Introduction
This article is designed to introduce you to the Civil Law PostDivorce Child Custody Scheme that your state uses to terminate your parental rights by default and uses to promote the scam that the state can convey to natural fit parents those parental rights that are Natural Rights, that are Fundamental Rights, and which are entitled to the full weight of federal constitutional guarantees protecting such rights.
The state can NOT “grant” to you that which you already have, natural individually protected parental rights. It is a legal impossibility, a nullity.
If you see this scheme for what it truly is, then you can defeat it. If you go into this thinking that it is natural and right for your individual natural parental rights to depend on marriage to the child’s other parent just as was the case under the Bastardy Codes of the Nineteenth Century, then you will be chewed up and spit out by the system a much poorer person with a limited license to parent your child, if you are lucky.
The Scheme
The state has established a state policy under its civil law codes that terminates parental rights upon the mere filing of a child custody petition or divorce petition and establishes a state licensing scheme where the former rights are replaced by a limited parental license. By default, each parent receives, if they receive any license at all, an unequal license whereby one parent’s speech and parental authority is enhanced by the state and the other parent’s speech and parental authority is diminished.
This policy is referenced herein and throughout as the state’s “Civil Law PostDivorce Child Custody Scheme” where it is applied against divorced parents and the state’s “Civil Law Unmarried Parent Child Custody Scheme” where it is applied against unmarried parents who were never married. It is essentially the same scheme.
To establish this parental license as a state regulatory action, the state must make a policy choice regarding first, whether either parent will receive a license, second which of the two parents will receive the greater license, and third the unique nature of each license. While the state’s civil code may provide an unequal default license, the state’s regulator has “broad” discretion to craft the license as he or she chooses with few if any recognized constitutional constraints on the authority to craft this license.
The primary purpose of this license is to regulate the times, the places, and the manner in which parent and child may speak with one another, may associate with one another, may worship together as a family with one another, and may share family privacy with one another. It also regulates the otherwise lawful and constitutionally protected child-rearing privacy choices fit parents are permitted to make.
This parental license is a prior restraint on parent-child speech, association, worship, family privacy, and parental authority to make child-rearing privacy choices. This license establishes a state censorship scheme whereby the state regulates intimate and expressive, close family, parent-child speech, association, and decision-making based upon the state’s preferred policy interests.
Traditional Separation of Powers Principles
The state legislature has established the broad civil law postdivorce child custody scheme as a state policy but lacks the means to regulate the details of applying this policy to individual parents. Under well-established Separation of Powers Doctrine norms, regulatory authority would be vested in an executive branch agency headed by an executive branch official.
Under established concepts of the separation of government powers, the legislature sets the broad policy interests and delegates to the executive authority to regulate and enforce these policy interests. The executive branch has developed a coherent scheme of regulatory authority with constitutionally mandated checks and balances that seek to ensure constitutional compliance in the regulation and enforcement of state policy interests.
At the top of the list of constitutional guarantees provided under the executive branch regulatory and enforcement scheme is 1) specific notice of the state’s intended regulatory actions, 2) a pre-deprivation hearing addressing the issues asserted in the notice, opportunity to challenge the state’s official imposing the state’s policy interests, the state’s regulatory intent, the state’s justification for the policy and regulation, the precision with which the state has crafted its regulatory authority, and the means the state seeks to employ to achieve the state’s policy interests. If the regulated individual is dissatisfied with the legal protections afforded in this process, they have recourse to challenge the state’s policy, regulation, and enforcement before a neutral and impartial judicial decision-maker who is NOT predisposed to rule against them.
Where the rights being regulated are fundamental, the judicial decision-maker must begin from the presumption that state regulation of fundamental rights is unconstitutional until such time as the state’s delegated official appears and demonstrates that the state can overcome this presumption of unconstitutionality. Due process demands this appearance and demonstration in every case with case-by-case demonstrations.
The State’s Civil Law PostDivorce Child Custody Scheme Works Differently
Under the state’s civil law postdivorce child custody scheme, the entire scheme of executive branch constitutional guarantees is summarily denied. No executive branch department or official is granted regulatory or enforcement authority and no executive branch official is delegated specific authority to testify as to the state’s interests, authority, or means, even if the State’s Attorney General may have general authority.
