As the entire world surely knows by now, members of the Russian band Pussy Riot have been jailed, charged and now convicted of “hooliganism”. They’ve been sentenced to two years in prison. It seems that the women barged into an almost-empty church, ran up to the altar, played music and generally clowned around. Part of their message was to criticize former president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. In short, the women were exercising what in this country would be called free speech by criticizing those in power. They did so intemperately and provocatively, and, in Putin’s Russia, will pay the price.
Now, if some punk rock band in this country assailed the policies or personality of President Obama, we’d probably never even hear about it and it certainly wouldn’t become an international cause célèbre. But this is about Russia and Vladimir Putin, so the whole thing went viral, and not just on the Internet. Their trial has been the stuff of daily news reports; an Icelandic diplomat weighed in with Russian authorities; 121 members of Germany’s Parliament lodged objections with the Russian ambassador. Even Madonna got in on the act and, well, you can’t get much more momentous than that.
By any stretch of the imagination, Pussy Riot’s antics don’t amount to a hill of beans. It was a juvenile prank that one Russian media observer called “unimportant and silly.” Of course Putin’s reaction to it made it far more important than it should ever have been, but that’s in Russia. What about here? How could it possibly make the news day after day?
I’d argue that it did so not because of its importance as news, but because, with every article, and broadcast, there was an implicit, and none too subtle, comparison being made. Without actually saying so, the context was clear – this doesn’t happen here. In the United States, we have free speech; we can criticize our elected officials to our heart’s content. It’s part of our rich and riotous history, this ruthless taking down of those we’ve put in places of power.
During all the hoopla surrounding three young women 10,000 miles away, Dan Brewington goes wholly unnoticed. He’s the Ohio dad who had the effrontery to criticize the family court judge and a forensic expert in his custody case. He’s now doing five years behind bars for his trouble.
Have you ever heard of Dan Brewington before now? His case has drawn no complaints by the German Parliament; no aging rock star has shown up to lend support and have her photo snapped. That’s probably because Dan Brewington is just a dad who questioned the workings of an Ohio family court. The judge didn’t like it and Dan Brewington is looking at five years in the penitentiary.
I know what you’re thinking. Brewington must have done something awful to be put in prison. This is America, after all. Surely he assaulted the judge, threatened the expert, stalked someone – something. But you’d be wrong. Dan Brewington did none of those things. No one has ever claimed he did.
In fact, he’s such a model citizen that, when his wife first filed for divorce, he was given three days a week visitation. That’s a lot for a father in family court. His wife leveled no accusations of abuse or unfitness at him. So the judge clearly thought that Brewington was a good father.
But Brewington made a mistake. He represented himself in his custody case and, like pro se litigants everywhere, he didn’t know how the game was played. His first judge misbehaved and Brewington forced him to recuse himself. Then he discovered that the court-appointed custody expert wasn’t even licensed in Ohio. Brewington complained. Then the expert refused to provide his case file to Brewington as he was required to do. Brewington complained again.
All the while, Brewington maintained a personal blog on which he criticized what he saw as anti-father dealings in the family court, and he certainly used some intemperate language to do so. He called the judge a “child abuser” because he restricted Brewington’s parenting time without cause. He called the forensic expert a “pervert” because the man asked sexually explicit questions of women but not of men.
Strong words admittedly, but unquestionably speech that’s protected by the First Amendment. We may not like his phrasing, but Brewington has a clear right to write what he did. Throughout his blog, Brewington made it clear that his purpose was to call public attention to what he considered the wrongful behavior of the family court. Often as not, he was right.
So the judge did what any petty tyrant would do; he punished the kids. Having done nothing to indicate unfitness as a parent, Brewington went from having his kids three days a week to having no contact with them at all. The judge issued an order completely barring the children from seeing their father or communicating with him. Brewington hadn’t suddenly become a bad dad; Dr. Jekyll hadn’t suddenly turned into Mr. Hyde. All he’d done was anger the judge, so now the kids don’t have a father.
But it didn’t stop there. No, the District Attorney, always glad to curry favor with a local judge, filed criminal charges against Brewington. They were all based on Brewington’s criticisms of the judge and the expert; again, he’s threatened no one, assaulted no one, stalked no one. All he did was direct rude remarks at the judge, the expert and the family law system. That is clearly protected speech, but Brewington’s criminal lawyer failed to challenge the charges or the jury instructions on First Amendment grounds. He was duly convicted and now sits in prison.
Dan Brewington isn’t the first father to excoriate the family court system. Family courts routinely treat fathers like pariahs, dangerous abusers whose only value to their children they carry in their wallets. Indeed, the greatest single predictor of a father’s suicide is that he’s become involved in a custody battle.
A small mountain of social science teaches us beyond question that children from all socio-economic strata, of all religions, races and geographic locations tend to do better with a father in their lives than without. The benefits of a father extend beyond childhood into the child’s adult life.
And what’s true of social science is true of people generally. Survey after survey shows that people think that equal custody between mothers and fathers is best for kids. Kids think the same thing; surveys of them show they want a continuing relationship with both parents if they divorce.
But, important as fathers are to children, state legislatures and family judges are loath to ensure that children maintain a real relationship with their dads post-divorce. Draconian measures enforce child support orders, but courts rarely enforce fathers’ rights to visitation with their children. That distinction is echoed in the federal budget that allocates about $5 billion to child support enforcement but only $10 million to enforce visitation orders, a 500:1 ratio. The result? Over a third of children in the United States have no contact with their fathers.
So, unconstitutional as it is, Dan Brewington’s treatment is really just one extreme of a continuum whose overwhelming tendency is to separate fathers from their children.
Criticizing ourselves is a lot harder than criticizing others, particularly when those others include Vladimir Putin. Tossing three young women in prison for ridiculing the country’s leader and dishonoring the church sends a chilling message to all Russians who might want to shine a light on those in authority. Incarcerating a fit father for criticizing a family court judge does the same here.
And family courts are in bad need of reform and therefore healthy criticism. They are, after all, one of the major players in the drama that for decades has daily shattered the bonds between fathers and children.
Madonna may not know or care, but those of us who see the havoc wreaked by fatherlessness in this country do. We know we need more Dan Brewingtons, not fewer. Oppression, like that of fathers by family courts, breeds more every day.
