Divorce and Child Custody in America

Divorce and Child Custody

Twenty-two million American children live in a single-parent household, receiving benefit from only one parent. This is a travesty caused primarily by family law courts and Nineteenth Century viewpoints regarding marriage as a source of parental rights and as a source of discrimination against children.

These antiquated Nineteenth Century family law viewpoints overwhelmingly shared by family law judges of every persuasion across all 50 states account for child statistics that are devastating for children. When looking at single family household statistics, ask yourself if the parents are to blame or if government is to blame. Would these statistics be improved if judges recognize that the Supreme Court long ago overwhelmingly rejected the basic premise upon which state family codes are based. In the early 1970’s, The Supreme Court eliminated bastardy laws everywhere except in custody suits between fit parents. State court judges have failed to get the message.

Bastardy laws punished children by depriving them of a parent simply because the parents were not married to each other. Divorce courts punish children by depriving them of a parent simply because the parents divorce. The Supreme Court says it is wrong to punish children in this way, family law courts continue to punish children. The statistics are shameful.

Custodial parents and their children

In April of 2018, 12.9 million parents (who are referred to as custodial parents in this report) lived with 21.9 million children under 21 years of age, while the child’s other parent lived somewhere else. The 21.9 million children living with their custodial parent represented over one-fourth (26.5 percent) of all 82.6 million children under the age of 21 living in families.

Approximately half (48.8 percent) of all Black children lived in families with their custodial parent, while their other parent lived outside their household, more than twice as large as the proportion of White children (22.7 percent).8 Among children of other races— including American Indian and Alaska Native, Asian, or Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander—13.6 percent lived in custodial-parent families. Over one-quarter (28.7 percent) of Hispanic children, who may be any race, lived with their custodial parent in 2018.

Child custody proceedings are unnecessarily complex simply because States and state court judges prefer to punish children for the sins of their parents rather than protect the child’s rights to have two full and equal parents in their lives. Where the supreme law of the United States is applied properly, child custody becomes very simple both parents retain full and equal rights and the child retains full and equal rights. Instead of discriminating against parents and children based on a state custody judge’s mere viewpoint regarding matters of conscience in child-rearing, the judge is compelled to perform his federal non-discretionary public policy duty of protecting the federal rights of the parents and of the child.

Some of the issues that are unnecessarily overcomplicated in family law

Instead of accepting that both parents are fit and protecting their equal rights, the courts use viewpoint discrimination to reclassify fit parents as “custodial parent” and “non-custodial parent,” for the specific purpose of making it easier to deprive them of their fundamental rights to their children.

Presuming that there can be only one

Child custody courts want to dictate which individual parent will have sole physical custody or primary physical custody and then blame the parents for fighting over which one will lose their child to the judge’s whim.

Physical custody

These judges define physical custody as the right to have your child live with you after you have exercised your protected right to establish your own home in which to raise your child. Instead of protecting each parent’s equal right to establish a home in which to live together with their child as a family, the judges protect their power to invidiously discriminate against whichever parent they like the least. Equal-joint physical custody is seen as the extreme exception, not the rule.

Child custody courts want to dictate which individual parent will have sole legal custody or primary legal custody and then blame the parents for fighting over which one will lose their fundamental right to make choices for their own child to the judge’s whim.

Legal custody

These judges define legal custody as the right to make choices for their children while failing to recognize that a parent’s right to make privacy choices for their child is the same right to privacy choices that underpins a woman’s right to get an abortion. State court judges will go to extreme lengths to protect the right to terminate a pregnancy but won’t raise a finger to protect the right to be a parent after a child is born. Parental rights are privacy rights just as abortion rights are privacy rights. Parents who chose not to abort their babies deserve at least as much protection for their privacy rights in raising their child as those who chose to abort them.

Where the privacy rights protected equally, divorced parents of minor children would each have full and equal legal custody of their child, limited only when one parent’s choices substantially burdens the other parent’s rights.

Joint legal custody / joint physical custody

Federal public policy holds that state court judges have an unflinching duty to prevent the violation of federal rights through the exercise of the state court’s federal jurisdiction to subordinate state law to the supreme law of the land, just as their Article III oath demands of them. They swore an oath to do exactly this before they could become a state court judge, yet they violate the federal rights of parents and children every single day. They violate their oaths every day and then have the nerve to lecture parents about responsibility. Shame on them.

