If you cannot view the above YouTube video from Congressman Pete Hoekstra's Parental Rights website, try this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYTBFcmndy0
3 weeks ago
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Federal Parental Rights Amendment - 72 Sponsors and Growing
If you cannot view the above YouTube video from Congressman Pete Hoekstra's Parental Rights website, try this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYTBFcmndy0
Fatherless Children
The point of this article is to combat the false notion that fathers are not needed by their children, not to suggest that having motherless children is the solution, a child should have a right to both parents.
Children from fatherless homes account for:
You might think a "loving mother" would want to protect her child and keep him from becoming one of the above statistics, but in most cases you would be wrong. Mothers are exposing children to the above risks:
Children from fatherless homes account for:
- 63% of youth suicides 1
- 70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions come from fatherless homes 3
- 71% of pregnant teenagers 2
- 71% of all high school dropouts 6
- 75% of all adolescent patients in chemical abuse centers 7
- 80% of rapists motivated with displaced anger 5
- 85% of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders 4
- 85% of all youths sitting in prisons 8
- 90% of all homeless and runaway children
You might think a "loving mother" would want to protect her child and keep him from becoming one of the above statistics, but in most cases you would be wrong. Mothers are exposing children to the above risks:
- Angry mothers sabotage a father's efforts to visit their children 9
- Few children are satisfied with the amount of contact with their fathers 10
- The mother was the greatest obstacle to having more frequent contact with the children 11
- 37.9% of fathers have no access/visitation rights 12
- 40% of mothers reported that they had interfered with the non-custodial father's visitation on at least one occasion, to punish the ex-spouse. 13
- 50% of mothers "see no value in the father`s continued contact with his children...." 14
- 70% of fathers felt that they had too little time with their children 15
- 77% of non-custodial fathers are NOT able to "visit" their children, as ordered by the court, as a result of visitation interference by the mother. 16
- 89% of mothers don't value their husband's input when it comes to handling problems with their kids 17
- Non-compliance with court ordered visitation is 300% more common than non-compliance with court ordered child support and impacts the children of divorce even more. 18
1 US Dept. of Health & Human Services, Bureau of the Census
2 US Dept. of Health & Human Services
3 U.S. Dept. of Justice, Special Report, Sept 1988
4 Center for Disease Control
5 Criminal Justice & Behavior, Vol. 14, p. 403-26, 1978
6 National Principals Association Report on the State of High Schools
7 Rainbows for all God`s Children)
8 Fulton Co. Georgia jail populations, Texas Dept. of Corrections 1992
9 Ahrons and Miller, Am. Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Vol. 63. p. 442, July 1993
10 Visitation and the Noncustodial Father, Koch & Lowery, Journal of Divorce and Remarriage, Vol. 8, No. 2, p. 50, Winter 1984
11 Increasing our understanding of fathers who have infrequent contact with their children, James Dudley, Family Relations, Vol. 4, p. 281, July 1991
12 p.6, col.II, para. 6, lines 4 & 5, Census Bureau P-60, #173, Sept 1991
13 p. 449, col. II, lines 3-6, (citing Fulton) Frequency of visitation by Divorced Fathers; Differences in Reports by Fathers and Mothers. Sanford Braver et al, Am. J. of Orthopsychiatry, 1991
14 Surviving the Breakup, Joan Kelly & Judith Wallerstein, p. 125
15 Visitation and the Noncustodial Father, Mary Ann Kock & Carol Lowery, Journal of Divorce, Vol. 8, No. 2, p. 54, Winter 1984
16 Visitational Interference - A National Study" by Ms. J Annette Vanini, M.S.W. and Edward Nichols, M.S.W. Originally published Sept. 1992
17 EDK Associates survey of 500 women for Redbook Magazine. Redbook, November 1994, p. 36
18 Visitational Interference - A National Study" by Ms. J Annette Vanini, M.S.W. and Edward Nichols, M.S.W. Originally published Sept. 1992
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
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
Monday, April 6, 2009
The Failure of “Family Policy”
by Stephen Baskerville
January 11th, 2008
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/index.php/2008/01/11/the-failure-of-family-policy/#more-477
Welfare reform was supposed to discourage unmarried childbearing. However, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) recently disclosed that out-of-wedlock births are at a record high. The Census Bureau also reports that, for the first time, married couples constitute less than half of the nation’s households. Thus, whatever the budgetary savings over the past ten years, from the standpoint of the family, welfare reform has failed.
