No secrets, no lies

Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever. --Ayn Rand

The title of this file comes from an admonition I issue repeatedly to my children. No secrets, no lies; you can trust what I say. No secrets, no lies; I believe what you say. No secrets, no lies; we'll face the truth together. It may be hard scrabbling, but deceit is quicksand.

In this file, I'm going to name every charge my wife's attorneys can make against me. My reason for doing this is to make plain that I have nothing to hide. It is important to stress that none of these constitute a good reason to deny my fatherhood of my daughter. You are free to view each of them in the worst possible light, and you will still lack a reason to deny that I am all the father my daughter has ever had. If any one of these is reason enough to deny my fatherhood of my daughter, then it is likewise and equally reason enough to deny my fatherhood of my son. If, like the State of Arizona, you conclude that I remain father of my son, then the denial of my fatherhood of my daughter cannot be justified by any of these charges. In fact, my fatherhood of my daughter has been denied solely because I did not fertilize the egg that grew into the girlchild I nurtured from birth and before. To arrive at the conclusion asserted by the courts of the State of Arizona, you must introduce in your mind the same contradiction, that seconds of egg-fertilization is fatherhood, but years of child-rearing is not.

In other words, these charges are denominated to be irrelevant in advance. They may make good arguments for or against my being awarded custody of my children, but not one of them is a good argument for denying my fatherhood of either of my children. I will list them here so that no one may say anything about me that I have not said first, but they are not relevant to the central issue of my judicial and legislative appeals.

1. I put my wife out of our house. In April of 1994, after we had been married nearly six years, my wife secretly renewed her romance with the man who had fertilized the egg that resulted in my daughter. Their romance was carried on through the summer by electronic mail and long-distance telephone calls (we live in Arizona and he lived at that time in Massachusetts). My wife had planned all that year to visit her sister and friends in Massachusetts and had asked me to persuade my father to give her round-trip airline tickets. In fact, the reason for her trip, effected at my expense and my father's, was to engage in a weekend tryst with her boyfriend, which I discovered while she was away. In my view, she had abandoned her home, her husband and her children, deceived and hid from us for the vainest of reasons. On the telephone that weekend, I asked her not to return to our home, but she did anyway. That night (October 10, 1994), we had a terrible row, at the end of which I picked her up and put her outside the house. I did not strike her or scratch her or kick her or use any weapons on her. Though she claimed later that I threatened to kill her or put her in the hospital, she sat calmly on the sofa right up to the time that I picked her up and put her outside. She did not run screaming into the street in fear. She did not call 911. She did not arm herself from the knife drawer or the toolbox. She took no actions consistent with the expression of fear, and her lawyer has claimed (falsely) that she injured me when I put her out of the house. In other words, while the action was coercive, and I'm not proud of it, it was not violent or physically abusive in any sensible interpretation of those words.

2. I cut my wife off financially. The next day (October 11, 1994), I reconfigured our bank accounts to deny my wife access to them. The night before, I had posted a note (entitled "Stupid Bitch") on the door to the house advising her to find a place to live and a job, as she would no longer be living at my expense. In that note, I used the words, "you are penniless." This was not literally true, since I was absorbing her pre-marital debt, approximately $30,000, and her share of our approximately $20,000 in community debt. Had she done as I advised, and as I felt honor dictated in the circumstances, she would have begun her new life unencumbered and debt free. And, of course, absolutely nothing had been settled by the divorce courts at that early date. She was without access to my funds for the moment, that's all.

