Who Really Guards the Bill of Rights? Its not Conservatives

Traditionally, parents determined what was best for their own children. Now courts make that determination, over the objection of parents who have done nothing to forfeit the right to make it themselves. Once courts stop administering justice, they start administering injustice; there is no middle ground. Without justice, asked St. Augustine, “What are kingdoms but great robberies?”

Never before in human history has any government created a machinery whose primary purpose is to take children away from their parents. The Nazis and the Communists both did it. But it was not their principal aim. In America, we have created multibillion dollar machinery that exists for no other purpose.

The very idea of incarcerations without trial should be raising an outcry and have us demanding to know what is taking place in the world’s greatest democracy. Yet we hear nothing but silence from journalists, self-styled civil libertarians, and “human rights” groups.

Conservatives have allowed this to happen by credulously swallowing feminist propaganda about “deadbeat dads,” “pedophile” fathers, and wife-beaters. Having given the Left a monopoly as gatekeepers of the Bill of Rights and civil liberties, conservatives can hardly be surprised that they stand defenseless as the Left targets the family, fathers, Christianity, and other “patriarchal” institutions.

The erosion of our freedoms today is so gradual that few can find tangible points at which to oppose it. But here we have an attack on freedom that is much more direct than culture; it involves a direct assault on private family life by a dangerous government machinery. Until we wake up to the fact that radical feminism is a totalitarian ideology and that the family courts are executing the feminist Terror, we will never reverse the family’s decline.

Facile parallels with totalitarian dictatorships drawn by westerners who never experienced those terrors are a much-abused form of criticism and one to which conservatives are especially susceptible. Yet in this case, survivors of those dictatorships readily attest to the similarity. Bogumila and Jerzy Koss compare New York’s family courts to the bureaucratic tyrannies they knew in Poland. “As children we lived through Nazi horror, then through Communist occupation,” they write, “and now, in the United States, the ‘Land of the Free,’ we are persecuted by judicial tyranny.” But in contrast to Nazi and Stalinist regimes, which used children as one weapon among many, today in the Western democracies children and families have become the central object of government tyranny, and parents rather than dissidents have become the targets.

After experiencing American family law, Romanian dissident Mihai Muset gained a new perspective on totalitarian justice under communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, by whose regime he had been arrested for a protest. "I was sentenced to two months in prison," he recalls, "but at least I got to appear in court and talk to the judge. That's more than I got in family court."

© 2007 Stephen Baskerville - All Rights Reserved