Single mothers head more than 50 percent of families in Edgecombe County and about 40 percent in Nash County, said Lois Watkins, director of Nurturing My Seed. Nurturing My Seed is a program at the Down East Partnership for Children that teaches absent fathers ways to strengthen their presence in their children's lives, she said.

A snipped lock of hair and a DNA test had confirmed the unthinkable: he was not the father of the child who bore his name. Legal wisdom has it that a man representing himself has a fool for a client but this man was articulate and intelligent, successful in his field. Nobody knew his case, detail by painful detail, as well as he did. So, beginning hesitantly, he made his own argument on Tuesday, trying out legal terms as if waiting for the court to erupt with laughter. He had paid his child support: $50,000 between 1996 and 2003 for the boy, now eight. He had not wanted the baby but had nevertheless raised him with love, believing the boy was his own. Now he knew he was nobody's father and he wanted his money back.

Speaking of pirates that give retards a bad name, Policy Studies Inc. of Denver Colorado has changed their image. This band of profiteers, who so recently aspired to "Do socially useful work, have fun, and make money", have sown their wild oats and now only aspire to "Do socially useful work".

Jim Untershine is a feedback control system designer who is currently using the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the teachings of Henry David Thoreau (civil disobedience) to expose Family Law in California as the exploitation of children for money and the indentured servitude of heterosexual taxpayers who dare to raise children in this country.

The state's Roman Catholic bishops reaffirmed their opposition to gay marriage and benefits for same-sex couples Thursday, saying the media misinterpreted comments Worcester Bishop Daniel P. Reilly made at a legislative hearing on a gay marriage bill. Bishops from the state's four dioceses sent a letter - bearing the title "Don't Believe the Headlines" - to state legislators and a story was published in The Pilot, the Boston Archdiocese's newspaper, reiterating the church leaders' anti-gay marriage and anti-benefits position.

Kinsley found that female rats that have had one or more litters are much less stressed out when provoked than rats without pups. When he examined their brains, he found much less activity in the fear centers of the brains of mother rats. Writing in the journal Physiology and Behavior, he called the phenomenon "maternal induced neural plasticity." In 1999, Kinsley published research showing that pregnancy hormones seemed to nurture brain cells involved in learning and memory. Mother rats did better than their virgin sisters in a rat maze test. In the new study, Kinsley found that mother rats are not only smarter, but calmer and braver." There's something about pregnancy and subsequent exposure to offspring that create a more adaptive brain, one that's generally less susceptible to fear and stress," he said in a statement.

Stephen Baskerville continues to "stomp on the terra", referring to the Family Law battlefield that pits families versus government in America. Stephen Baskerville and Roger Gay teamed up to expose profiteers disguised as advocates for "Marriage" and "Responsible Fatherhood" in the recent Mens News Daily Roundtable Discussion. Tom Sylvester and Rebecca O'Neill both wondered why more scholars didn't agree with Baskerville and Gay, when they needed to count scholars who didn�t ... Families unaware of this perilous environment can take great comfort in the fact that the "winds of change" are gathering forces, due to hurricane Baskerville and others. This perfect storm is approaching, but if we are to be prepared for it, we must first shed our fear of it.

Families in the middle of a separation or divorce may experience all levels of emotional ups and downs. These stressful times can trickle down to the children in many ways. According to information provided by Ramona Gentry of the Louisiana State University AgCenter, a survey of children indicated that the four top stressors youngsters in these situations often face are having to act as a messenger between parents, listening to one parent criticize the other, money matters and being expected to act as a spy for one parent. The LSU AgCenter is offering "Children in the Middle," a free workshop designed to address these concerns and to help teach co-parenting and communication skills.

"When you get an answer from a child living in poverty, it's not a very good indicator of their capacity," said Dr. Edward Zigler, a psychologist, a founder of Head Start, and the director of the Center on Children and Social Policy at Yale University. "They have a variety of motivational factors that get in the way. If you grew up in poverty, you become wary and suspicious of adults you don't know, and testing situations."

