Accomplishments
Fathers & Families has the best record of legislative success, the largest membership base, the highest media profile, the most funding, and the most successful legislative representatives of any family court reform organization. Fathers & Families’ accomplishments include:
- Helped lead successful campaigns in 2004 and 2006 to defeat California “move-away” bills which would have made it too easy for custodial parents to move children to other states without regard for children’s best interests.
- Reduced excessive child support by over $1 billion from 2001 through 2008 in Massachusetts. Won seat on the Massachusetts Child Support Guidelines Task Force in 2007-2008.
- Helped defeat two 2010 California legislative attempts (AB 612 and AB 2475) to prohibit or limit family courts’ ability to recognize and properly deal with Parental Alienation. These successes help protect the loving bonds target parents share with their children.
- Helped pass California SB 1082 to protect military parents’ rights in family court.
- Worked with legislators and staffers in other states on military parent legislation, leading the following states to pass bills modeled in part on California—Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Ohio, Michigan, Oklahoma, Utah, Mississippi, Alaska, Missouri, and others.
- Enlisted over one-quarter of the Massachusetts Legislature as co-sponsors of our shared parenting bill.
- Gathered thousands of signatures to place shared parenting on the 2004 Massachusetts ballot; led successful campaign for its passage, winning 86% of the vote.
- Helped pass a 2010 Arizona bill to protect disabled parents from family court financial abuses.
- Helped defeat a 2010 Massachusetts bill which would have further marginalized noncustodial parents in relation to their children’s medical needs.
- Helped pass a 2010 California bill to ensure that noncustodial parents aren’t saddled with an unreasonably high percentage of their children’s medical care costs.
- Helped pass paternity fraud legislation (AB 252 and SB 1333) which allows California child support obligors to use DNA evidence to set aside false paternity judgments and the concomitant child support orders.
- Helped pass a 2010 Indiana bill to protect disabled parents from family court financial abuses.
- Worked on the 2009 National Defense Reauthorization Act (HR 2647) to include a mandate that the U.S. Secretary of Defense produce a report on child custody litigation involving members of the Armed Forces, as well as international intrafamilial abductions of servicemembers’ children.
- Persuaded the Boston Globe to become first major newspaper in country to endorse shared parenting in principle in editorial (Feb 23, 2008).
- Wrote amicus brief which helped win precedent-setting Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court case protecting children in joint physical custody from being moved out of state, away from one parent. To read our brief, click here.
- Fathers & Families penned an amicus brief for the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in A.H. v. M.P. supporting the parenting rights of a non-biological lesbian mother — a woman who had been a parental figure for the child for years but who was cut off from the child by the biological mother after the couple separated. Fathers & Families feared that the case could set a precedent marginalizing parents to whom children are deeply attached simply because they are breadwinners. To read our brief, click here.
- Instrumental in passing law opening up access to report cards and school records to non-custodial parents in Massachusetts.
- Led 2008 campaign which stopped FOX from airing the anti-father reality TV show Bad Dads.
- Led 2009 campaign which stopped Lifetime Television from airing the anti-father reality show Deadbeat Dads.
- Helped create California’s COAP program, which allows parents who are unfairly saddled with inflated, unpayable child support arrearages to settle them for modest cash payments.
- Worked with Texas Senator Jane Nelson to pass SB 279, a bill to protect military parents’ custody rights, which was signed by Texas Governor Rick Perry in 2009.
- Helped spearhead massive nationwide grassroots protest campaign against anti-father PBS show on child custody, successfully forcing production of even-handed documentary.
- Helped spearhead successful national protest campaign against Florida’s refusal to reunite a fit and loving Cuban dad with his daughter.
- Helped lead successful campaign to free Brian Gegner, a father jailed because his adult daughter didn’t get her GED.
- Helped pass California SB 285 to protect disabled veterans. The bill prohibits courts from illegally garnishing disability compensation for child support. It also prohibits courts from calculating veterans’ disability compensation into divorce settlements as income or as a divisible asset.
- Helped defeat an amendment to California AB 164 which would have prevented fit noncustodial parents from gaining access to school and other records.
- Built the only organization of its kind to achieve financial stability through broad-based individual financial support.
- Developed the largest website, blog and E-newsletter in the world devoted to family law reform. Our subscriber list of 50,000 readers is the largest in the world on our issues.
- Established presence in major broadcast and print media, including the O’Reilly Factor, PBS, NPR’s The Connection, NPR’s Justice Talking, CNN Prime News, ABC’s World News Tonight, Geraldo at Large, CNN’s TalkBack Live, the CBS Early Show, Fox News’ Big Story with John Gibson, the Fox Morning Show with Mike and Juliet, CBS Sunday Morning, and others; major magazines, including Newsweek, Time, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Forbes, U.S. News and World Report, People magazine, Best Life Magazine, and many others; and hundreds of newspapers, including the New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Daily News, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Chicago Tribune, MSN.com, and others.
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