Best Interest of the Child
The State's Best Interest of the Child "policy" is a "substantial state interest" justification applied to deprive fit parents and their children of core, fundamental, intimate-and-expressive, close-family association rights with each other. The terms of the State's interests are defined entirely by a sole government official's personal "viewpoint" regarding matters of conscience in child rearing, as applied to a particular child, to be used as the sole determining criteria of whether or not the child's and the parents' core fundamental rights will be violated by the state.
The Child's best Interest has been described by the Supreme Court as a judge's "opinion" in, Troxel, a child custody case, and as a "policy choice" when made by the Attorney General related to immigrant children. The more proper term is "viewpoint" as in viewpoint discrimination applied to justify violations of First Amendment protected intimate and expressive close family associations.
The Supreme Court has also described the State's pursuit of a child's best interests as a "state interest" in a child custody modification case between fit parents post divorce. In that case, the Supreme Court held the State's interest to be merely a "substantial" state interest that is categorically insufficient to justify violations of core fundamental rights.
Your judge's personal opinion regarding which of two parent-child associations is the "best" of the two parent-child associations, is about as relevant to your core fundamental rights as is your judge's viewpoint regarding who should be this years female vocalist of the year. What is "best" is a purely subjective and arbitrary viewpoint that is entirely insufficient to justify violations of any constitutional rights under any standard. The answer to the best interest of the child question has zero authority under federal law to justify any violation of constitutional rights, and federal law is the controlling law where federal fundamental rights are at issue. The State's best interests of the child policy is no more constitutional than its unlawful predecessor the Tender Years Doctrine.
There are so many structural flaws in the Best Interests of the Child Policy that the only reasonable explanation for its continued application in family law is that the judges who are applying it are suffering from a fundamental bias that compels them to treat the rights of these fit parents and the rights of these children as deserving of less constitutional protection than the rights of other fit parents or the rights of other children. You need to start asking what can cause your judge to be this biased. Is it purely hatred of divorced people? Is it the State's financial reward from Title IV-D money? Is it the fact that protecting your parental rights would likely eliminate your judge's prestigious job as divorced parents would have little to fight over. Is it your judge's religious beliefs? Is your judge just too morally weak to go against the flow? Does your judge not sufficiently understand the federal law requirements of protecting fundamental rights? Is there some other payoff to your judge.
The list of possibilities goes on and on but what is absolutely certain is that your judge is violating federal law and acting without legitimate authority to violate your rights. You have a choice. You can either float along with the flow and live wherever the flow takes you, or you can take what we teach, get above the flow, and go where you want to go. All we can do is provide you a better option that you wouldn't have had without us. But we cannot make the choice for you.