To achieve the state’s asserted state interests, the state has established a statutory rule for classifying parents under the scheme. That rule is that a sole state official will make the state’s value judgement after conducting an unbridled exploratory search into private realms of family life, parent-child speech, and otherwise lawful and constitutionally protected parental privacy choices. This value judgement is labeled a Best Interests of the Child Determination and is used as the basis for the prior restraints previously discussed.
The state has established a state policy to pick and chose between fit parents to classify one parent as “best” and the other parent as “less-than-best.” Under this policy the state provides unequal protection of parental rights, providing greater protections for the parent classified as “best” and lesser protections for the parent classified as “less-than-best.” The state first terminates fundamental rights, then it presumes authority to “grant” those “rights” back, as a limited license forever subject to revocation under the state’s terms. Every bit of this scheme turns on the mere viewpoint of a sole state official regarding matters of privacy in family life and the judge’s opinion of the parents’ otherwise lawful and constitutionally protected parental choices.
The state has delegated this best interest policy and regulatory determination role to a judicial officer, the same judicial officer who holds sole jurisdiction to hear challenges to the state’s policy, regulation, and enforcement. This is ideal for the state because the expenses of operating a state agency and appearing in every child custody case is eliminated. Parents are compelled to pay for the state’s regulation of their rights themselves. And the state ensures that its policies, regulations, and enforcement actions will NEVER face competent constitutional review because history has proven that NO judge ever holds his own regulatory and enforcement actions to be unconstitutional and NO judge ever overturns state policy granting him unbridled discretion over the private lives of a disfavored class.
Under the scheme, a sole state official interprets the state’s asserted policy interests, devises a regulatory scheme with unpublished regulatory rules, and enforces the policy and unpublished regulatory rules with imprisonment at the state official’s sole unchallengeable discretion.
This is less than ideal for the parents because their fate turns on the mere opinion of a state official who they must please to retain any semblance of rights with their child. There is literally no objective fact that can be proven to protect a parent’s rights under the grant of broad discretion. There is NO means of avoiding loss of parental rights because there exists NO means to challenge the presumptive termination of rights and NO means to challenge the granting of the limited parental license.
The only criterion at issue is the viewpoint of a sole state official regarding whether you are the “best” or the “less-than-best” parent. You either bow before this godlike individual, beg for his grace, denigrate the other parent, and enflame the judge’s emotions against the other parent or you lose your child, are compelled to work as an indentured servant of the state providing a percentage of your income in support of third parties, and face imprisonment for failure to adequately produce income to the state’s arbitrary standard.
Denial of Access to the Courts
The scheme is designed to deprive you of your fundamental right to access the courts to resolve conflicts the state has created between itself and your constitutional rights.
You must remember that your ex did NOT create the state’s civil law code. Your ex has zero power to impose the terms of the state’s civil law code on you. Only state action by a state official acting under authority of that civil code can use the power of the state to deprive you of rights to your child. Your ex is merely asking the state to violate your rights. That is the extent of their power.
Under this scheme you can NOT meaningfully sue to challenge any of violations caused by the scheme because the person taking these actions against your rights is the sole individual with authority to hear your challenges. In order to succeed, you are required to convince this sole state official that they themselves have violated your rights and that their regulatory and enforcement orders that they themselves created and signed are unconstitutional.
The odds of success are so close to zero as to be indistinguishable from zero.
You can, of course, appeal these state actions but there is a catch. Each and every member of the appellate panel who will review your appeal has also been in the exact same position as your trial court judge and has done essentially the exact same things that you are complaining of and they have done these things many times over.
To win on appeal, you are required to convince a panel of judges that the exact same things they routinely did as trial court judges are unconstitutional. You must convince them to overturn every child custody case they ever ruled on as a trial court judge and to admit that they were wrong and that they were routinely violating the constitution. The odds of meaningful success here are even closer to zero than at trial.
If you review state appellate court decisions with a critical eye, you will find that they overturn minor technical issues on minor technical justifications or if they make larger rulings, those rulings pose zero danger of upsetting the apple cart. They do just enough to provide a false façade of acting as a proper appellate court, but the fix is in. You are likely already familiar with this practice in other circumstances. The Mafia uses a similar tactic where the only way to move up in the organization is to be witnessed by others in the organization committing ever more serious crimes. This ensures that if you rat on them, they rat on you. In geopolitics its called detente.
