Not long after Gonze publicly inveighed against the plight of wealthy divorced dads, the law was changed in his favor.
In 2007, Gonze and David Standridge formed a nonprofit lobbying group, Families Against Confiscatory Child Support, to oppose “excessive awards.” The same year, Gonze signed a letter to the New Mexican attacking the state’s “insane child support guidelines.” Months prior, he and Standridge had published an op-ed in that paper calling on state lawmakers to fix child support “inequities.” The piece argued that wealthy men were treated unfairly by a system that set no limit to child support for those earning more than $8,300 a month—forcing fathers to pay more than the cost of child rearing. “The excess money could then be used by the mother on luxuries for herself,” Gonze and Standridge wrote.
In 2008, state Rep. Al Park, D-Bernalillo, sponsored and passed a bill that did just as Gonze and Standridge requested: It placed, for the first time, a ceiling on child support payments. (Park did not return messages asking why he sponsored the change.)
Under the new guidelines, the lowest-earning parents (those whose combined income totals $800 a month) must pay 12.5 percent to support one child. The highest earners pay only 9.9 percent on $30,000 a month in income.
In the 2006 petition Gonze filed against his first wife’s boyfriend, he gave his side of a dispute regarding a portion of his $2,054 monthly child support payment. “As the evidence shows,” he wrote, “I am not at all angry about paying child support.”
But by his second wife’s account, Gonze continued to hold a grudge.
“He collects news articles from wire services that report on specific cases of men on the verge of divorce who hurt or killed their children or soon-to-be-exes because they were furious at the prospect of paying child support,” she wrote in her
Aug. 19 protection order petition. “[H]e believes that the men in the news stories were justified…He has told me many times, ‘That’s what happens when you divorce a man and demand too much child support.’”
Before joining Thornburg Investment Management, Joshua Gonze rated oil and gas bonds for Standard & Poor’s in New York, where he was born.
Being part of a movement, Gonze has his supporters. The loudest may be Glenn Sacks, a radio talker turned web publisher and executive director of Fathers & Families, who in 2001 published an article called, “Why I Didn’t Marry a Jewish Woman.”
Why, indeed?
“The reason I lost interest in many Jewish women was the generally contemptuous, belittling, and bigoted attitude that so many of them have towards men,” Sacks explains.
On Sacks’ site, the same attitudes are attributed toward women of all creeds. In 2007, in the midst of Joshua Gonze’s alleged campaign to have Margaret Kegel fired, Sacks called Gonze “one of my most articulate readers.”
Gonze’s short published letter to Sacks prompted a reader to argue for “mandatory Paternal custody…such as what prevailed in most of Christendom until the twentieth century, (when so much else went wrong!!).”
Indeed, there is a throwback religious current running through the movement.
It is exemplified by Gonze’s attorney, David Standridge.
Standridge explains his philosophy of “warrior life” in a magazine published by New Mexico’s Body of Christ in Albuquerque. “Many men today are abdicating their responsibility to be the Godly leader of their families,” Standridge begins. “As a result, many women have taken over the role as the Godly leader of their homes, churches and society as a whole.”
The attorney goes on to praise the virtues of violent men. “Warrior Life is not some touchy feely click [sic], club or organization,” Standridge writes. “Warrior Life is best defined by violent men who take the kingdom of God by force…It is about men who are tired of the perversion, rudeness and slothfulness of [sic] as dictated by today’s culture.”
Standridge did not return a message.
Kathryn Joyce, author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, says such rhetoric fits right in with male-dominated Evangelical sects she has studied. This movement’s leaders “make suggestions that women should probably limit how much they speak in mixed company. Most of them emphasize…that wives need to learn how not to push their husband’s buttons,” Joyce tells SFR.
“They won’t come out and defend domestic violence—they’ll say it’s a sin—but they’ll also put equal blame on the wife.”
The fathers’ rights movement doesn’t come out and defend domestic violence either. But its members push back at anyone who calls attention to violence against women and has the statistics to back it up.