Under the supreme law, joint legal custody and joint physical custody is the mandatory default in terms of the Court’s duty to protect the full and equal rights of the parents and to prevent violation of the child’s rights by the court. The Supreme Law does NOT tell the judge, “thou shalt do what you think is best.” The Supreme Law tells the judge, thou shalt protect the rights of the litigants before you and thou shalt not use your government authority to violate the rights of the child.”

We fought a Revolutionary War because a King dared dictate to us what was in our best interest. Family law judges stand as kings and queens dictating to parents what is in their child’s best interests. Parents in family law courts, under current state laws, cannot stand upon their inalienable rights as parents and demand protection of those rights by a servant of the people. Parents in family law courts today must go before the king or queen and beg for the king’s or queen’s favor. Family law judges are the monarchs of our time.

When you walk into a child custody court as a fit parent seeking to maintain your rights to your child with another fit parent doing the same, the only questions should be how should we equally divide the time and authority over the children so that the rights of both parents and the child are protected and are there any narrow disputes creating compelling justification for this court to resolve because they are necessary, not desirable, to resolve. A sole government official’s mere viewpoint regarding what is best for the child is NOT even a legitimate consideration in this decision.

A dispute over what school the child will attend establishes compelling justification for the court to resolve that singular dispute because it is necessary that the dispute be resolved. Meanwhile, a dispute over what time the child will go to bed at either household doesn’t even establish a legitimate governmental interest for the court to resolve. A parent’s desire to use government power to dictate to the other parent when the child must go to bed is not even rationally related to a legitimate governmental interest.

Here’s the rub. Parents must be presumed to be fit parents until proven otherwise in a proper trial. Fit parents must be presumed to be doing what is best for their child until proven otherwise in a proper trial. What is “best” for a child is no more fact than who is the “best” female vocalist in country music. One parent’s choice is as good as the others, and the judge’s viewpoint is irrelevant. The First Amendment protects our right to disagree over what is “best” as an absolute right, the right of belief.

The child refuses to go

Some parents are all too willing to use a corrupt family law system to punish the other parent for the failure of the marriage or other offenses they believe that parent to have committed against them. They will seek to deprive that parent of rights to their child in any way they can. They often claim that the child doesn’t want to go to the other parent and they can’t make the child go.

This is a simple claim to destroy. If the child doesn’t want to go to school and the parent doesn’t make them, the State will haul the parent before a judge who will tell that parent to put your child in school or lose your parental rights. The choice is yours.

The same choice applies in child custody parenting times.

What’s wrong with the Best Interest of the Child Standard

I just read this sentence from Nolo Press, “most parents would agree that their child’s best interests should prevail” and it struck me that this is a classic example of how the best interest of the child so called standard is the best marketing phrase ever invented.

Ask the state if the state always provides for the “best interests” of every child under the state’s care. You will hear how the constitution does NOT require the state to provide for a child’s best interest when the child is in the state’s care. The state has many budget interests that are far more important to the state than providing the “best” for the children in the state’s care.

We already know the state doesn’t require the state to do what a judge thinks is in a child’s best interest when the state has to pay. Why should the state be able to force you to do what the state says they don’t need to do? You see, the thing is in constitutional terms, that if the state says you have to do what the judge says is in your child’s best interest, but the state doesn’t have to provide for the best interest of children in its care then best interest is both underinclusive and less than compelling.

The question you have to ask about the best interest of your child is who decides. Who decides what is best for your child? Does the mere opinion of a sole government official regarding what is best for your child justify depriving you and your child of your constitutional rights? The Supreme Court has held that a mere disagreement between a judge and a parent regarding what is best for a child is not sufficient to override a parent’s choices. Custody courts are thumbing their noses at the Supreme Court and at your constitutional rights because attorneys and parents let them.

You have a constitutional right to make best interest choices for your child. Your judge has zero legitimate authority to deprive you or your child of any constitutional rights based solely upon his or her mere opinion of what is best for your child.

Visitation arrangements are profoundly offensive

Parents do NOT “visit” their children nor to children “visit” their parents. Parents parent their children and live together with their children as a family. The right to live together as a family is a First Amendment protected individual right, NOT a right created by a nuclear family. There can be no constitutional protection at all of the nuclear family except through protection of each member’s individual right to form associations. Families can only be protected in pairs where two people choose to associate with one another.

