This news article on a recent parenting case is alright in itself, but falls apart in two respects.
The only weblinks it provides in the related links section are to “father’s rights” organisations, one of which is the infamously horrible Fathers 4 Justice, a bunch of people whose favoured tactics for gaining support were dressing up as superheroes and scaling public buildings, performing occasional security breach stunts and committing serious vandalism on family court offices. (As an aside, I don’t link to their Wikipedia article here as I usually would do because it’s very very poor. Even for Wikipedia. You have been warned.) This should at least be balanced by a link to someone who’ll actually tell the truth rather than just ill-informedly rant. They’re also given far too much time in the article itself.
Worse, the “Have Your Say” boxout, giving a sample of the latest drivel from the BBC’s should-have-been-shut-down-years-ago comments section, currently has a quote from a “Jon” interspersed with the actual article:
So I presume the mother will expect the state to be paying for the childs upkeep, instead of the father!
The article itself, however, points out that
[The woman] said she wanted the baby girl, who is now 19 weeks old, adopted at birth without the knowledge of either them or her father.
So no, Jon, she bloody well doesn’t, you presume wrong, you’re a woman-hating berk who believes all that Fathers 4 Illiteracy tell you about the family courts system and whoever picked that entirely wrong quote out from the Have Your Say Fascist Wannabe Comments Pile should really think about what bias actually means the next time they do such a thing; the place where the comment quote is positioned makes it look a lot like an actual quote from the story, which is way wrong.
Besides, it’s worth pointing out the context of the story: the woman is an adult. She lives on her own. Why should a court anywhere in Britain even consider forcing her to tell her parents (which is how it got to the Appeal Court for this ruling), which we can assume from the context to be something that would cause a massive amount of embarrassment or possibly serious repercussions? That they would decide to do so is in itself worrying; this appeals decision, on the other hand, is probably the right one for everyone involved, hence why the F4J crowd think it’s wrong. Still, can’t win ’em all.
Edit 26/11/2007: Also note this much better Guardian article, with the detail that the idiot local authority actually wrote to the woman’s parents by mistake and without half the article taken up by comments from pressure groups.
F L I C K E R I N G / F R A M E 
interesting blog.
“This should at least be balanced by a link to someone who’ll actually tell the truth rather than just ill-informedly rant. ”
So where’s your evidence for “serious vandalism”, Inq, and just what do you have against the “infamously horrible” Fathers 4 Justice?
I wonder if you read the judgment in the case to which you refer; if you have, you will know that the issue raised by Jon was also raised by Torpe, LJ.
Will you take the trouble to inform yourself, or do you just prefer ranting?
What I have against F4J is the fact that instead of actually doing anything to promote actual help for fathers (and note that I don’t bash Families Need Fathers, the other link in the article), it instead performs stupid or obnoxious stunts and is filled with wife-beaters, scumbags and control freaks of the sort who shouldn’t be seeing their kids anyway.
(And I’m not even mentioning the Leo Blair thing.)
As for the vandalism, it’s been reported constantly: graffiti, stuffing up door locks on CAFCASS offices, doing so to Ruth Kelly’s office too (check that arrogance in the statement!), cutting telephone and power cables, harassing people like Elizabeth Butler-Sloss at home, that sort of thing. Unfortunately a lot of that was in the Tonight with Trevor McDonald programme so I can’t provide a direct weblink to the evidence and ITV don’t provide an obvious transcript archive as Panorama, for all its many faults, does.
Also, I don’t have the judgement as these things aren’t generally available unless you’re a lawyer or a journo, you have the relevant databases and pay a lot of money. (As an aside, I’m a big fan of “open access” publication in scientific fields and would love it if it extended to legal rulings too – that would get rid of a whole lot of ambiguity with news reports like this one.) I do have the news article which points out the adoption issue, which I feel is relevant to the position.
Yes, it’s a different organisation now thanks to the various disintegrations and splinterings, but it isn’t in spirit. And I dislike F4J’s aggressive, over the top tone, just like I dislike the same style of rhetoric coming from PETA and friends. I think you’re going about it the wrong way, and I’m not even sure what exactly it is you’re going on about.
It would help if it was possible for mere mortals to read the court ruling – that, in fact, is the sort of thing this article should have linked to instead of campaigning organisations of any sort – but right now I’m going to stick with what I’ve written.
[And unfortunately the theme I’m currently using doesn’t make the links in this comment very obvious, so you’ll have to spot them by mouseover. Sorry.]
F4J and the public courts are two different matters. Public courts ae the ones where social services dominate the proceedings and dictate to the judges, charmingly spout lies to gain there incentives (need to fill adoption/fostering/special needs slots) have teams of legal and medical professionals all backing each other so a hapless innocent parent is left with no recourse at all against the monolithic wall of power that has no governing body. Childrens’ Social Services have no governng body as of April 2007, Judges have no governing body and someone call Tradibng Standards as they are not working on behalf of Her Majesty The Queen. In fact it appears we have Family Lawer Mafia runniong the PUBLIC family law courts. The PRIVATE (divorce) family law courts are open, but CAFCASS are involved in both types of courts. It’s important to distinguiosh between these two types of court as mothers are generally the targets in public family law.
You can’t rely on the BBC to tell the truth about anything any more. Never mind, there are plenty of other media outlets.
8 pm Monday on ITV1 – Trevor McDonald Tonight. The programme centres on the Fran Lyon case, she has now fled the UK.