John Washington III Calls Georgia's Child Support System a Racket: Fatherhood, He Says, Should Not Turn on a Marriage License

Presidential candidate John Washington III turned his attention to Georgia family law on Sunday, arguing in a written statement that the state's child-support system recognizes an unmarried father when it is time to collect money from him but not when he seeks legal rights to raise his child.

Under Georgia law, as he described it, a man who has a child with a woman he is not married to can be legally required to pay child support, but that obligation does not automatically give him the legal right to custody or visitation. Even if he signs the birth certificate, he wrote, even if DNA proves he is the biological father, and even if he is paying child support, he generally must go through another legal process called legitimation before he can seek enforceable custody or visitation rights.

"The government can recognize you as a father when it's time to collect child support, but when it comes to having legal rights to raise your own child, suddenly you're required to go through another government process," he wrote. "I call that a racket." He called the arrangement "government overreach, plain and simple."

Washington was careful to separate the structure he is criticizing from the obligation itself. He wrote that he is not saying fathers should not financially support their children, and he framed his question as a matter of consistency: if the government can legally establish that a man is the father for financial obligations, he asked, why should the same father have to clear additional legal hurdles to establish his standing to seek parenting rights? "Fatherhood should not be determined by a marriage license," he wrote.

He also drew the limits of his position in the statement. It is not about taking rights away from mothers, he wrote, but about recognizing the importance of both parents in a child's life and protecting responsible fathers from unnecessary legal barriers. Courts, he added, keep their responsibility to protect children from abuse and dangerous situations — but simply being unmarried should not automatically put a father at a legal disadvantage.

Washington presented Georgia as one example of a larger pattern, arguing that state governments across the country have built laws that force people to navigate expensive legal processes in their personal and family lives, and that those laws should be examined. It is an argument with a natural audience in state capitals — Austin included — where family codes are written and where a presidential candidate's call to re-examine them becomes a legislative question as much as a campaign one.