Wade Horn, the federal official in charge of Head Start, said that extensive field testing had been done to make certain not only that the test is reliable, but also that children find it "fun, interesting and enjoyable."

The test was clearly not Nate Kidder's idea of fun. When Mrs. Stevens showed him four pictures of people with different facial expressions, and asked him to point to the one that matched the word "horrified," he bit his lip and looked at her for reassurance.

A new University of Richmond study suggests motherhood has some less than obvious benefits, researchers reported. The study found that female rats who are mothers are smarter and calmer under pressure than their non-mom counterparts. The study also found that mother rats are more courageous. Researchers said a female's brain after pregnancy is generally less susceptible to fear and stress; although the connection was not confirmed, researchers said the phenomenon could have to do with hormonal changes in the brain during pregnancy.

As Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi moves to overhaul the tax and pension systems, the social consequences of Japan�s motherhood-unfriendliness are becoming painfully clear. The government tax commission is now discussing how to limit the tax burden on individuals to a mere 50 percent of income over the next 20 years, without significant degradation of services. The reason: The baby bust means there will be so many fewer workers in Japan over the next couple of decades that taxes would have to rise to 60 percent of incomes or more to fund current pensions and standards of elderly health care. Worried local governments are organizing conferences these days on the causes of and remedies for [the population decline].

Even so, Japanese men still don�t seem to get it. At one of those forums, held in Fukuoka in June, former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori asserted that women who don�t bear children are unworthy and ought to be denied public pensions. �The government takes care of women who have given birth to a lot of children as a way to thank them for their hard work. . . . It is wrong for women who haven�t had a single child to ask for taxpayer money when they get old, after having enjoyed their freedom and had fun,� Mori said. His comments received many approving male nods.

'While the connection of birth mothers to the adopted child is widely acknowledged, most people would question any such ties in relation to fathers. In fact, there is little acknowledgment of their fatherhood at all,' says Gary Clapton, author of Birth Fathers and Their Adoption Experiences. Clapton, himself a birth father, spoke to 30 men who were all teenagers at the time of conception, and separated from their children at birth. 'All of them cared, and never stopped caring. For some men the adoption was the beginning of years of anguish and despair.'

More British men than ever before are trying to track down their adopted kids. Over 1,000 birth fathers are officially registered with adoption-contact agencies and hundreds more are believed to be searching for their children independently - trawling through public records, placing personal ads and hiring private detectives ... Michael and Joseph are among the lucky ones: both are reunited with their daughters. Michael found his three years ago, and they have a fantastic relationship. In 2000, Joseph finally got to take his daughter, now 36, to the seaside. They walked hand in hand on the beach and ate ice cream. 'I turned to her and said: "You can't wet on me now!"' he laughs. 'It was very special. All I ever wanted to do was take care of my daughter.'

It is this theme, of the unmooring of wedding customs and traditions from their original purposes, that propels the book most powerfully. Whereas a wedding once provided young people with a moment of transformation so powerful that even a modestly funded event was a momentous one, nowadays �with marriage an iffy bet and with most betrothed couples having already helped themselves to all the liberties of adulthood�the only way to underline the moment is to put on an elaborate and costly show. Further, there were once measures of propriety that held wedding spending in check: no large weddings for second-timers, or older brides, or couples of differing religions, or the visibly pregnant, or cohabitating partners, or couples who would have to assume large debts to throw a lavish reception, or women whose sexual history was extensive and well known. But these strictures have all eroded. With clergymen and parents no longer the guardians of wedding rituals, that role has passed to retailers and party planners, who would happily marry a pair of baboons if someone was willing to foot the bill (indeed, the summer issue of Martha Stewart Weddings included "Tips for Making Your Favorite Furry or Feathered Friend a Part of the Festivities").