The fact that a state court judge rather than an executive official is imposing state policy regulation and enforcement on you creates numerous roadblocks that make it very difficult to have these issues heard in a federal court. Many fathers we know have attempted to use a federal removal statue to this effect but have failed in every case. We agree with these father’s interpretation of this statute and believe the Supreme Court got this one absolutely wrong, nevertheless, the Supreme Court already ruled on this issue. The Supreme Court gets the final word and the federal removal statute is a dead end.
Clarity About the Scheme
What you need to clearly understand about this scheme is that your judge is NOT neutral or impartial. Your judge is NOT independent from state policy interests. Your judge is NOT your friend. You can NOT make the judge your friend without going over to their side.
You can prove this is true by what the state’s best interests of the child policy demands of your judge. It requires your judge to agree before your proceedings ever even begin, that the judge will rule in every such case in favor of the state’s policy interests against the constitutional rights of the litigant parents and against the federal law mandating that they place protecting constitutional rights above all else.
Your judge enters the courtroom predetermined to do the state’s bidding, to exercise judicial power at the legislature’s specific command.
In every single case your rights are violated from the initiation of suit as that is the point where your rights are effectively terminated. From that point forward, you are entitled to NO constitutional guarantees to protect those rights and the state asserts authority to “grant” them back to you as it pleases. You are provided zero opportunity to meaningfully challenge this presumptive termination of your rights.
This action is state initiated termination of parental rights that places the state action on the same plane as state-initiated unfitness hearings, and the same due process protections are mandated to protect your rights, but they are ignored. Even if you manage to walk out of court with your 50/50 rights seemingly intact, your rights are still violated because from the point of suit until your child ages out your so-called rights are subject to no more protection than the mere opinion of a sole state official.
Consider The Rights of the Child
In every single case, the rights of the child are violated by the state and by the court. In every single case, the child loses some part of a parent based NOT upon the parents’ protected choices but rather because the state claimed authority to “grant” “rights” to the parents and to the child. The state exercises state authority to meaningfully interfere with a child’s private life upon NO legitimate justification. The child always loses in every single case. At a minimum the child loses the protection from state interference in their private lives that only fully protected parental rights can provide.
Your state’s civil law postdivorce child custody scheme punishes children for the otherwise lawful and constitutionally protected choices their parents make when the state disagrees with those lawful and protected choices. In this regard, your state’s civil law postdivorce child custody scheme is indistinguishable from the Bastardy Codes that the Supreme Court overturned in the 1970’s.
The question must be asked, how can the actions of a sole state official to violate a child’s fundamental rights be rationally related to the state’s asserted goal of acting in the child’s best interests.
It can NEVER be in any child’s “best interests” for a sole state official to deprive the child of fundamental rights without affording that child all the constitutional guarantees the constitution mandates for the protection of that child’s rights.
What constitutional guarantees has your child been afforded before your child custody court judge deprived your child of a fit parent?
Conclusion
We have zero doubt that your state’s civil law postdivorce child custody scheme is unconstitutional. We have proven it so in dozens of different ways.
We have undeniable constitutional proof of the violations in a form that is proper to place before the courts. What we need is an honest court and a strong parent willing to change the system to protect their own child.
There are federal court judges who have never before been state child custody judges. We are working to get these federal constitutional challenges before such a federal court judge but the scheme places significant roadblocks between fit parents and the federal courts. We are systematically dismantling those roadblocks and will, with your help, remove them completely before we are done.
Our children have aged out. We kept our rights to our children without the knowledge we provide to you now. You can do the same, easier with this knowledge but first you must recognize the essential nature of the scheme because having that knowledge is the only means of defeating the scheme.
Questions
What is “Civil Law PostDivorce Child Custody Scheme”?
The term “Civil Law PostDivorce Child Custody Scheme” was created by Ron B Palmer of Constitutional Scholars Inc. in 2023 to convey in concise terms exactly why the scheme is unconstitutional. First it is a civil law scheme requiring civil law or civil rights protections. The scheme is initiated by a divorce between fit parents, an exercise of the fundamental right to divorce, to impose the state’s viewpoint regarding child-rearing onto parents and children as punishment for the parents choosing to divorce. All of the civil rights violations inherent in the scheme, derive directly from the state’s child custody determination which is fundamentally and deeply unconstitutional.
This short phrase packs a lot of power and is easy to repeat in your filings.