(As you might guess, she didn't do what my sense of honor would dictate. Instead, she obtained an Order of Protection against me accusing me of threatening to kill her, of threatening to hospitalize her and of being a survivalist--a bootless, tentless survivalist who owns no guns, knives or sleeping bags. She did not bring criminal charges against me for assault, nor has she ever. She did, however, place herself (and my children) in a battered woman's shelter. She didn't do this the night that I had put her out of the house, but the next night, after she had already obtained the protective attentions of the police forces of the State of Arizona. Much later, I found notes that read, "Good legal advice for being in shelter." That is, on the advice of legal counsel, my wife obtained a spurious Order of Protection and inflicted the horrors of a battered woman's shelter upon my children, all in pursuit of legal advantage. I had put her out of our home while our children slept, admittedly a wrong thing to do. She had the police put me out of our home while our children watched. Since my business was located in our home, the police put me out of business--which would have left us all penniless--at no extra charge. As it worked out, I had a dreadful automobile accident almost immediately after all this happened, with the result that my wife regained access to my bank accounts, I returned to our house when I got out of the hospital, and my business survived virtually intact.)

3. My wife claims that, in late 1994, I threatened to physically abuse her and to leave her penniless. During the span of time for which she makes this claim, I was still desperately crippled. I was confined to the bed, practically speaking, and I could ambulate slowly for short distances by bearing the full weight of my body on both of my hands on a walker. I was at this time quite literally a pushover, and I was utterly incapable of injuring a hungry mosquito, much less a human being. In the same respect, my wife had full control of my money. She had always handled the family and business finances, and I had not so much as touched a coin or a bill since my accident. On January 3, 1995, my wife abducted our two children and went to join her boyfriend in Seattle, to which city he was relocating. I was completely incapable of leaving her penniless, but the incapacity was not reciprocal; she gutted our bank account and left me with $6,000 in unpayable accounts payable. There was no food in the house and I was unable to carry food to sit down and eat it; I had nothing to eat from noon on Tuesday, January 3, until after midnight of the morning of Saturday, January 7. My hip and pelvis were broken in my accident, and, at that time, I probably could not have gotten back up had I fallen; very likely, I would have been hospitalized by a fall. Abandoning a cripple is not physically abusive in the same sense that striking someone is. But the fact remains that I was abandoned to whatever fate might befall me with no way to take care of myself and with no food, money or transportation. These events are discussed in more detail in Whoredom, boredom, love, lust and a great big tree. In email to her paramour, my wife presented her opinion of my character prior to any of her court appearances, and this can be viewed in the file Character.txt. In any case, the claim that I would injure her or leave her penniless is the justification to which she has steadfastly clung for abducting my children, holding them incommunicado until phone contact was order by a judge, and withholding them from me until she was ordered to return to Arizona by another judge.

Ironically and--you may perhaps conclude--revealingly, she spirited herself and my children away to no refuge; her paramour did not reside in the Seattle area at the time of the abduction; he was at that time still effecting his move from Massachusetts. I surmise without data that she set up his new household. Though they planned the abduction for many days (as is documented in Planning.txt), she left our home with virtually nothing, so as to give the appearance that she barely escaped from imminent peril. Thus, my children actually were made destitute, not by me, but by their mother--they were robbed of all of their clothing, all of their toys, their home, their room, their furnishings, their friends, their father, and all of this had to be replaced in a void. Moreover, my wife has claimed in email to me that their time in Seattle was dominated by the fear that her paramour's ex-wife would come and do insane violence to them. I don't actually believe this claim, but it does put a nice coat of paint on the irony: out of fear of poverty, she escaped to poverty, and out of fear of abuse, she courted abuse.

4. I am six (or more) thousand dollars behind in my court-mandated payments to my wife. I am current on my child-support obligations of $1,230 a month, although I have been late several times, most egregiously 27 days late. I am also ordered to pay $750 a month in income sharing, and, for the most part, I have been unable to pay this. The estimate of my income that has been used to calculate my payments is $66,000 per year (my income before business expenses), when in fact I made $40,000 in 1994 (my income after business expenses; 1995 promises to be worse). The result is that my court-mandated payments amount to $1.10 for every dollar I earn, all of this before any of my living expenses. In early May, we asked that my figures be reviewed, to bring them into concordance with my actual income; this request was denied in August. As my wife handled all of our finances prior to the abduction of my children, she knows that I do not make the money that is demanded of me. I have demonstrated this fact conclusively with both my 1994 tax return and year-to-date figures covering January-July 1995. It is within her power voluntarily to modify the figures to reflect my actual income, but she has not done so.

