons — not only has the mother cut off his scheduled visitations with the his son, but Caron says the child in question is not even his. Caron doesn’t just base that on his own subjective opinion, but says that DNA evidence proves that he couldn’t be the father of the boy.

There’s only one problem — he can’t get a judge in Ohio to even consider his claim. Caron and his wife divorced in 1992 at which time a child support order was entered. Under Ohio law, Caron had only a year after his divorce was finalized to challenge the paternity of the child. Since he didn’t learn that he wasn’t the father until after this year time limit had expired, he can’t legally challenge the child support order.

Along with filing hundreds of motion to try to get a paternity hearing, Caron has been campaigning for a bill that would bring Ohio’s law into the 21st century by allowing men to stop making child support payments and sue to recover past child support payments if a DNA test shows they are not the father of the child. The Ohio state House already passed the measure and it currently is in committee in the state Senate.

As Bonnie Erbe commented on the case in a recent op-ed piece,

Talk about lose-lose situations, the Caron/Manfresca situation is clearly one such. The little boy has already lost. He has been given over to a parent who persuaded someone to marry her by telling him his sperm caused her
pregnancy, when there was at least the strong possibility that someone
else was the more likely progenitor. She also had no right to accept his
payments of child support under such fraudulent circumstances.

Reforming Ohio’s law to take into account DNA tests after the 1 year deadline would allow Caron and others to get out from under egregious abuses of the child support system while at the same time discouraging the sort of frivolous paternity challenges that the one year deadline was meant to prevent.

Stop Honor Killings

The other day I was reading a book by an academic feminist who argued, among other things, that the idea that there is a universal code of morality (i.e. there are just things that are plain wrong) is a white imperialist idea. Maybe, but I still have to say that honor killings are wrong and the relativists be damned.

What’s an honor killing? An honor killing is where a man kills a female relative if he suspects she’s committed a sexual transgression, and in some cultures such violence is not only ignored but actually sanctioned by the legal code.

In Jordan, for example, two women were recently murdered in honor killings. In one case a father killed his adult daughter after she was released from jail after serving time for a sexual relationship her step brother. In the second case, a woman accused of having extramarital sex was murdered by her brothers. Of course both men and women kill each other in the United States and other parts of the world over sexual infidelity, but here’s the kicker — in Jordan the penal code specifically exempts a man from punishment if he kills a female relative to atone for her sexual transgressions.

According to the BBC (Jordanian women killed ‘for honour’), in Jordan about 25 women a year are murdered this way, and their murderers are protected by law from prosecution. That’s a rather large figure in a country of less than 5 million people.

A small group of reformers tried to get the Jordanian parliament to overturn the law protecting honor killings but failed. A protest against the law drew only a few thousand people.

And Jordan isn’t alone in having a problem with honor killings. A report released by Amnesty International last September claimed that hundreds of honor killings take place in Pakistan every year. Although honor killing is murder under Pakistan’s penal code, juries tend to acquit men who kill their female relatives for reasons of honor and judges tend to give light sentences for those men who say they killed to preserve their family’s honor.

Maybe it’s just the Western imperialist in me, but honor killing is downright barbaric and should be outlawed everywhere in the world.

Are White Men the ‘root of all evil’?

It hasn’t really hit the national news scene, but for the past few weeks a dentist college at the University of Iowa, in Iowa City, has been a focal point of understandable racial fear and anger.

Several weeks ago, somebody at the university began sending racist e-mails to students and faculty at the college, usually sent from free mail accounts at popular web sites such as Yahoo! or Excite. The same perpetrator made bomb threats and, in an extremely noxious display, left a portion of noodles dyed red with a message that it was a black person’s brain outside a black male student’s residence.

There was justifiable outrage at the college over these events and a variety of events designed to show that the college wasn’t racist. Finally last week the perpetrator was finally caught but apparently few people were prepared for the outcome — police arrested a black female student, Tarsha Claiborne, for making the threats. Claiborne apparently confessed to the e-mail and bomb threats and additionaly confessed that she was the person responsbile for the noodle incident.

This shouldn’t be all that surprising — there have been a number of high profile cases of such racial harassment that turned out to have been perpetrated by a member of the very minority that was targeted for harassment.

What was surprising, however, was that vice-president of University Relations at the University of Iowa, Ann Rhodes, chose to make a racist and sexist remark after Claiborne’s arrest. Asked about the outcome of the investigation, Rhodes told the media, “I figured it was going to be a white guy between 25 and 55 because they’re the root of most evil.”

To her credit, Rhodes immediately backpedaled and apologized for the remark, telling a Conservative News Service reporter (College Official Calls White Men ‘Root of Most Evil’) “I feel so horrible about this and I apologized as quickly as I could (Thursday) and I’ve been apologizing ever since. This is the worst thing I’ve ever said.”

