“Divorce court has no boundaries and the abuse you seek to escape in your marriage is magnified by our current family court system and in many cases made worse. You become more mistreated and abused and worse now they have the authority and approval of the courts to do it and become even more empowered. You can feel more abused than you were in your marriage and have less power and authority over your children. Your children become weapons for parent abusing the system. The other parent is rendered powerless to protect the children from being used by the very system that is supposed to protect them and your rights.
Within the walls of family law is power that has grown so enormous that parents have become nothing more than pawns and children weapons. The court wields its powers in the name of the children and the parent they choose to side with. Parents that try to challenge them are threatened losing even more rights and lose the little time they might still have with their children. The system purposely makes the cost to standing up to them unbearable for most parents and thus the system is left to flourish while the parent is left barren and to a life of servitude to the other parent that has stolen their children with the system’s blessing.
What motivates the judges and attorneys to attack a parent and their children in this way? It’s not protection of the children as they claim, its protection of their power, their finances, and the livelihood of their friends and colleagues. They soothe their consciences with the platitude that they are acting “in the best interest of the children” when in fact they are supporting a multi-billion dollar industry funded on the backs of children.”[1]
The courts act as if fighting for your children and the preservation of your time and your rights with your children is offensive. What’s offensive is the judges and attorneys near unlimited power to destroy the lives of children. It would be offensive to not fight the courts from giving the other parent superior rights over your time and your decision making authority to the other parent unequally. It is offensive for the courts to continue to believe that parents must get along in order to continue to parent their children on their own separate time. It is offensive for a court to choose a favorite parent over the other. It is offensive for the court to use their own personal biases or anyone elses to decide who is a better parent, etc. and use that as an excuse to violate our rights.
Subjecting parent’s rights to who has the better argument puts these rights at unnecessary risk. Parents should not have to know the law or know how to argue to keep their children. It is fundamental, it is natural, it is there for all, not just those who get lucky to have an attorney that knows how to argue their rights better than another.
Regardless of how powerful the judges have become, there is no one who can stand in the way of a Judge’s power like a parent whose rights to their children are being threatened. When parents finally realize that they wield the sword that can strike all of this injustice down, the court’s will be forced to fall back to their proper role and to stop taking advantage of them. Parents are the only ones who can defend their rights and protect their children from one of the greatest violations of parental civil rights crimes of our time. And parents are the only ones that can keep forfeiting their rights to the courts and giving them permission to continue to harm them and their children. It is time to stop being afraid of the state, stop letting them trick you into believing that it is your ex doing this to you, and to demand our rights be respected.
My experiences and research exposes the reality of divorce and the greatest lies that you are being told by many attorneys, judges, and other professionals, and even others in the community, and how they are leading you down paths that have been getting these same bad and unjust results for generations. Ask yourself why attorneys would think that they would get different results by following the exact same patterns of the attorneys before them when most cases ended up with the same results – one parent is primary decision maker and the other is rendered a visitor. How dare they render a parent a “visitor” in a child’s life, what can possibly be more offensive than that? Many attorneys are parents too and many of them have also suffered this same treatment. Some decide to take on this battle with the courts and some cannot continue in their profession after they know this. It devastates them and challenges all that they thought law was.
BLOCK IN: Some states have begun to change the wording in their statutes. Arizona no longer uses the word visitation and has changed it to custody time.
Why do attorneys keep handling divorce cases the same way when they know that ultimately it is going to end with one parent’s relationship with the children becoming severely limited and severely damaged and sometimes permanently severed? Don’t they see the injustice, or have they simply become numb to it as they continue to collect their fees?
I had the same questions when I was going through it. Why would they keep filing the same things that has gotten the same results over generations, why do they keep approaching the fight in the same way, why weren’t they protecting my rights and my children’s rights to be with both parents, why did they keep involving the children but telling me not to involve them, and how could they keep looking me in the eye and assuring me they were protecting me and my children when they knew exactly the way it was going to turn out? Why were they encouraging a win-lose format? And how could they do this over and over again and still be getting away with it?.”[2]
In previous posts I talk about how this has been happening because parents haven’t known how to stand up to it or were unknowingly forfeit their rights. But this post discusses my belief that parents’ rights to their children should not be subject to forfeiture or error of the law as a common practice in divorce.
I remember the day my lawyer told me that the judge was finally bringing my children back home. The relief, the intensity of the flood of emotions, the disbelief that it was even real, after so many hearings and so many losses, and so many years. Sometimes days felt like weeks and weeks felt like months and months felt like years when the court battles were raging and I would suffer not being able to be with the children at all let alone the equal time that we had in our orders because the other parent was not forced to follow the custody time orders.