However, the point stands. I have been ordered to pay more than I make, but the fact remains that I have not paid every cent that I have been ordered to pay. My wife is unemployed and contends that Wellesley alumna are unemployable in metropolitan Phoenix--where the jobless rate for white, middle-class, college-educated females has risen to as high as zero percent in the years since 1945--and so she is forced for now to scrimp along on a tax-free cash income of around $20,000 per year, with all of her pre-marital debts, all of our community debts, all of our past and current tax obligations and all of our health insurance costs paid by me. Please don't be swayed by irony, though. I am not a "deadbeat dad", since I am current on my child support. But I am in default on some of my court-mandated payments, and there is no escaping from facts.

5. My wife contends that I have engaged in a campaign of electronic mail harassment and verbal abuse against her. She initiated email contact, and she terminated it. In the course of our exchanges, she swore at me, called me names and attempted seriously to call my sanity into question. In the same respect, she phones my home and swears at me and screams at me at incredible volume. These things are not verbal abuse or harassment, however. Verbal abuse and harassment consist of making inarguable points inarguably, a vile offense of which I am guilty on my very best days.

Perhaps you think I'm simply being wry. My wife was gracious enough to provide me with a definition of verbal abuse: "'If the words or attitude disempower, disrespect, or devalue the other, then they are abusive.' Categories of verbal abuse include: withholding, countering, discounting, verbal abuse disguised as jokes, blocking and diverting, accusing and blaming, judging and criticizing, trivializing, undermining, threatening, name calling, forgetting (which involves both denial and covert manipulation), ordering, denial, and abusive anger. I'd also add ridiculing, which you seem to do with particular enthusiasm." Now you might think that verbal abuse is what the cab driver bellows out the window after he is cut off in traffic. Evidently this is not the case: one fine Sunday morning, my wife had called to scream and swear at me. I said, "Don't you understand that this is verbal abuse?" And my wife screamed in reply, "I DON'T CARE!" Maybe there is some unknown law of electromagnetics that insists that verbal abuse moves only in one direction, never from my wife, but only toward her. I am ridiculing with particular enthusiasm, of course, but I do not believe in making unfounded assertions, no matter how amusingly, so I am making available all of the email I have sent to my wife, so that you may judge for yourself what is abuse and harassment, and what is not.

6. I am an anarchist. In fact, I am an agorist, an anarcho-capitalist, which simply means that I advocate that all the functions currently performed by the state that are actually necessary to human life should be effected by private enterprise instead. I am in fact an agorist theorist, and the wrinkle that I've added to the anarcho-capitalist equation is this: I advocate that all dispute-resolution be effected non-coercively. Pretty tame, isn't it? "Anarchist" means "opponent of the state," but people have been taught to believe that it means "bomb-throwing nihilist". This is the spin that my wife's attorney has attempted to put on the word, most notably by quoting egregiously out of context from my book Janio at a Point. Here's a passage she hasn't quoted, and this language appears in various forms half-a-dozen times in the book:

So, my view is that the intelligent thing to do, the thing one ought to do, is to react to crime in this way: respond to crime in kind as it is happening, if you choose. And respond to it after the fact by seeking redress through the courts, by seeking restitution for such real injuries as you sustain. In general, I would argue against responding violently even while a crime is happening. For one thing, any incidental damage you cause is your responsibility. For another, you could get badly hurt.

As I said before, I advocate noncoercive means of settling judicial claims. The reason for this is, even though you have been injured, this does not give you the right to initiate injuries. If I punch you in the nose and you beat me to death with a ball bat, I have committed a small crime. But you have committed a much larger crime. The first blow was self-defense. Everything after that was new injury, initiated by you. In the same way, if I swipe your purse, to forcibly recover it, you would have to force you way into my home and compel my person. Your purse is yours, and you have every right to recover it. But my house is not yours, nor is my body. The injuries you inflict upon things that are not your property are Crimes.

