[raganwald]

Your argument says "since (unfair child support laws) then (men treated unfairly) thus not(sexist anti-women culture)"

The problem with your argument is that you are not espousing a widely held belief about child support laws being "unfair to men." Thus, a discussion about your argument is likely to devolve into long exchanges about children's rights and anecdotes about ridiculous edge case judgments on both sides.

Which is fine, but I think it would be two steps removed from what you're trying to establish, namely that the unfair sexism is somehow balanced. If you're going to construct an argument of the form A -> B -> C, I suggest you pick an "A" that is beyond dispute so we can focus on the validity of A -> B and B -> C.

[CompiledCode]

I actually think that "A" is beyond dispute. Your married partner cheats on you, divorces you, marries the biological father of the child, and you are still on the hook for child support? I can't imagine someone NOT thinking with every moral fiber of their being that this is wrong.

Regardless, I think my point is already self-evident in the answers. Which is: we accept without second thought that (A) our society is sexist and women are oppressed and objectified. So A -> B -> C: when a woman claims sexism, we all have to focus on eradicating that sexism immediately (i.e. reign men in). No thought is given to the possibility that the pendulum has possibly already swung too much in the opposite direction, and it is actually the men who are treated unfairly in most cases whenever gender issues come up. Just see e.g. the topic on reddit's front page this morning "I called the cops on my GF after an argument we had got violent, the cops come and arrest ME".

I think any discussion that is about treating both genders equally and fairly that does not take into account current anti-male inequality misses the point. We need to question ALL social conditioning to reach a point where everyone is treated fairly.

[ugh]

Is it really the case that someone has to pay child support for a child that is proven to be not theirs?

I did some superficial googling and found the case of one man who has to pay child support even though a DNA test proved he is not the father, because he missed all the deadlines for challenging the ruling. That seems like an unfortunate edge case to me, not some general pattern one has to be worried about.

I think you might be mistaken about the legal situation, but I’m more than happy to be proven wrong.

[rada]

It depends on your definition of "not theirs". The law doesn't look at biology only. (Same gender parents, adoptive parents, grandparents as primary caregivers, etc).

If you accept a child as your own for several years, the law is likely to look at them as yours regardless of DNA. I think that in the majority of cases, this probably works out for the better.

[ugh]

Well, that makes perfect sense. I do not understand what’s “anti-male” about it.

When it comes to child support, who matters first and foremost is the child. That’s who it’s all about.

[raganwald]

You wrote:

I actually think that "A" is beyond dispute.

But you forget that I said:

you are not espousing a widely held belief about child support laws being "unfair to men." Thus, a discussion about your argument is likely to devolve into long exchanges about children's rights and anecdotes about ridiculous edge case judgments on both sides.

I was careful not to discuss the validity of your belief, but merely to point out that your belief—whether true or false—is not WIDELY HELD. And as you can see, at least one other person disagrees with you, and the resulting exchange is getting further and further away from discussing the original point.

When I use the words “beyond dispute,” I mean that people accept it as true, or a at least such a sufficiently large proportion of people that anyone disputing it is immediately understood to be ignorant or a crank. The Earth revolving around the Sun is beyond dispute. Although I personally believe that the evidence shows that punitive laws around marijuana possession are unhelpful, it isn’t “beyond dispute,” lots of people dispute that opinion every day.

I stand by my assertion that if you say A -> B -> C and you choose an A that is not widely held to be true, you are going to spend a lot of time arguing about A even though your original intention was to try to convince other people of C. It doesn’t matter how certain you are of the truth of A, what matters when trying to convince people is whether they believe it to be true.

If they don’t, you either have to find a forum where people are discussing “A,” and talk about that, or pick another argument that is going to have a high signal-to-noise ration when discussing “C."