One day before the children were scheduled to fly home, I received a call that an emergency lawsuit was filed and a hearing scheduled for that very Monday. The children would arrive home on Saturday and then the judge would hear pleadings from a new lawsuit filed now in the name of one of my adult daughters to try and take custody back. What started out as equal custody rights and equal time now was being ripped apart over and over again from multiple attorney tactics for no valid reasons under the law whatsoever. Once again one parent was allowed to use the system and the children to increase the stress on the children and me again before they even arrived back home. So now the children would arrive riled up again and with the belief that they would be taken again by the court and that they were just flying back temporarily. They would not be able to settle. This is five years after our original divorce had finalized. They were constantly being pulled into this fight and I was constantly being prevented from keeping them out of it. They had been told that this is their fight. They believed now that they were fighting against their mother to be with their father. That is what the court allowed this to become because they refused to enforce our equal time with the children. The courts delayed for years, and over 17 hearings later, before we finally got a judge that decided to enforce orders. The equal rights divorce decree had never seemed to matter to the court. They forced us to fight each other even though we had an order that said we were equal five years prior.
I did not know what to expect from the children when they got off the plane. The day they arrived, a female attorney secretly called the children on their cell phones. She told them to hide from me and talk to her in private. Another adult, someone that claims to be a professional trained in the law, a stranger to me and my children, interfering with my children and my ability to parent them. Telling them to try and get somewhere away from me so that they could talk. All of this without my permission and without any provocation or induction of any valid child protective laws. There was nothing plead that rose to the level of child abuse or neglect. They entered child preference statements in the form of affidavits. This is how this attorney wasted what my former husband claimed was their college funds that went to pay for this attorney. These disgusting practices go on ever day in family law. Beware of these types of attorneys. You think they are helping gain advantage in court while they are taking advantage of your children and their future funds for their development in life.
Do we want to keep blinding ourselves and claim that this is protecting our children from abuse or are we all ready to do something better? “Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.” ― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
If parents did not have to worry about someone else being allowed to cost them money and put their rights at risk and at the mercy of how good an attorney can argue their rights, parents could work through the natural stress of a divorce and the loss of a relationship, and get back to being able to focus on being there for their children while they are working through this change in life. By not adding to their stress with unwarranted threats from the law and lawsuits without proper causes of action you protect the children.
Parental rights are fundamental and are too precious and core to our meaning of life and our pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. Parental rights are part of who we are. Parental rights are too precious to be subject to which lawyer has the better argument. Parental rights are what protect our children’s rights.
If we can determine that the color of a person’s skin does not decide whether or not he/she receives equal rights. Then we can determine that parents going through divorce do not justify challenging their equal rights. If we required every person whose skin color was different to hire a lawyer and defend their right to be treated equally as a white person, their rights would be subjected to the skill of the argument of the attorney. Many of them would be subjected to losing some of their rights, having to bargain some of their rights away when they ran out of money to fight, having to live through restrictions or deprivations that they just didn’t know how to take to a higher level effectively, etc. Many could not pursue their dreams and would suffer not only from legal poverty from all of the costs and the bills that they incurred from the battle but also would suffer the discrimination that the passage of the constitutional protections were put in place to protect them from. Parents today are suffering from having to argue their rights that are supposed to be protected by the constitution as well.
Injustices and deprivations and eliminations of their rights based on individually having to argue that they deserve to be treated equally under the law and that they deserve to have the same rights as the other parent is causing injustice and damage to families and to our communities. Divorcing parents should not be subjected to having to pay attorneys for protection of rights that are inherent to them individually and fundamental to their very being. Parents should not be subject to risking their rights to how good an attorney argues those rights. As mentioned earlier, if that were allowed to happen to anyone else in society based on whatever criteria the other person suing them decides to base it on, i.e., skin color, gender, hair style, clothing selection, etc., we would find society paralyzed and unable to live life the way that we have grown accustomed to be required in order to be a fully functioning democratic society. Everyone would constantly live in fear the way that parents live when they are going through a divorce. Everyone would be subjected to constantly having to worry that one of their most precious and important beings in their life is going to be ripped from them at the slightest error in argument or not knowing how to argue a law or a right.
This cannot be how we handle families going through divorce. For far too long we have been blinded by our altruistic tendencies to want to protect others. Somewhere along the line we have been subjected to these emotional connections to other people’s children. While at the same time children become subject to harm from people that are not emotionally connected to protecting your children, but instead they are emotionally connected to either their money or to exacting revenge on one of the parents and do not care how this affects the children. We are allowing our emotional tendencies and biases to get in the way of protecting people from unwarranted discrimination and from an industry growing from these unjustified legal practices.