In a nuclear family the husband and the wife form a family association through their individual choices to live together as a family. When they have a child, and as long as that child is a minor or a participating adult, each parent-child association is protected as a family through their individual privacy choices to form an intimate and expressive family association. While the child is a minor, the parent holds many of the child’s rights in trust and makes associational choices for the child by protected privacy right.

When parents divorce, they dissolve the legal recognition of the private association, but that choice can in no way deprive either parent or the child of their individual family association rights to each other. Because divorce cannot deprive you of your parental rights, no judge can “grant” to you what you already have. The judge can only violate your rights or protect your rights, but they cannot “grant” parental rights to a natural parent. It isn’t legally possible. The very idea is a legal nullity.

When a state court judge uses the term visitor or visitation in relation to child custody arrangements or asserts visitation rights, that judge offends the parents, offends the child, and offends the First Amendment. The constitution does NOT protect “visitation” rights. The constitution protects full intimate and expressive association rights. The right to live together as a family with your child. The right to make privacy choices for your child. The right to protect your child from an overzealous government official wearing a robe invading your child’s family privacy rights.

Judges irreparably injure children

Without any doubt whatsoever, children have their own First Amendment protected intimate and expressive association rights with each parent. While the parents have the authority to make value choices for the child that might otherwise violate the child’s rights, state court judges are absolutely prohibited from violating the child’s rights without first providing all appropriate constitutional guarantees that the federal courts have established to protect those rights.

The Supreme Court has been very clear in holding that violations of First Amendment protected rights, even for short periods of time, cause irreparable harm to the individual. Judicial violation of the child’s First Amendment rights, in the absence of applicable guarantees, is dispositive to any claim by the judge to be acting in the child’s best interest. Here, dispositive is a fancy legal word that means judges violation of law legally destroys the judge’s best interest claim.

Best Interest Factors

In an effort to hide the fact that the State’s best interest of the child public policy grants judges broad discretion to violate fundamental rights based upon viewpoint discrimination, the judges in most states, sometimes followed by the legislatures have created a list of viewpoint factors which they claim narrows the unbridled discretion of the judge to violate fundamental rights. None of these factors even comes close to meeting the narrow tailoring threshold test necessary to limit the best interest determination. The Supreme Court has been absolutely clear and unambiguous in holding in every conceivable context that broad government authority can never be sufficient to violate fundamental rights. If your judge claims broad authority to violate your fundamental rights or your child’s fundamental rights that judge is either 1) a fool who has drunk too much of the Kool-Aid or 2) a corrupt power-hungry government official who doesn’t care about violating his or her oath.

As a cover up for their corruption, judges claim that it is their solemn responsibility to do what is best for the child while ignoring that the constitution calls BS on that claim because the parents already do what is best for the child even when they disagree because “best” is nothing more than an opinion and everybody has one. The difference is that the parents’ determinations of “best” are constitutionally protected while the judge’s viewpoint of “best” is strictly prohibited.

The Texas Supreme Court consolidated the factors into a list referred to as the Holley Factors in Holley v. Adams, 544 S.W.2d 367 (Tex. 1976). Some of the “factors” the judge will assert to throw you off the impermissibly broad discretion track are:

(A) The desires of the child:

If your child attempted to sign a contract or to purchase alcohol or porn, the State would claim that the child doesn’t have the mental capacity to make such a choice. However, the state is all too ready to ask the child to choose a parent and suffer the mental and emotional consequences of that choice for the remainder of their lives. It is nothing short of pure evil to ask a child to choose a parent no matter how you craft the question. If the judge really cared about the child’s best interest, the judge would tell every child that you get the parents you were born to unless they are proven unfit. Your current teenage emotionally addled choices will have no bearing whatsoever in the custody outcome. As a judge acting in your best interests I would never ever allow you to make the choice to reject a fit parent that is likely to haunt you for the rest of your life. Such choices are for full grown adults, NOT emotionally confused teenagers.

(B) The emotional and physical needs of the child now and in the future:

First, fit parents by the definition of fitness, already see to the emotional and physical needs of the child even where the parents disagree on what those needs may be. The judge’s viewpoint of the child’s emotional and physical needs, beyond minimum reasonable standards of care, constitutes nothing short of viewpoint discrimination.