The continued rise in out-of-wedlock births no longer proceeds from just low-income teenagers. In fact, the NCHS reports that the birthrate among girls 10 to 17 dropped to the lowest level on record. It is the sharp rise in births among unmarried mothers in their late 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s that accounts for the record levels. Inspired by such books as Rosanna Hertz’s Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice and Peggy Drexler’s Raising Boys Without Men, these women are moving beyond divorce to dispense with marriage altogether.
It would be a mistake to attribute this trend solely to cultural and lifestyle decadence. The ongoing sexual revolution is now codified in government policies that do more than discourage family formation: They empower officials to dissolve families and offer generous rewards for doing so. The growth of unwed childbearing in the middle class, like the older problem in low-income communities, grows directly out of welfare.
While the conservative focus on the broader cultural causes of illegitimacy is appropriate, neglecting the practical legal issues can hinder our ability to confront the problem. Political scientist James Q. Wilson epitomizes the conservative establishment’s paralysis when he throws up his hands: “If you believe, as I do, in the power of culture, you will realize that there is very little one can do.”
Many social conservatives have cast “family values” in terms of issues that, while undeniably important, are more consequences than causes of family breakdown. Today, the most direct threat to the family is not homosexuality, pornography, popular culture, euthanasia, cloning, or abortion. It is the elephant that barged into America’s living rooms almost four decades ago: As Michael McManus of Marriage Savers writes, “Divorce is a far more grievous blow to marriage than today’s challenge by gays.” While this, too, began as a lifestyle option, it quickly translated into highly destructive policies.
Beginning in the 1970’s, America quietly embarked on the boldest social experiment in her history. With no public discussion of the possible consequences, laws were enacted in virtually every jurisdiction that ended marriage as a legal contract and precluded couples from creating binding agreements to rear children. Regardless of the terms on which a marriage is entered, government officials can now, at the request of one spouse, simply dissolve it over the objection of the other and with no penalty to the moving party. As far as the federal and state governments are concerned, all couples are cohabiting.
The sexual revolution prepared the way for this massive change, but, as Melanie Phillips writes in The Sex-Change Society, “The divorce laws . . . were reformed by unrepresentative groups with very particular agendas of their own and which were not in step with public opinion.” Changes in the law preceded the cultural shift, as “Public attitudes were gradually dragged along behind laws that were generally understood at the time to mean something very different from what they subsequently came to represent.”
The National Association of Women Lawyers claims credit for pioneering no-fault divorce, which it describes as “the greatest project NAWL has ever undertaken.” As early as 1947, NAWL began promoting no-fault divorce to bar associations and state governments.
While the left was revolutionizing the legal structure of marriage, the conservative response was to lament and bemoan. “Republicans did not want to alienate their upscale constituents or their libertarian wing, both of whom tended to favor easy divorce,” writes Barbara Whitehead in The Divorce Culture, “nor did they want to call attention to the divorces among their own leadership.” When Vice President Dan Quayle famously denounced unwed motherhood, he was careful to add, “I am not talking about a situation where there is a divorce.” Maggie Gallagher’s complaint has become a prophecy for today’s politics: “Opposing gay marriage . . . is for Republicans an easy, juicy, risk-free issue. . . . The message [is] that at all costs we should keep divorce off the political agenda.”
The divorce revolution weakened marriage and fatherhood among members of the middle class in striking parallel to what welfare inflicted on the poor. In addition, the surge in divorce has expanded the welfare state itself to include the middle class, turning programs conceived to address the problems of low-income, single-parent homes into financial incentives for middle-class divorce.
The welfare reform of 1996 did not end the federal subsidy of single-mother homes; instead, it shifted it to mandatory child support — after all, fathers should be supporting their children. Like the original federalization of child-support enforcement back in 1975, the target was willfully absent fathers who had abandoned their children, leaving them on the dole.
