I may have mentioned before that I am American and my wife is Mexican, and we live in Mexico with our baby son. He was born in Mexico, so I have applied to the U.S. Embassy for recognition of his U.S. citizenship at birth through me.

The recognition process demands all kinds of documentation to prove the fulfillment of various requirements to pass on U.S. citizenship to the child.

When the U.S. citizen parent is the father, as in our case, not only must he provide the birth certificate showing him as the father, but he must also provide proof of relationship with the mother, in particular proof in the form of timestamped photos and passport stamps, inter alia, that he was in the same place as the mother during or around the time of conception. If the Embassy is not satisfied with this evidence, it will require the US citizen father to order a paternity test. I personally read about a case like this from a member of a Facebook group about the process for obtaining a Consular Report of Birth Abroad (the equivalent of a birth certificate for U.S. citizens born outside the country); she was still living with her ex when she met her now husband (the U.S. citizen parent) and conceived her child with him shortly thereafter, and the latter was ultimately required to provide positive DNA test results to obtain recognition of their son's U.S. citizenship.

I wouldn't find all this unfair if it weren't for the fact that the government regularly goes after men for child support because, .e.g., the mother put his name on the birth certificate without him knowing, or because he had the same name as the person in question (this happened to a man who had only been 10 years old when the child in question was born!), or because a man acted like a father towards a child for a certain period of time (which would not be recognized for the procedure in question by the U.S. Embassy).

If men are constantly imposed paternal obligations by law based on very low standards of evidence, shouldn't we be entitled to enjoy those low standards when we exercise our paternal rights? If being named on a birth certificate is enough to be required to pay child support, shouldn't it be enough for me to gladly and willingly transfer my citizenship to my son?

Now, one may say that the consular citizenship recognition procedure for my son is a federal matter, while the cases of child support being imposed on men who are clearly not the father are state matters. However, considering that there are federal laws to enforce such unfair child support judgments across state lines, the federal government has clearly endorsed such dubious state-level attributions of paternity and paternal obligations.

Therefore, I think I am right to consider the U.S. federal government hypocritical for demanding mountains of evidence to prove that I am my son's father in order to bequeath him the benefits of my citizenship, since the same federal government would help a state squeeze money out of me for nothing more than my being named as the father on the birth certificate of a child I may not even know.

ADDENDUM: I would also argue that this inconsistency shows how the best interests of the child are only applied when it is convenient. If the best interests of the child dictate that the state must falsely attribute paternity to non-fathers when it allows the child to have more material resources, shouldn't they also dictate the same when it allows the child to have a citizenship that will provide him or her with far greater life opportunities than the citizenship already recognized? It seems that principle goes out the window when there's no man being made to suffer, or no man whose resources are to be extracted.