Second, judicial adjudications deal with past events and resolving past conflicts. Looking to the future and seeking to avoid future conflicts is a policy choice reserved to the legislative and executive branches of government. Courts have no legitimate authority to make policy choices because when courts make policy choices, the courts deprive you of your right to access the courts to challenge the policy choices. This is a basic and fundamental concept addressed in the separation of powers doctrine.

(C) The emotional and physical danger to the child now and in the future:

This one sounds really important but couldn’t possibly be more vague and undefinable. It is part and partial to broad discretion. It allows a judge to deprive you of rights without any notice at all of what you are being charged with. To the degree it looks to the future, it is entirely speculative. How on earth does a parent defend themselves in a court of law when the judge himself or herself is accusing them of some speculative imaginary crime they may commit in the future?
The legislature has already determined in every single state what constitutes sufficient harm to a child to warrant depriving a parent of their individual parental rights. That is how State’s define the difference between fit parents and unfit parents. The State carries the burden of proving a parent to be unfit after the state serves the parent with written notice of the specific charges and provides a full confrontational hearing where the parent can adequately confront the state official making the charges under an evidentiary standard of clear and convincing evidence.

Newsflash custody court judges evaluating evidence under a preponderance of the evidence standard, you do NOT have subject-matter jurisdiction to declare a parent to be unfit simply because in your viewpoint they present an emotional or physical danger under some undefined conditions. You fail under notice requirements. You fail because the other parent lacks a private cause of action to pursue charges of unfitness. You fail under an inadequate evidentiary standard. You fail for vagueness. You fail for bias in seeking to act as a prosecutor instead of a neutral and impartial judge.

(D) The parental abilities of the individuals seeking custody:

The judge’s viewpoint of the parents’ parental abilities is absolutely irrelevant and impermissible. The court has no choice but to presume the parents are fit. Even if the judge believed a parent to be unfit, the limit of the court’s jurisdiction is to file a complaint with the appropriate child protective agency and to allow them to investigate. If that agency brings charges, it will be for another court with proper subject-matter jurisdiction to determine if the parent is fit.

Judges do NOT get to act as child advocates against the interests of the parents and to conduct an open-ended investigation or “exploratory search” into the realm of family privacy that can never be challenged in a court of law before a neutral and unbiased judge. Parents and children have a heightened expectation of family privacy even in a child custody proceeding against the judge himself or herself.

(E) The programs available to assist these individuals to promote the best interest of the child:

The only proper use of the best interest of the child concept is in softening the application of law in a parental termination proceeding where the court believes that the rights of the parent and child may be protected from termination if the parent can adjust their behavior under State direction. Then, and only then, would the availability of any such program have relevance.

(F) The plans for the child by these individuals or by the agency seeking custody:

Where the parents must be presumed fit, the court lacks any legitimate interest in demanding to know what the parent’s plans are for parenting their child beyond specific circumstances where the exercise of rights by one parent might injure the rights of the other.

(G) The stability of the home or proposed placement:

The rights of parents are individual rights. A married mother’s rights are exactly the same as a divorced mother’s rights. A married father’s rights are exactly the same as a divorced father’s rights. This is true because the rights are individual rights that cannot be limited based upon other associations or upon private choices regarding marriage.

The child does NOT have a constitutional right to “stability” however some random judge may arbitrarily define the term. Where the parents must be presumed to be fit, the stability they provide must be presumed to be adequate. If the State seeks to limit parental rights based upon “stability” then the legislature must define the term in statute and articulate the conditions under which it may overcome fundamental rights.

Parents may value instability as a teaching tool to help their children develop some character trait the parent feels if valuable for the child to learn. No judge’s conflicting viewpoint on the importance of “stability” compared to the parent’s perceived value in instability can establish a legitimate governmental interest to dictate otherwise.

(H) The acts or omissions of the parent which may indicate that the existing parent-child relationship is not a proper one:

Those alleged acts or omissions of the parent must be committed to writing in precise terms with dates and other specifics that provide for the ability of the accused parent to confront the charges in a proper hearing. They cannot be made up in the judge’s head after the judge has heard all the testimony.

(I) Any excuse for the acts or omissions of the parent:

These excuses are part of the evidence that would weigh against termination of parental rights. The parent may have failed to pick up their child from day care necessitating a call to child protective services by the daycare center. However, if the parent, on the way to pick up the child from daycare, through no fault of their own was in an automobile accident that placed them unconscious in a hospital emergency room, they could NOT be considered an unfit parent.

