Family Courts Tyrannically Deny Fit Fathers Their Constitutional Right to Parent Their Children
By Shane Flait © 2009 

Family courts routinely deny one fit parent – overwhelming the father- his parental right to raise his child. They tyrannically allege a right to deny father’s fundamental rights since they do so for ‘the best interest of the child’.

Such family court claims are tyrannical and directly conflict with constitutional rights and protections – as this article shows.

Fundamental or ‘Constitutional’ rights are enumerated in the Bill of Rights, the further Amendments, and rights raised to that level by Supreme Court Case law. Supreme Court case law overrides all lower jurisdictional laws including family courts procedures.

The Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the state from depriving any person of "life, liberty, or property (i.e. any fundamental right), without due process of law." Due Process Clause "guarantees more than [a] fair process."Washington v.Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 719 (1997). It includes a substantive component to the process that "provides heightened protection against government interference with certain fundamental rights and liberty interests." Id., at 720; see also Reno v. Flores, 507 U.S. 292, 301302 (1993).

The Supreme Court consistently upholds parental right as a fundamental constitutional right. And that’s the right to determine what the best interest of the child shall be.

The Supreme Court asserted that the ‘liberty’ protected by the Due Process Clause includes the right of parents to "establish a home and bring up children" and "to control the education of their own." Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390, 399, 401 (1923). So parenting includes both legal and physical custody of your children.

To deny a parental right requires constitutional due process that proves he’s either unfit or a clear danger to his children - proven with ‘clear and convincing’ evidence. As such, Santosky v. Kramer 455 U.S. 745 (1982) emphasized to restrict a fundamental right of a parent to any extent, requires a showing of clear and convincing evidence that serious harm will come to the child.

Family courts ignore all constitutional due process when they daily deny a fit father his right to physical and legal custody of his child – a right that every other fit parent has.

Family Court claims to determining ‘best interests of children’ over fit fathers’ rights are illegal in a presumably free republic. Only if there are no fit parents can the court invoke the ‘best interest of the child’ doctrine to assign custody.

 

In Parham v. J.R. et al 442 U.S. 584 (1979), the Supreme Court declared the ‘best interest of the child’ resides in the fit parent – not in the state: “Our constitutional system long ago rejected any notion that a child is a “the mere creature of the State” and, on the contrary, asserted that parents generally “have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare [their children] for additional obligations.” 

In the 1978 case of Quillon v Walcott, the Supreme Court ruled: “If a state were to attempt to force the breakup of a natural family, over the objection of the parents and their children, without some showing of unfitness and for the sole reason that to do so was thought to be in the children’s best interest,” the Due Process Clause would clearly be violated.

In 2000, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Troxel v. Granville 530 U.S. 2000: “[S]o long as a parent adequately cares for his or her children (i.e. is fit), there will normally be no reason for the State to inject itself into the private realm of the family to further question the ability of that parent to make the best decisions concerning the rearing of that parent's children.”

Under divorce and paternity actions, the ‘equal protection clause’ of the 14^th Amendment, requires that one fit parent must necessarily retain all of his fundamental rights to the extent that the other does. But two disputing parents can’t both exercise a few decisions – such as where a child goes to school simultaneously – but these are few.

Now the level of scrutiny required for a family court to infringe upon fundamental rights of either parent is "strict scrutiny", which requires the court to show that the infringement serves a "compelling state interest" and that there is no constitutionally less offensiveway for the state to satisfy this compelling interest.

The constitutionally least offensive way – by far – is an equal partition of time parenting their child. So, during one’s parenting time, that parent can control all decisions about the child which parenting implies, i.e. education, religion, medical, etc, as well as the typical day to day decisions.

The family courts deny fathers’ fundamental rights to extort money from him and support a billion dollar industry based on such denials. They provably work to the ‘worst interests of the children’

Shane Flait is a writer and educator. See more at www.EasyRetirementKnowHow.com