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A Judicial Kidnapping
No one realizes it can happen to him. A man comes home one day to find his house empty. On the table is a note from his wife saying she has taken the children to live with her sister or parents or boyfriend, or to a “battered women’s shelter.”
Soon after comes a knock on the door. He is summoned to appear under an “emergency” motion to a family court within a few hours. In a hearing that lasts a few minutes his children are legally removed from his care and protection, his right to make decisions about them is abrogated, and he is ordered to stay away from them most or all of the time. He is also ordered to begin making child-support payments, an order is entered to garnish his wages, and his name is placed on a federal government data base for monitoring “delinquents.” If he tries to see his children outside the authorized time, or fails to make the payments, he can be arrested. Without being permitted to speak he is then told the hearing is over. No members of his family, the public, or the press have been permitted to be present, and no record will remain of what was said.
This scene, with variations, is acted out in America hundreds, perhaps thousands of times every day. The man may be accused of domestic violence or child sexual abuse, in which case there may be no hearing at all or he is not notified of it, but the police will simply come to his front door and order him to leave his home within hours, or even minutes, even if no evidence has been presented against him. Without being formally charged, he will not be allowed to see his children at all or perhaps only with a supervisor present or at a visitation center where he and his children will be observed and for which he will pay an hourly fee. The man may also be ordered to pay alimony and the fees of lawyers he has not hired and threatened with arrest if he refuses or is unable. The mother may take the children hundreds or thousands of miles away where he either cannot see them at all or he must quit his job and leave his home to do so. Or perhaps he is the one that leaves with the children, and she finds the note.*
*Stephen Baskerville, TAKEN INTO CUSTODY, Pages 29-30
I am asking for your support to help me put an end to these “Star Chambers”
Vote for Michael Nance for Assembly District 32.
Through divorce, the modern state achieves one of its most coveted and dangerous ambitions: to control the private lives of its citizens. In a free society, public tribunals exist to dispense justice, against violators of the law or legal agreements. When they stop dispensing justice they begin to dispense injustice; there is really no tenable middle ground.
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