In fact, no evidence has ever demonstrated that large numbers of fathers were or are deserting their families and not paying child support. Unchallenged research has long established that fathers are forcibly separated from their children by divorce courts and criminalized by child-support orders that are patently impossible to pay. The “deadbeat dad” is largely the creation of bureaucratic policies and of the feminist ideology that drives them.
Over the years, child support has increasingly functioned less as a way to reduce or recover welfare costs and more as a forced subsidy on middle-class divorce. States are paid by federal taxpayers based on the amount they collect. This encourages them to neglect welfare families, for whom the program was designed, because there is little money to be had. Instead, enforcement agencies have shifted their focus to middle-class families, for whom the program was never intended, because they can collect large sums and, with them, lucrative federal funds, which can then be spent for any purpose. Using child support, state governments found they could raise revenue through the growth of single-parent homes.
The perversity of the incentives is diabolical. States have a financial incentive to generate fatherless children in the middle class, which they procure by providing sweeteners for single motherhood—expedited divorce, automatic and exclusive mother custody (regardless of fault), minimal visitation by fathers—turning as many men as possible into payers (including some who are not even fathers) and setting child-support awards as high as possible. It is hardly surprising that the vast majority of divorces in which children are involved are now filed by women.
Federally regulated child support effectively transformed welfare from an issue involving public assistance into one of law enforcement, creating yet another federal police force without clear constitutional justification. The welfare state is employing the penal apparatus to ensure itself continued funding and growth, with methods far more draconian than those used (so far) to collect taxation.
These programs are virtually unassailable, not only because they balance state budgets, but because they play upon our natural sympathy for women and children. Anyone questioning child support incurs feminist charges of defending “deadbeat dads.” Further, by appealing to superficially conservative values, feminists have gained allies among centrist Democrats as well as the neoconservatives who dominate Republican family policy. Even family-values conservatives are reluctant to challenge policies they know to be driving single motherhood and criminalizing fatherhood.
This tacit left-right collusion has locked us into a tragic bureaucratic cycle in which the cures are causing the disease. And the malady of fatherlessness will continue to worsen as long as government officials have a free pass to socialize childrearing.
Whatever its intentions, the state can never create or restore family life. The best it can do is stop destroying it.
Stephen Baskerville, an assistant professor of government at Patrick Henry College, is the author of Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland House).
This article first appeared in the January 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
January 11th, 2008
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/index.php/2008/01/11/the-failure-of-family-policy/#more-477
Welfare reform was supposed to discourage unmarried childbearing. However, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) recently disclosed that out-of-wedlock births are at a record high. The Census Bureau also reports that, for the first time, married couples constitute less than half of the nation’s households. Thus, whatever the budgetary savings over the past ten years, from the standpoint of the family, welfare reform has failed.
The continued rise in out-of-wedlock births no longer proceeds from just low-income teenagers. In fact, the NCHS reports that the birthrate among girls 10 to 17 dropped to the lowest level on record. It is the sharp rise in births among unmarried mothers in their late 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s that accounts for the record levels. Inspired by such books as Rosanna Hertz’s Single by Chance, Mothers by Choice and Peggy Drexler’s Raising Boys Without Men, these women are moving beyond divorce to dispense with marriage altogether.
It would be a mistake to attribute this trend solely to cultural and lifestyle decadence. The ongoing sexual revolution is now codified in government policies that do more than discourage family formation: They empower officials to dissolve families and offer generous rewards for doing so. The growth of unwed childbearing in the middle class, like the older problem in low-income communities, grows directly out of welfare.
While the conservative focus on the broader cultural causes of illegitimacy is appropriate, neglecting the practical legal issues can hinder our ability to confront the problem. Political scientist James Q. Wilson epitomizes the conservative establishment’s paralysis when he throws up his hands: “If you believe, as I do, in the power of culture, you will realize that there is very little one can do.”