Divorce is two people who have decided to live separately. Just as two people decide to get married and do not require lawyers and lawsuits to determine their disagreements with the marriage or the relatives. There is nothing there that invokes the necessity of the interference of the law. Parents cannot get a court to hear a lawsuit regarding a disagreement with time spent with the children in marriage, and they should not be allowed to be heard in a lawsuit regarding their disagreements that would interfere with each parent’s individual rights to their children in divorce other than an equal splitting of their 50/50 time. Allowing courts to entertain people’s disagreements in divorce and allowing the court to insert their legal reasoning and pile on top of that their requirements to know how to argue under the rules of the law has created a burden that has allowed error in argument to determine what parent gets to continue to exercise their inherent and unalienable right to parent their child free of governmental interference unless they have violated a law that would require the preclusion of that exercise of rights.
“I had been left struggling with the question of whether it was all worth it – to believe that there was a better life, to believe that working hard to do what was right was worth it. If the life you build and the children you have could be taken away for such things as a failed marriage or for doing things that weren’t favored by your mainstream conservative community. If attorneys and judges could take advantage of you and your children and use up everything you saved and worked so hard for; what was the reason for trying to earn a life that they could just rip from you at your ex’s whim?”[3]
“Whether the courts recognize it today or not, we, the parents, have to force them to recognize that they do not have the inherent authority to take people’s kids without the same due process they would afford a married couple. They only get away with it today because they require parents to challenge them. The courts interpret family law in ways that support their near unlimited power while completely ignoring U.S. Supreme Court rulings. It is going to take a similar effort to that that abolished slavery in this country, a similar passion to that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandi put into their causes, and similar courage to that demonstrated by women in fighting for the right to vote, if the courts insist on continuing this path.
It is time to force the courts and the legal system to protect parents’ rights and to stop letting them force us to give up our children. We are going to have to force them to recognize they cannot make laws or statutes that violate parent’s equal rights and equal time to their children. They cannot take your children and neuter your parental rights with orders that seem to give you rights but leave you completely unable to exercise those rights without your continue permission to do this. This book shows you how you are being tricked into giving them permission, how you are being tricked into forfeiting your rights, how your attorney’s pleadings are forfeiting your rights and asking the judge to do this to you.
The difference between this book and the other books that I have read is that other books make you believe that hiring an attorney is going to protect you and your children, and that justice will prevail if you follow their advice and system.
Other books make you believe that you are in control and that you can stop the battle with some simple techniques and that you are just as responsible for the battle and its continuation as is your ex. This book reveals what really happens to parents that follow this advice without knowing what is really going on and without being aware of what it is they are really fighting, and what happens if they give in. This book is a real account of what happens even if you do what they say, after hiring attorneys, counselors and psychologists, and consulting with other experts, etc., and what happens when they continue the same patterns of those before them. It is also about what happens when orders are not enforced and what happens when they are.
I wrote this book, because book after book that I read, continued to get the argument wrong, and to ignore the crucial role that the courts and attorneys and experts are playing in all of this.
Fighting parents do not “abdicate their responsibility to a stranger – the judge” to take over their decision making. Parents fighting does not take away the court’s duty to protect parental rights equally, and does not give the court permission to violate their responsibility to uphold the law. It only takes one parent to start a fight. It’s time to recognize that this does not give the court a right to strip the other parent from their equal rights and time to their children. And it should not give the parent that wants to fight the right to cost the parent excessively to keep their rights to their children either.
None of the people that I mentioned in this blog have changed their practices that I know about. The attorneys that involved my children may continue to involve and hurt children in other cases. As long as there are courts that continue to entertain and allow this it will continue. The court where my case was did not allow it and refused to entertain it. So the damage in my children’s lives was minimized and now they are able to live freely and as equally as possible with both of their parents. Thanks to a judge that finally saw through it all and put a stop to all of it. All it will take is more courts refusing to entertain these horrible harmful practices and the professionals will have to focus on something other than using your children.
I share these experiences and information with you so that other judges can start to change the way that they handle divorce child custody disputes and parental rights. My family is proof that even after a highly contentious battle if the equal time and rights of the parents is respected there is less conflict and the less harm to the children, regardless of whether or not someone’s personal opinions is opposed to children having two equal homes. Let the parents raise their equally without being forced to spend all of the money that could be spent on developing the children in your courtroom.
