It seems the fallout from divorce can last a long, long time. In what may be an extreme result of parental alienation, Jan Schill, who currently lives in Durango, Colorado, took out an ad with her husband in an Oklahoma City newspaper imploring voters to vote against her father, John Mantooth, who is running for judge. She also started a website dedicated to keeping her father from being elected, in which she posts 30-year-old documents from her parents’ divorce, among other things, to put her father in a bad light.
Keith Gaddie, a University of Oklahoma political science professor, calls the ad “reality show politics,” saying: “It’s unsavory. It’s undignified, and it’s real.”
Given the nightmare Mantooth’s experience with his ex must have been and the apparent parental alienation that caused his daughter to hate him, I hope the man is elected. What we need is more male judges who have been through rough divorces and can sympathize with what other men are facing when they have to deal with family law. Forcing men to face older judges from another time when women didn’t leave their husbands in such prodigious numbers has resulted in vast injustices, because the default assumption is that the man must have been really a horrible person to force his poor, innocent little wife to seek help from the judge in removing him (but not his income) from her life.