Ben Atherton-Zeman, the 43-year-old Massachusetts advocate, joined the feminist movement after learning of a college girlfriend’s history with “a controlling ex.” He later began running into the “abusers’ lobby” at conferences and while lobbying at various statehouses.
Ever since, he has compiled a list of pejoratives the DV deniers have thrown his way, including: hypocrite, liar, bigot, eunuch-type male, man-whore, lemming and “Atherton-Semen.”
Who are these DV deniers?
“I wouldn’t say they are all wife-beaters, but I would guess they’re at least 75 percent of the membership,” Molly Dragiewicz, a Canadian criminologist who studies violence, gender and anti-feminist groups, says. She bases the figure on a Rutgers University professor’s book-length study of the fathers’ rights movement, in which three-quarters of the members interviewed reported being “falsely accused” of violence.
“The other 25 percent,” Dragiewicz says, “are making money off of the wife-beaters or are sympathetic to them.”
Atherton-Zeman once believed the best way to combat misogynist groups was to ignore them. For a while, it seemed to work. “Unfortunately, they’ve gotten better,” he says. “Now they have slick bullet points that sound quite reasonable to your average legislator.”
Indeed, DV deniers share some rhetoric with well-intentioned efforts to encourage non-violent masculinity. They can be hard to tell apart.
In the past 2 1/2 years, I have seen how the Judicial System treats father's based on "heresay, false accusations, outright lies, and the polluted verbage given by the mother. I personally witnessed the Judge and "his" employees tell the father that he did not need to file a counter motion. The father's motion presented compelling evidence of physical, emotional, and verbal abuseand attempted murder of the mother against her infant child. The mother got drunk at a party where she "happened" to have forceably taken the infant. An eye-witness stated that the child had an accident or was somehow injured. The mother knew she was responsible for injury to the child on night of the party and at other times in the family home. Under the careful direction of the mother's contacts at CYFD, the lies continued and subsequently parental rights were taken away from the father, after the mother and her contacts made several attempts to have the father incarderated under false allegations. The mother is the one who is the abuser who suffers from very low self-esteem, has had bouts of depression, rape, abortion, suicide attempts, has made threats of killing all family members, history of abuse by both her parents, I could fill books about this family. I know about this family because it is my family. People have told me, well what does that say about you? It says I am aware what "mental illness" can do to families; I've studied mental health and lifed it for close to fifty years. When you see your own family members falling into this category, you make excuses, look the other way, pray, anthing to make the ugly truth go away, but it doesn't. What has kept me sane is my close spiritual faith, my friends, my therapists, my doctors, help groups, and medication. In short, you do everything possible to life a decent life. In vast contrast to this, family members who exhibit their illness in fits of rage, controlling and manipulative behavior, refuse to believe that there might be a need for "mental therapy," stating that there is NOTHING wrong with them, it's other person who has problems; they refuse to see doctors claiming that their knowledge far surpasses that of any doctor, refuse medication claiming that the doctors and pharmacies want to make money off of prescribed medication. There is no reasoning with people who are incapable of being reasonable, they will pretend to be reasonable in front of the courts, law enforcement, and witnesses, then they go and do what they please because they lack a moral conscience, like the people at CYFD, and those people who believed a cunning, manipulative, spoiled child, rather than the honest words of a father. It was in mandated therapy where I learned that the child's father was the one who was being abused by the mother. I could hear the mother tell the father "I told everybody all about you, they know everything, you're in trouble and they are not going to believe you." She said all this after drinking alcohol all day at one of her drug & alcoholic friends home, then returns being physically and verballly abusive. Now who do you think the abusive parent really is. Someday the lies will surface and those who contributed to the physical, emotional, mental, and sexual abuse of these innocent children, will surely feel the karma coming back at you one way or another. As long as there is one candle the light of truth will never be extinguished. CYFD went above and beyond to cause mental, physical, and emotional anguish to the child's father, who loves his child and was a major caretaker and focal point in his child's life. Because people lie - children die.
To be published at a later time, a book on how an abused child grew up mentally aware but morally bankrupt. How she lied to the world to avoid a life of incarceration or being institutionalized, and how she got everyone to do her bidding. Mentally Ill or Demonized.