A fight rages on about a grandfather in Scottsdale, Arizona, who was kicked out of a Barnes & Noble store on May 4 after the heinous and unforgivable crime of shopping for his grandchildren.

The man, 73 year old Dr. Omar Amin, was looking for books for his two grandsons in the children’s section, when a B&N employee approached him, told him that “men alone cannot be by themselves in the children’s area,” and was forced out of the store.

We weren’t going to bring this up, but since you asked, yes, there was a complaint made that day by a woman – and yes, that was the real reason why Amin was removed.

According to Irish Times, many fathers in Ireland are unaware that they have no “automatic right” to their own child’s custody and guardianship. And while married and happy relationships would never unearth this sort of lack of rights, the legal trouble comes to light when mothers abduct their kids. This difficult disparity is also illustrated by the statistic that one third of births in Ireland occur in unwed relationships.

To read some of the nitty gritty details, check out the Irish Times, sauced below.

Some Michigan fathers, along with lawyers and lawmakers are fighting a 55 year old law that binds a child conceived during a marriage to that marriage – even if the child was conceived outside of that marriage. Need a moment to sort that one out? Thought so.

The story’s made easier (?) to understand by the case of Daniel Quinn, who was living with Candace Beckwith for three years. Beckwith was still married to another man (but separated from him). Quinn and Beckwith conceived a child – Maeleigh.

Oren Adar and Mickey Ray Smith, a California same-sex couple, adopted a baby in his birth-state of Louisiana. A registrar in Louisiana named only one of the men on the baby’s (amended) birth certificate, which has gay advocacy groups up in arms over adoption policy when dealing with same-sex marriage. This last Tuesday, the Supreme denied Adar and Smith’s appeal without comment.

The couple argues that there are many practical and legal reasons for listing both Adar and Smith on the birth certificate. Social Security, taxes, inheritance, insurance, school registration, passports, as well as “parents’ and child’s right to make medical decisions for other family members at the necessary moments; determining custody, care, and support of the child in the event of a separation or divorce between the parents,” according to their appeal by Lambda Legal.

The Louisiana registrar that denied both mens’ names on the birth certificate, cited that, according to CNN, “the term ‘adoptive parents’ in the applicable section of state law applies only to married parents, because in Louisiana, only married couples may jointly adopt a child.”

You can read more on this topic at the CNN sauce below.

The baby was adopted in Louisiana in 2006 and the adoption was finalized in New York, where the couple was then-living. Though the birth certificate issue has ended in defeat for Adar and Smith, they do remain joint custodial parents of their now-5-year-old son.

Good luck to Adar and Smith – and all other same-sex couples dealing with similar battles.

Fathers & Families reports that Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick signed a bill to reform alimony in the state,which used to require most men to pay “lifelong” alimony. It will also help women with short-term alimony that were not able in the past to collect it.

F&F Board Chairman Ned Holstein, MD, MS says that there’s still work to do: “The next step is to rid the alimony issue of gender bias — the idea that only men should pay it and only women should receive it. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in two-earner couples today, women out-earn men in about 33% of couples. Yet women are alimony payers in only 4% of cases. We need an even-handed approach.”

If you want to read about what else the bill did, check out F&F below.

Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Cameron, recently made a claim that runaway fathers should be shamed like drunk drivers. Sounds alright, yes? Quoth PM Cameron:

It’s high time runaway dads were stigmatised and the full force of shame was heaped upon them. They should be looked at like drink-drivers, people who are beyond the pale. They need the message rammed home to them that what they’re doing is wrong: that leaving single mothers, who do a heroic job against all odds, to fend for themselves simply isn’t acceptable.

No one’s got any problems with this. Any parent that doesn’t take responsibility for their kid should be looked at like a criminal. Butttttttt, evidently, just days prior, Cameron had unleashed a new welfare reform bill, that, along with other things, would charge single parents an upfront fee of £100 (about $62) and commission to go after deadbeats.

The welfare reform bill aims to make parents resolve problems before going to the Child Support Agency. The problem is that without a law behind it – there’s no “full force of shame” for deadbeats – because no one will know about them.

Read the much-more-informed Guardian article on the matter. We’re just here to make jokes via photoshop.

Sauce: The Guardian

The Supreme Court denied that decisions of citizenship have a gender bias. The claim was made by Mexican-born Ruben Flores-Villar, who was born in Tijuana to an American father and Mexican mother. If the parents’ nationalities were reversed, and his mother were American, Flores-Villar would be an American citizen.

Ruben Flores-Villar, who was brought to the United States at the age of two, was (much) later arrested and deported for smuggling marijuana and illegal entry. The Supreme Court upheld the decision with a 4-4 vote, but since it was a tie, won’t cause a precedent.

The laws for citizenship are dicey, and based out of 1940. According to CNN:

The man tried to avoid deportation by claiming he was a U.S. citizen. The case turned on a federal five-year residence requirement, after the age of 14, on U.S. male citizen fathers — but not on U.S. citizen mothers — before they may transmit citizenship to a child born out of wedlock abroad to a non-citizen.
The 1940 law states if the child’s mother is a U.S. citizen, the child will automatically be a U.S. citizen at birth, so long as the mother previously had lived in the United States for one year, at any age. But if only the child’s father is a U.S. citizen, the law mandates that the father have resided in the United States for 10 years prior to the child’s birth, at least five of which must be after the father was 14 years old.
Because the man’s father was only 16 when his son was born, he did not meet the five-year time frame before Flores-Villar was born.

So is there a gender bias in the immigration and citizenship policy that favors mothers over fathers? Was the Supreme Court’s denial of the bias enough to convince you that mothers should retain different abilities in citizenship than fathers?

Sauce: CNN

Yo California dads, do you have a teenager? Chances are that they’re on MySpace, Facebook, or some other social network. Tshaka Armstrong, Founder of Digital Shepherds, explains that California’s new “SB 1411″ law will give parents tools to protect their children against cyberbullying.