Which is to say, so very far am I from the popular misconception of the bomb-throwing nihilist that I am opposed to violence even where it is countenanced under our present arrangements. What is more, I have no political agenda whatsoever, and I am not politically involved in any way at all. Perhaps vainly, I hope that my political philosophy will someday have an impact on prevailing social structures, but I refer to this explicitly as "the five-hundred-year plan"; in other words, to the extent that I expect to see my ideas implemented, I expect it to take centuries. I belong to no political parties or organizations, nor to any sort of organizations at all. I have participated in one political campaign since college; I canvassed for petition signatures for Linda Rawles in her failed bid for the republican nomination for Congress. While I am technically a libertarian, my party registration has been republican for two years. Through her attorney, my wife has attempted to claim that I'm a survivalist (who just happens to lack all of the gear, literature and other artifacts associated with survivalism), a gun nut (who owns no guns), an advocate of violence (who explicitly, publicly and repeatedly condemns violence) and a ravenous would-be expatriate--at any moment, I might flee to Canada, where anarcho-capitalists are black-listed, or to Latin America, where anarcho-capitalists are imprisoned in roach-infested dungeons. I live in the United States because I love what this country still stands for in its best moments, but the awful truth is I could not live safely anywhere else. It is still legal in the United States to conceive of and promote ideas with which the majority disagrees, but the clear implication is that freedom of thought and expression do not extend to the divorce courts.

Ironically, my wife is also an "anarchist", or at least she was when she had this chat session on September 14, 1994:

AnnSwann: You know; it occurs to me that we might have some genuine philosophical differences between us....

StWright: We must, somewhere; did you have anything specific in mind?

AnnSwann: ... after my having been married to an anarchist, his arguments have made deep impressions on me....

AnnSwann: I wouldn't call myself an Objectivist, really, any more (just an objectivist)

StWright: Well, me too, though not over the anarchy issue

AnnSwann: ???

AnnSwann: Like, for example, government = crime.

StWright: Try again: I'd call myself a small-o objectivist, but I'm not an anarchist

StWright: I do believe we can create a form of government that really protects rights

StWright: and that that's better than not having that institution

AnnSwann: I don't believe, anymore, that we can create that kind of government without violating the rights of *some*

AnnSwann: (so it comes down to a question of the end justifying the means)

AnnSwann: (and I don't think it can)

StWright: There certainly isn't a very good track record

StWright: And I agree the end can't justify the means

The argument they are making with less than ideal coherence parallels the argument of the End-State Theory in Chapter 8 of Janio at a Point. And: people who believe that the ends of government do not justify the means of government, are anarchists, by definition, whether they use the word or not. The word "anarchist," if it indicts anybody, indicts every adult involved in this divorce.

7. My wife will attempt to claim that her paramour did not pursue his paternity claim before now because he was afraid of me. In fact, he has not pursued his paternity claim even now; she sued him for paternity, solely to usurp an unfair advantage in our custody dispute. Prior to the resolution of that paternity suit, her paramour had never paid one cent in child support; my wife leads me to believe that neither of them want to pay the substantial past-due child support for which he can be held accountable, should this paternity ruling stand. Prior to the resolution of that paternity suit, my wife's paramour provided few if any gifts that were exclsively for my daughter, as opposed to giving gifts to both of my children, as any friend of the family might do. Prior to the resolution of that paternity suit, his parents had nothing whatever to do with my daughter, alleged at present to be their granddaughter. By contrast, my own parents have been doting grandparents to both of my children, and continue to be. Prior to the resolution of that paternity suit, my wife's paramour had zero contacts with my daughter that a domestic relations court would describe as visitation. He did have contacts with her, but these were incidental sightings of her, rather than visits with her for her own sake; he graciously documents his monumental indifference to my daughter in the file Sightings.txt. Prior to the resolution of that paternity suit, my wife's paramour had no telephone contact with my daugther, nor did he attempt any.