Consider the Almost Brides, an astonishing number of whom allude in their tales of woe to children: children they have borne to their fianc�s, or to other men, or children that their fianc�s have sired with previous wives or girlfriends. That these broken engagements (many of which ended in rage fests followed by what psychotherapists usually describe as "sexual acting out" on the part of the Almost Brides) may also have constituted periods of significant loss and grieving for these children�who suddenly had to bid good-bye to a person they had expected would be a parent�goes entirely and shamefully unmentioned in There Goes the Bride. Such is the lot of children in our culture: absent stigmas on divorce or single parenting or illegitimacy, with religion often a governing factor in people's lives only to the extent that it is a boon rather than a constricting force, a child's fate in life is entirely dependent on the sexual and romantic whims of his parents. And come wedding time, the child is considered merely a cast member, a cunning little ring bearer or flower girl or�worst-case scenario�sulking adolescent in a shiny new suit of clothes, rather than someone whose life is about to be profoundly (if perhaps temporarily) affected by the events at hand.

Once, she had an excellent relationship with her father. But since her parents divorced, the little girl has lived with her mother and cursed her father, refusing to speak to him and saying she hates him. Was the 11-year-old girl mature enough to instruct a lawyer that she didn't want to be handed to her father's custody? In a recent court decision underlining the Solomonic dilemmas often seen in family law, a Montreal lawyer has been told that he should continue to represent the girl, despite concern that she had been wrongly influenced by her mother's rancour in a bitter divorce case.

Perhaps this year we might celebrate Domestic Violence Awareness Month and Marriage Protection Week together, by becoming aware of how the domestic violence hoax is being used to destroy marriage and erect a police state.

The program, created by the 30-year-old Christian Service Mission, works with referrals from Jefferson County's three domestic relations court judges. Workers identify barriers, such as having no driver's license or lack of savviness in finding a better job, that may have stalled a client's efforts in paying child support. Clients also can be referred to the program as an alternative to incarceration for nonpayment. Potter said the nonprofit Christian Service Mission started the program after looking for ways to expand its community service. "I'm really about helping men to be the dad their children need them to be," Potter said, citing President Bush's Fatherhood Initiative. Dalton was already employed when he joined the program, but Potter helped him prepare his resume, sent him on job interviews and served as a sounding board. He was also required to attend a 12-week father support group set up by the Birmingham Fatherhood Initiative, which is a part of University of Alabama at Birmingham's Treatment Alternatives to Street Crime. "They are not just hovering over you saying, `You gotta do this and that,'" Felton said. "It's just a good thing to know you have that support there."

Ron Jr. said he sees improvement every time he visits his dad. He talks to him about school, girls, sports and anything else that comes to mind. He says it doesn't matter to him what they talk about. The important thing is that they're talking at all. "I missed how he used to be, how he used to take care of us," Ron Jr. says. "I feel like I got my old dad back."

The premise here is that someone is trying to end this arrangement. But gay people do not want to enter into civil marriage in order to destroy it; and that claim is a grotesque assault on our good faith. Gays don't want to join the straights-only golf club in order to destroy the game of golf. They want to join in order to play golf.

Critics of gay marriage say we�ll destroy the entire institution. Maybe they�re right, and maybe it wouldn�t be such a bad thing ... Suporters and opponents of gay and lesbian rights are facing off over same-sex marriage in the wake of the Supreme Court�s decision in Lawrence vs. Texas. But the majesty of the Supreme Court�s rhetoric should push the gay and lesbian movement in another direction: abolishing the legal status of marriage for everyone ... Lesbian and gay marriage-rights activists counter criticism of their efforts by saying that the right to marry will provide a choice to gay and lesbian couples: Those who embrace the institution will have the opportunity to enter it, while those like me who find fault with it can simply choose not to marry. This choice-based rhetoric contains an enormous fallacy. When the state gives one type of relationship more benefits and legal support than others, there is inherently some coercion and free choice is impossible. Ronnie will have to marry Elaine to receive the care she needs; and if Ronnie doesn�t have Elaine, if they divorce or Elaine dies, then Ronnie�s needs are off the radar screen of the gay and lesbian movement. Lawrence vs. Texas signals the end of second-class status based on sexual orientation. The movement for lesbian and gay rights shouldn�t buy into a different hierarchy, this one based on marital status.