I don't understand then...why would you change the subject from THIS sailor and HIS child to just the more 'general terms not specificlally this case'?EEllis wrote:Ummm since I brought it up why do you think I missed it? If the court thinks the mother is unfit I should hope they wouldn't give her custody. That being said I have no idea what happened or why the father gained custody and see no reason to believe that the court wouldn't take any issues the mother had into consideration. I just know 'we' making some conclusion without knowing the fact or hearing the arguments is pretty dang silly. If they seemed to think she was unfit before the court seems to be trending the other direction now. Also while we are discussing a particular case you should be able to tell that I was addressing the issue in general terms not specifically this case. If you were separated with one child and the mother had full custody, if she was away for 4 months or more wouldn't you be thinking that the child could go ahead and stay with you? Maybe it's because this is a situation men would encounter more than women that even tho she is a women I still see the issue different than others. Is child custody some game you win and then it's game over and nothing should ever change? I hope not.Vol Texan wrote:EEllis, I think your comment misses the point that the court took custody away for the mother for some reason. I'm not sure why it was done, but I'd bet it's not because she went to church each weekend. I'd wager that it was something a little worse than that...EEllis wrote: I don't advocate losing custody of your kids because you get deployed but if you look at it based solely on the child if one parent would be gone and the other parent wanted to take care of the child then that would be the normal and prefered caregiver. Of course things like school and such would also matter but if the guy is gone for 4 months the point of not letting the mother take care of the child would be what? Just to make the point that one parent was in charge? Now with the neglect or abuse issues it adds a whole different issue that also should be addressed but that doesn't cancel out the issue that the custodial parent wouldn't be the one taking care of the child for lengthy periods of time.
So, given the choice of an unfit biological parent or a fit stepmom (for the duration that the biological dad is deployed), I'd choose the latter for the child if I had any say in the matter.
Was the mom unfit? I don't know...but the court seemed to think so.
Please don't think I'm being unfriendly, but this is not conducive to a healthy discussion. There are a number of folks on here who seem to be quite moved by this: a parent anywhere receiving threats from a judge to take away a child for a bad reason - while not impacting us here on this forum personally - definitely has a broad impact. For that reason, there is a lot of passion here. So, given the amount of passion, why change the argument to the general, if only just to stoke the fire more? That's far removed from 'friendly' message board banter. Rather, it seems like a troll-ish behavior. No, I'm NOT calling you a troll, but it does seem that you're pushing people's buttons just to push them, and changing the subject away from this case to the general case in order to better justify it. (Note: I've re-read this last few sentences a few times, trying to make it sound nicer, but I couldn't come up with the words, so I left them as-is. It is not my intent to insult you, rather I just want ponder why you've taken this discussion off-course from the specific to the general.)
I see this happen a lot here on this site. There are a few other places here on this forum (for instance, on this thread) where it happens a lot. Why use the strawman technique when debating? It just takes us off the specific topic and has us arguing over something else (related, but different argument). The people who are still on-topic are still passionate about the original topic (e.g. this sailor losing his child, or in the case of the other thread: the IRS losing its emails but we taxpayers face severe penalties if we lose our records), but folks who shift the topic over to the strawman (e.g. in general, the mom should get the child, or in the case of the other thread: it's expensive for a private company to retain records).
Nobody is arguing against your generalities. We're arguing against this SPECIFIC case. Nobody is arguing that it's expensive for companies to keep records. We're arguing against the SPECIFIC topic of Lois Lerner's emails. But the argument goes on and on, because the strawman debating technique is a logical fallacy.
It's one of the reasons I've reduced my time checking this site out. Watching people just pushing on other people's hot buttons for the fun of it is quite a downer. If I could tune it all out and just read the very well reasoned postings that TAM puts out, (plus the stuff about guns and TexasCHL) I'd be much happier.
Sorry for my cross-thread rant, Mr. Cotton. I hope we can all find our way to get back on the topics as posted by the OPs, in all our message board threads.