I mention all of these things not because I believe they mitigate anything, but because they are significant according to the terms of certain Arizona appellate rulings. In order to assert that he has been unfairly denied the right to assert a claim of paternity, a putative father must demonstrate that he has made a good faith effort to be a father: he must pay child support or seek visitation or sue for paternity in a timely fashion or in some other way demonstrate that he actually regards himself as being a father and not merely a fertilizer of eggs. For nearly seven years after he fertilized the egg that resulted in my daughter's life, my wife's paramour was perfectly happy to absolve himself of the responsibilities--the time, the money, the effort--of being a parent. Only when it proved advantageous to my wife to use the facts of my daughter's paternity to attempt to deny my custodial rights to both of my children, only then did her paramour rise up and declare himself to be my daughter's father. Even now, the two of them seem dead set against following through on their absurd claim by paying the past-due child support plus interest. I don't want them to do this, since I am my daughter's father, not this vain interloper. But I regard it as deeply significant that he still seeks to shirk his responsibilities as a "father".

But in fact, prior to the filing of the paternity suit, both my wife and her paramour understood that I am my daughter's father, as can be seen in the file Father.txt.

On July 12, 1988, ten days after we were married, five months before my daughter was born, my wife and I sent electronic mail to her past and current lover. This is quoted from her portion of that mail:

> and for our child's sake.

Let me make it perfectly clear to you that you can no more lay claim to this child than you can to me. There is no such thing as a "right" to the life of another human being. Whatever relationship you can have with another person is only what you can *earn*.

As for the noises of concern that you've made with regard to this baby, let me put it bluntly: you've shown that your concern lies only with the blow that your ego has sustained, not with the welfare of this child. Even in this mail, you took my hope that you were doing okay as a chance to show me all of your scabs, and you made no inquiry at all into my health or into the health of the baby (even when I explicitly told you that I was having a hard time).

The baby that I am carrying is in no sense *our* child. That kind of relationship has to be earned, and you have done nothing to earn it, and everything to prevent it. Plain and simple: this child would not be coming into this world if it were not for my husband. He has been there for me with love and support and RESPECT since he first learned of this pregnancy. It was HE who fought, with tears streaming down his face, for this child's life. (You may recall that you displayed to me "just a touch" of regret when I told you of my decision to have an abortion.) It has been Greg that has been taking on the burden of the household tasks so as to make it easier for me. He has scooped endless piles of cat excrement out of the litter box; he has cooked for me on the days when the smell and sight of food was enough to make me wretch; he has brought me cold washcloths and comfort on the night that I've thrown up more times than I could count. But most importantly, it has been Greg who has tried to make this pregnancy as joyful an experience as possible for me -- for my sake, but more importantly for the sake of the baby that is growing inside of me.

I do not believe that you would have the right to the unearned in the material realm, and I certainly do not believe that you have a right to the unearned in the spiritual realm. You have done nothing which would give you any kind of a justifiable claim to me or to this child, and your behavior has not even been up to the level of a good friend of the family. Just to be explicit here, let me say that it would be improper as well for me to talk of any "right" that *I* have to this child. Providing half the chromosomes for this child does not entitle me to anything. And as there can be no unchosen obligations, so neither am I enslaved by this child. But, I have a *freely-chosen* custodial responsibility for this child, a responsibility to do the very best I can for it. And Greg has made the same choice and has assumed the same responsibility. We both take that responsibility *very* seriously, and we will not sacrifice the welfare of *our* child as a salve for someone else's ego.

So, as for your

> it does seem pressing to me to start getting acquainged [sic] with Greg,

fuck off. Don't presume that you have "rights" where none exist. Any relationship that you are to have with Greg, with the two of us together, or with this baby will not be any kind of an obligation that we do not choose. And as long as you continue to be manipulative, consciously *or* unconsciously, you will get from us what you have earned: a door that is slammed shut in your face.

