Kingsley G. Morse Jr.
End paternity suit discrimination
(there are no maternity suits)
I'm interested in ending the gender based discrimination of
- paternity suits that force men to reward sexual predators who lie about contraception, or even commit date rape, with many years of child support, but
- no maternity suits, because women are protected by legalized abortion.
It's a big problem.
The decisions of who to have children with, when to have them, and how many to have, are some of the fundamentally most personal and important decisions of our lives.
Data suggests hundreds
of thousands of men are hurt by paternity laws each year.
(Table 24 on page 59 says 8.1% of births were intended by the mother, but not the father. Table 4 on page 39 says there were 4.1 million births in a year. Multiplying 8.1% times
4.1 million births suggests about 300,000 guys are hurt by paternity laws each year.)
I'm happy to report how to fit it:
Live up to America's creed!
You can see this is so, because
- the U.S. Constitution says
"nor shall any state [...]
deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws" and
- abortion and abandonment laws protect women, so
- men should be protected too.
I became the Reproductive Rights Chairman for the
National Center for Men.
I tried to stop the discrimination.
Finding a willing paternity suit defendant,
media expert and lawyer with experience in federal court turned out to be surprisingly hard.
But I did it.
We
challenged Michigan's paternity law in Federal Court.
News outlets across the world reported it as
Roe v. Wade for Men.
Unfortunately,
US District Judge David Lawson dismissed the case.
And in an act of extraordinary hubris, he wrote it was "frivolous".
Surprised?
Maybe we shouldn't be.
The U.S. Supreme Court allowed slavery.
At first.
But it was overturned.
I'd like to think the gender based discrimination of paternity laws can be overturned too.
Stop paternity fraud
I visited my state's capitol to try to stop an ancient injustice called "paternity fraud".
It's basically when a woman lies about who the dad is, and the wrong guy pays for it.
WA senator Jan Angels's S.B. 5006 would have allowed DNA evidence to overturn child support orders.
Combining Ten Jurisdictions Reveals The Net Effect Of Gun Control Laws On Murder Rates Was Statistically Insignificant
Firearms have existed for centuries, and murder since the dawn of recorded time.
However, there's still no consensus on whether gun control laws save lives.
Some studies say they do.
Others say they don't, or worse.
To try to reconcile the contradictions, I tested the statistical hypothesis that gun control laws affect murder rates in America.
I pooled data from ten jurisdictions that passed gun control laws, spread over a hundred years, thousands of miles and millions of people.
The rest of the nation served as the statistical control.
I found that murder rates tended to rise after gun control laws went into effect, but the rise was small compared to the variation otherwise seen between jurisdictions.
Overall, the net effect of gun control laws on murder rates was statistically insignificant (p=0.38).
The full text of my scholarly paper is
here.
The spread sheet I used is
here.
Confounding factors blunted the effect of public policy for 2020's COVID-19 epidemic