Ignore, for a moment, the plight of the man who doesn’t want to be a father. While his girlfriend/wife/girl he met in the bar all have the legal opportunity to bail out of their parental duties (and here in Denver, for a few days after a child is born, it is even legal to abandon the infant if the abandonment happens at one of the state sanctioned “please do something about this nuisance so that I don’t have to actually deal with my own responsibilities and actions, thanks a bunch” stations) while the dad has little to nothing to say about the blessed event. But, hey, we’re leaving that to the side, right?

Now, what about the state labeled father who is nothing of the sort? That is, he isn’t the father, but the state still gets to hold him partially financially responsible for the life of a child.

Well, those guys get really screwed according to Matt Welch’s article in Reason that should have your blood bubbling gently in your veins.

What Pierce didn’t realize, and what nearly 10 million American men have discovered to their chagrin since the welfare reform legislation of 1996, is that when the government accuses you of fathering a child, no matter how flimsy the evidence, you are one month away from having your life wrecked. Federal law gives a man just 30 days to file a written challenge; if he doesn’t, he is presumed guilty. And once that steamroller of justice starts rolling, dozens of statutory lubricants help make it extremely difficult, and prohibitively expensive, to stop—even, in most cases, if there’s conclusive DNA proof that the man is not the child’s father.

This stacked deck against accused dads has provoked a backlash movement, triggering “paternity fraud” legislation and related legal challenges in more than a dozen states. Combined with advances in genetic technology, this conflict may end up changing the way we define parenthood. For now, the system aimed at catching “deadbeat dads” illustrates how a noble-sounding effort to help children and taxpayers can trample the rights of innocent people.

Here’s how it works: When an accused “obligor” fails, for whatever reason, to send his response on time, the court automatically issues a “default judgment” declaring him the legal father. It does not matter if he was on vacation, was confused, or (as often happens) didn’t even receive the summons, or if he simply treated the complaint’s deadlines with the same lack of urgency people routinely exhibit toward jury duty summonses—he’s now the dad. “In California, you don’t even have to have proof of service of the summons!” says Rod Wright, a recently retired Democratic state senator from Los Angeles who tried and failed to get several paternity-related reform bills, including a proof-of-service requirement, past former Gov. Gray Davis’ veto. “They only are obligated to send it to the last known address.”

Because, yeah, legal parental obligations that could potentially result in decades of obligations should be decided with little in the way of actual proof.

Read the story.