And this is the relevant portion from my contribution to that mail:

Now, then: my position from the very beginning has been that you have no "rights". There can be no such thing as a "right" of one person to another, and, hence, you have no right either to Ann, to me, or to the child. I had intended to present this more gently, and in person, but I don't think I can trust myself that far at the moment; my honest desire is to perform corrective neurosurgery upon you with a Louisville Slugger. By any objective evaluation, your relationship to the child forming in Ann's body is that of a sperm donor, nothing more. It is possible in time for you to earn *privileges*, but you must truly *earn* them by your actions, actions far different from the ones you've employed so far. In the meantime, you have no "rights" to anyone but yourself, and I will support Ann in any disposition she wishes to make of any requests you extend. In other words, you have the same "rights" as any stranger at my door: you have the "right" to take every lump you get if you attempt to enter my home without my explicit permission. To be more plain: if you appeal to the "law" of this Socialist State, I will regard that as an initiation of violence and will respond with violence. I am not threatening you, because I *do* believe you are rational, despite the evidence to the contrary I have before me, but I would be less than forthcoming to conceal the fact that I lived for ten years in New York City and I am not squeamish in the smallest way. My advice to you is: leave your guns outside.

This is obviously Alpha Male chest-beating. Won't take my word for it? Let's get a second opinion, straight from the horse's mouth:

[Greg] might not go so far as to carry out his threats against me (Gary thinks he's more bark than bite, and in fact is also philosophically something of a pacifist).... [circa January 1989]

In that particular file, a memorandum to himself, my wife's paramour goes to some lengths to talk himself out of doing anything with respect to a paternity claim to my daughter. His reasons have nothing whatever to do with fear of me, but rather with the fear of a lifelong commitment, doubt, anger, shame, pecuniary interests, conceit and inertia.

Moreover, I was a guest in his home and he in mine in those years, hardly the actions of a man who was paralyzed by fear.

And moreover yet again, a year after he spawned my daughter, he impregnated yet another woman without benefit of ceremony. He actually followed through and married the woman on that occasion, fathering--which is to say raising--a very smart, very troubled little girl. But he has since divorced his wife and has moved 3,000 miles away from his daughter. This move was effected in mid-January 1994, and it is why my children were abducted to Seattle and not Massachusetts. At the time that he was considering alienating himself from his daughter, he named these as his reasons:

I've been having a really hard time with this Microsoft offer. Part of me says I can't afford to turn it down; part of me says I can't afford to leave Mimi. I don't know what's right, I'm *so* confused, *so* full of doubt. I'm afraid that I just want to be with you, and that I'm seizing a great opportunity to leave Boston so that a later move to be with you won't be at Mimi's expense. (Does that kind of doubt make sense to you?) Is this what Lucinda means by making excuses? [11/8/94]

I don't know *what* to think anymore. I just want to be away from her, not listening to her, not hurt by her any more.

I just *hurt* all over, my head, my heart, my stomach, my chest. Right now I feel like I would trade never knowing Mimi to have never known this woman. [11/8/94]

And I called Patty Brook at Microsoft to verbally accept the offer. All I can say is that I'm *still* agonized by this; but I just *can't* turn it down and not have that security under all our feet again. I'll see in the weeks ahead whether I find anything to make me jilt them, or whether I have to ask for a later starting date. [11/11/94]

That is, his reasons for not staying to be with his real daughter after his divorce are pretty base: lust, hatred for his ex-wife, money, and, by inference, a desire to have the slate of his messy life wiped clean. On the one hand, this doesn't argue very stridently for his future fidelity to my daughter's interests, particularly if they should come into conflict with his own desires. On the other hand, his willingness to ignore my daughter for seven years and his willingness to walk away from his real daughter after six years does tend to argue rather cogently that this behavior pattern will be repeated. I don't think it's me he's afraid of...