The really sad thing about Rhodes’ comments is that she claims she received supportive email from women who agreed with her original statement that white men are the root of most evil. According to the Conservative News Service story on the controversy,

Rhodes, who’s worked for the university for the past 22 years and spent the past 11 years as the university’s official spokesperson, said she’s received numerous e-mails from men who were offended by the comment, along with correspondence from women she said agreed with her comments.

It’s a sad commentary on the current state of civil rights movements that academia has merely replaced one set of stereotypes about minorities and women with another set of stereotypes about whites and men. Rhodes’ initial comments don’t come from a vacuum, as the supportive email she received testfies, but rather is part and parcel of a very popular view within academic feminism. Only a couple weeks ago, for example, a feminist professor of communications at the university I work at gave a presentation about how the First Amendment doesn’t meet the needs of women because it enshrines a white male version of free speech (completely ingoring the fact that it was precisely this “white male” version of free speech which, unlike other countries, protected the rights of women and minorities to successfully agitate for a more inclusive political system — whereas the “female” version of free speech she advocated would have certainly been used to hamper such movements).

Rhodes shouldn’t be fired or forced to undergo sensitivity training. To do so would merely replicate the problems attendant with forcing sensitivity training or expelling other people who make sexually or racially insensitive remarks — it tends to violate their fundamental human rights and moreover it pretends that deep seated racial and sexual animosities can simply be wished away with a brief seminar or swept under the rug and ignored.

Glass Ceiling at MIT? Where’s the Data?

For the February-March 2000 issue of Heterodoxy, Kathryn Jean Lopez reports on the bizarre turn of events at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here’s the short version: several female professors got together and wrote a petition demanding the school investigate gender discrimination at MIT. MIT dutifully convened a panel to study the matter and in March 1999 admitted to systematic gender discrimination against its tenured female science faculty.

Case closed? Not quite. Suspicions were first generated by the composition of the panel. The chair of the committee charged with studying discrimination was biology professor Nancy Hopkins who also happened to be the person who originated the complaint in the first place. Typically it’s considered bad form to place someone in a decision making position who has an interest in the outcome, much less was the original complainant.

More importantly, though, the committee investigating the sexual discrimination charge claimed that its findings were based entirely on statistics showing unequal salaries, office space, awards, etc. Unfortunately as of this writing, MIT still refuses to release those statistics.

Judith Kleinfeld, of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, wrote a scathing indictment of the report that was published by the Independent Women’s Forum. Kleinfeld has a possible explanation for why no data was release — apparently no data were collected. Kleinfeld relates that a member of the committee who spoke to her on condition of anonymity said that “Heroic efforts were made to get statistics but a lot of this information was hard to gather, like who had what space. There was insufficient data from any of these sources to determine anything in particular.”

For example, in three of the six science departments at MIT, there are fewer female faculty members than male faculty members, However, in those three scientific fields there are fewer women with PhDs than men. For MIT to conclude that a pattern of sexual discrimination explains the sex discrepancy, the obvious way would be to compare the proportion of men to women in those fields as a whole with the proportion of men to women at MIT. And, of course, there was no attempt at all to do this.

Perhaps it is for this reason that although MIT claimed there was solid statistical evidence (which it refuses to release) to support the charge of sexual discrimination, at the same time the report characterized the discrimination as “subtle” and “unconscious.” Apparently so subtle and unconscious that MIT had to completely ignore any real data and instead simply follow the politically correct feelings of the moment.

Violence Within Lesbian Couples

One of the recurring claims in much radical feminist literature is that violence is an inherently male problem, as opposed to a general human problem. The radical feminist critique of the family, for example, often simplistically postulates that it is solely the presence of males within the family structure which leads to interpersonal violence in families (in other words, even where a woman assaults a man, it is still the man’s fault).

The idea that women may perpetuate violence on their own is one usually ridiculed as a part of the “backlash” by “right-wing forces.” Studies which show that, in violent relationships, men and women on average participate in acts of violence at similar rates, are dismissed as propaganda and researchers who produce such data often subjected to campaigns of protest.

It is interesting, then to consider a study done a couple years ago at the University of Florida which found domestic violence within lesbian couples to be just as prevalent as domestic violence within married heterosexual couples.

Sociologist Janis Weber interviewed 168 lesbians and found that 14 percent of those in committed relationships experienced some form of domestic violence within the previous month — very close to the number of women in heterosexual relationships who report experiencing some form of domestic violence in surveys.

A press release from the University of Florida summarizing the study noted that:

The study of 84 lesbian couples found that lesbians who beat their
partners fit the profile of heterosexuals who did so because they also abused their authority and tried to control their partners. The victims resembled their heterosexual counterparts in making excuses for the abuse or the abusive partner.

There was one important difference, though — the feminist ideology that men are the root cause of violence makes it difficult for lesbian victims of domestic violence to be taken seriously by authorities.

“The only difference between these women and their heterosexual counterparts is they feel completely ostracized from normal channels of help,” Weber said. “If they call the police, the officer would likely laugh and say ‘Oh right, your girlfriend beat you up.’ And they’re persona non grata at shelters because these are usually battered spouse shelters.”