Best interest factors were established for termination proceedings not custody proceedings

It is abundantly clear simply from reading the list that these factors were established to guide courts in softening harsh child endangerment laws where doing so would be better for the child.

If you attempt to raise any precedent in your child custody case that comes from a termination proceeding, the first thing the judge will do is to dismiss your citation as not being relevant because it came from a termination proceeding where the state initiated charges. As is typical of government judges want to have their cake and eat it too. Only those rules that serve the judge’s biased interests as self-appointed protector of the child will survive the judge’s biased adjudication.

I would first attempt to use citations from termination proceedings that work in your favor. After the judge rejects those citations, file a motion asserting that the Holley Factors cannot apply for the exact same reasons, or in the alternative the Court must reverse its holdings against your citations. Put it in their face and make them directly address the double standard in the record.

Evidence of abuse or neglectEvery state seems to have a family code statute holding that the judge can deprive you of your fundamental parental rights and deprive your child of their fundamental rights to you if there is merely evidence of abuse or neglect. “Evidence” is all that is required, NOT proof. The Court is NOT required to serve you with charges. You are NOT provided an opportunity to confront those charges before a neutral and unbiased court. One side just needs to provide “evidence.” They don’t need to provide clear and convincing evidence as in a termination proceeding, just “evidence.” Even a just slightly incompetent attorney should be capable of invalidating any such statute, but no attorney ever even tries.

Why Not!

Child support

Child support has become the Twenty-First Century equivalent of Burn the Witches.

Child support wouldn’t even be necessary if each parent’s rights were protected equally. Each parent would have to provide care for the child their half of the time. I can tell you from experience that most families just have two of most inexpensive things. Only the most expensive items such as phones and laptops tend to travel with the child. Where the time is equal, the child always has the same quantity of clothes at each home. There is no need to carry clothes back and forth unless a child just wants to bring a favorite.

Divorce courts, because they never face independent judicial review for their policy actions, have established a two-tiered standard of financial care in this country. Married parents are required only to meet minimum reasonable standards of child-care as defined in the parental termination statutes. While divorced parents owe the child an arbitrary percentage of their total income. The courts have created two classes of child where ironically, the child with parents married to each other has lesser rights.

Let’s be absolutely clear, no child is ever constitutionally entitled to a percentage of their parent’s income to be spent on them. No child is constitutionally entitled to their best interests being met. Choices by parents to provide greater than minimum care are privacy choices that fund or defund a child’s desires in direct relation to the intent of a parent to directly educate their child on value choices in life. Where the courts compel a parent to pay more than the minimum reasonable standard of child-care to the other parent, the courts compel speech and establish a censorship scheme where one parent’s voice is make more powerful by the viewpoint discrimination of a sole government official without any possibility of independent judicial review of the censorship scheme.

These are just more examples of why the principles inherent in the Separation of Powers Doctrine are so vitally important to preserving freedoms in a free country.

States actually get paid by the federal government to the tune of roughly 4 billion dollars per year to collect as much child support as they possibly can without any constitutional limiting factors imposed by the federal legislation, Title IV-D of the Social Security act. The federal government is paying the states billions every year to violate your parental rights on their behalf all in the pursuit of the all-mighty dollar. Do you want to know why the system is so hard to fix, Follow the money?

Court of law vs court of equity

Sometime after the middle of last century, state legislatures began a process of replacing common law practices of equity courts with statutory family codes that transformed the courts of equity into courts of law. This is vitally important under the Separation of Powers Doctrine.

Courts have broad powers to protect constitutional rights and concepts of fundamental fairness that are core to equitable principles. These courts can exercise these broad, often policy, powers in this context because they are in actual fact, the last resort to protect freedoms and rights.

When a legislature replaces common law with statutory law, the role of the courts changes. Under civil law, legislatures enact policy choices by statute and assign the execution of those policy choices to executive officers or agencies. Under these circumstances policy creation and execution are intentionally insulated from judicial review and the court’s lack any legitimate policy making authority. They become courts of law instead of courts of equity. They retain equitable powers only where there exist narrow gaps in statutory law that must be filled. Where the gaps are too broad, the statute becomes void.