And there is more, of course, ever and always more. Even though he did not bring the paternity suit, he did participate in it. Why did he, if he is afraid of me? The obvious argument is that he is not afraid of me. A plausible counter-argument is that I was so crippled in mid-February, when the suit was brought, that I presented no peril to him. But wait... If I was too crippled to present a threat then, how was I so very threatening to my wife a month-and-a-half earlier, when I was much more crippled? To argue about the nature of liars with respect to my wife and her paramour would be to commit the logical fallacy of Assuming the Consequent. I am arguing by relatively non-subtle means that they are liars, but it would not be warranted to argue that the archetypical behavior of liars proves that they belong in that category; it would assume the point in question. But one of the interesting behaviors that does typify liars as a group, and which might prove to be a useful lens for discovering the truth in this matter, is this: liars always assume that no one is ever going to check up on more than one lie at a time. We have two pieces of data, and they contradict each other: he was afraid of me except when I was crippled, but she was afraid of me when I was crippled. At least one of these propositions is untrue.

If you want to defeat any kind of vicious fraud--comply with it literally, adding nothing of your own to disguise its nature. --Ayn Rand

I am discomfitted to have the details of my life displayed in public in this way, but this is not because they are sordid details. In general, I prefer that private matters remain private, both because dignity commands that we mind our own business and because, frankly, the small details of a person's life are trivial, obvious and boring. But I think the circumstances justify making publicly accessible what I would normally prefer to keep private. Certainly, neither I nor my children have done anything to be ashamed of, and it is our misfortune to be possessed of lives that are, for now at least, interesting in their small details. Moreover, the usurpation of my children is being effected in silence, in darkness, in secret, and so it is in the cold, clear light of the public square that we must seek our refuge.

If some craven voyeur finds his furtive delight in the exposure of what is, perhaps, the most amazingly Internet-documented divorce in history, so be it. But if one person of justice sees what has been done here and is swayed to act, it will all be worthwhile. We like to comfort ourselves with the thought that we are protected by the law, but we are not. We are protected only by the self-restraint of our neighbors, by their self-loving will to act for equity when their base interests might impel them toward iniquity. Here the law is found on the side of iniquity, or at least absurdity, and so I must appeal to my neighbors to speak out for justice in spite of the law. My daughter is not the only person caught in this awful trap, after all, yet she may be the poster-child for the cause of the rights of parents, when parents are distinguished from progenitors. Certainly her case is without any of the ambiguities that have clouded other such appeals: we are all of the same race, and the man who spawned her life evinced no interest in asserting a paternity claim until doing so was advantageous for usurping custody, nearly seven years after he fertilized the egg that resulted in my daughter's life. My interest, obviously, and hers is to have this horrible paternity order set aside. But if by the example of our case, so perfect in its monumental injustice, we can establish, at least in Arizona, the right of people who raise children not to have their children taken away by people who merely spawn children, then we will have done something of great moment and great worth.

My attorneys are mounting a Special Action Appeal of the paternity order and I am pursuing relief before the state legislature, as is discussed in my testimony. If you would like to do something, I would be very grateful. The best thing you could do is to express your feelings to the subcommittee at:

Domestic Relations Reform Study Subcommittee
of the Arizona State Legislature
1700 West Washington Street
Phoenix, AZ 85007

If you wish to get in touch with me, you can send email to gswann@presenceofmind.net or physical mail to:

Greg Swann
1006 West Main Street, #101
Mesa, AZ 85201

It is my private delight to create fictional characters who write in their own behalf in the first person and whom I subsequently quote as though they were real people. My normal email signature file is this:

We are what we do, not what we say we do... --Janio Valenta

No secrets, no lies. I shall conclude this file with a different quotation, a statement about the fundamental justice of the universe:

Nobody ever gets away with anything. --Ramblin' Gamblin' Willie