Where family law codes went wrong and became unconstitutional is where the legislature, desiring to strongly regulate domestic relations but loath to spend any money on it, chose NOT to establish any executive agencies to execute the legislature’s policy choices but instead to assign those execution activities to the judges who had already been doing this under rules of equity. But the legislature cannot have its cake and eat it too.

When the legislature exercises its power to make civil law, it deprives the courts of equitable authority to follow common law practices. The equitable authority of courts is simply NOT within the legislature’s power to grant. It is a constitutional power inherent in the nature of courts as evolved over thousands of years or expressly defined in the state’s constitution.

The exercise of equitable powers is inherently a biased proposition. The courts create the policy, then the courts enforce the policy, and then the court adjudicate the constitutionality of the policy. This would be akin to the legislature sitting as judges determining whether their own statutes are constitutional and is only acceptable under equity as a last resort. The safeguard for freedom lies in the fact that the legislature can at any time override the judicial equity policies by enactment of statute.

Where civil law is established by the legislature, that policy choice can only be overridden by a court if the policy choice violates constitutional guarantees. Where under equity, the legislature is the check on corrupt courts, under civil law, the courts must be in a position to check a corrupt legislature. Where the legislature assigns the task of enforcement and execution to the judiciary, the legislature deprives us all of a neutral and impartial judiciary to check the corrupt family code.

Where the legislature assigns execution and enforcement activities to the courts under civil law, and the courts accept that power, the legislature and the courts are conspiring in a quid pro quo to impermissibly violate the separation of powers doctrine. The entire family code in every state crumbles under legitimate judicial scrutiny.

Denial of access to federal courts

Under normal conditions, the federal courts are an additional check on runaway state governments but because of the Supreme Courts absurd insistence, in defiance of all logic, that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people takes on some magical quality of sovereign immunity from accountability to the people for wrongs the government does, we the people cannot adequately challenge family law statutes in federal court because we do NOT have an executive government official whom we can sue in federal court and the judges get absolute immunity from such suits.

The Supreme Court has created a catch 22 where parents cannot gain access to federal courts to protect their federal rights. Ironically, when Texas creates the same scheme to limit abortion rights, the Supreme Court falls all over itself to rise up and put a stop to that foolishness in record time. Once again, the federal courts champion termination of pregnancies while completely ignoring actual parents of actual minor children who are suffering at the hands of the Court’s own policy choices.

This is why we have been saying for several years now that the anti-abortion states should simply assign judges the task of executing and enforcing anti-abortion laws. Texas finally took us up on it and as a result, any day now, we will get some kind of ruling by the Supreme Court that will most likely help actual parents of actual minor children gain access to the federal courts for protection of their federal rights.

Standardization of children

Family law custody courts are engaged in a massive social experiment where they are attempting to standardize the raising of children in compliance with the general viewpoint of the judiciary as a whole. The best interest of the child means whatever the judge’s want it to mean, leaving parents no choice but to attempt to conform with their judge’s personal beliefs to keep their children.

It is important to speak with an attorney

The problem is that there are only two kinds of family law attorneys 1) those who have no clue how to protect your rights or your child’s rights from a judge intent on violating those rights and 2) those who know how but make too much money on the corrupt system to ever change it. Both types of attorneys will simply hold your hand and listen to you cry as they walk you through the corrupt process by which your judge takes your rights based on his or her personal viewpoint of your private association with your child.

If you have to choose a family law attorney, choose a young attorney of type one who is willing to learn and engage us to show them how to protect your rights. If they are a qualified attorney, they can review our research and analyze the law themselves.

In the end, your parental rights, and your child’s rights to you are civil rights. You don’t need a family law attorney. You need a civil rights attorney. You can settle, if you must, for a young family law attorney who is eager to learn how to become a civil rights attorney specializing in family law.

Become a civil rights attorney specializing in family law

If you are an eager young attorney doing family law to make a living but dreaming of making an actual difference in the world then you absolutely need to learn The Palmer Systems Approach to Family Law. By the time you retire, family law will be a completely different type of law. You can help create the change or you can be steamrolled by it, your choice.

Conclusion

Welcome to our divorce and child custody site where you can learn as much of the detail of these issues as you care to learn. You can get just enough to win your case and go on with your life, or you can become obsessed as we are and commit yourself to destroying this corrupt government system that lives on irreparably injuring children on a daily basis.