Many social conservatives have cast “family values” in terms of issues that, while undeniably important, are more consequences than causes of family breakdown. Today, the most direct threat to the family is not homosexuality, pornography, popular culture, euthanasia, cloning, or abortion. It is the elephant that barged into America’s living rooms almost four decades ago: As Michael McManus of Marriage Savers writes, “Divorce is a far more grievous blow to marriage than today’s challenge by gays.” While this, too, began as a lifestyle option, it quickly translated into highly destructive policies.
Beginning in the 1970’s, America quietly embarked on the boldest social experiment in her history. With no public discussion of the possible consequences, laws were enacted in virtually every jurisdiction that ended marriage as a legal contract and precluded couples from creating binding agreements to rear children. Regardless of the terms on which a marriage is entered, government officials can now, at the request of one spouse, simply dissolve it over the objection of the other and with no penalty to the moving party. As far as the federal and state governments are concerned, all couples are cohabiting.
The sexual revolution prepared the way for this massive change, but, as Melanie Phillips writes in The Sex-Change Society, “The divorce laws . . . were reformed by unrepresentative groups with very particular agendas of their own and which were not in step with public opinion.” Changes in the law preceded the cultural shift, as “Public attitudes were gradually dragged along behind laws that were generally understood at the time to mean something very different from what they subsequently came to represent.”
The National Association of Women Lawyers claims credit for pioneering no-fault divorce, which it describes as “the greatest project NAWL has ever undertaken.” As early as 1947, NAWL began promoting no-fault divorce to bar associations and state governments.
While the left was revolutionizing the legal structure of marriage, the conservative response was to lament and bemoan. “Republicans did not want to alienate their upscale constituents or their libertarian wing, both of whom tended to favor easy divorce,” writes Barbara Whitehead in The Divorce Culture, “nor did they want to call attention to the divorces among their own leadership.” When Vice President Dan Quayle famously denounced unwed motherhood, he was careful to add, “I am not talking about a situation where there is a divorce.” Maggie Gallagher’s complaint has become a prophecy for today’s politics: “Opposing gay marriage . . . is for Republicans an easy, juicy, risk-free issue. . . . The message [is] that at all costs we should keep divorce off the political agenda.”
The divorce revolution weakened marriage and fatherhood among members of the middle class in striking parallel to what welfare inflicted on the poor. In addition, the surge in divorce has expanded the welfare state itself to include the middle class, turning programs conceived to address the problems of low-income, single-parent homes into financial incentives for middle-class divorce.
The welfare reform of 1996 did not end the federal subsidy of single-mother homes; instead, it shifted it to mandatory child support — after all, fathers should be supporting their children. Like the original federalization of child-support enforcement back in 1975, the target was willfully absent fathers who had abandoned their children, leaving them on the dole.
In fact, no evidence has ever demonstrated that large numbers of fathers were or are deserting their families and not paying child support. Unchallenged research has long established that fathers are forcibly separated from their children by divorce courts and criminalized by child-support orders that are patently impossible to pay. The “deadbeat dad” is largely the creation of bureaucratic policies and of the feminist ideology that drives them.
Over the years, child support has increasingly functioned less as a way to reduce or recover welfare costs and more as a forced subsidy on middle-class divorce. States are paid by federal taxpayers based on the amount they collect. This encourages them to neglect welfare families, for whom the program was designed, because there is little money to be had. Instead, enforcement agencies have shifted their focus to middle-class families, for whom the program was never intended, because they can collect large sums and, with them, lucrative federal funds, which can then be spent for any purpose. Using child support, state governments found they could raise revenue through the growth of single-parent homes.
The perversity of the incentives is diabolical. States have a financial incentive to generate fatherless children in the middle class, which they procure by providing sweeteners for single motherhood—expedited divorce, automatic and exclusive mother custody (regardless of fault), minimal visitation by fathers—turning as many men as possible into payers (including some who are not even fathers) and setting child-support awards as high as possible. It is hardly surprising that the vast majority of divorces in which children are involved are now filed by women.
Federally regulated child support effectively transformed welfare from an issue involving public assistance into one of law enforcement, creating yet another federal police force without clear constitutional justification. The welfare state is employing the penal apparatus to ensure itself continued funding and growth, with methods far more draconian than those used (so far) to collect taxation.
These programs are virtually unassailable, not only because they balance state budgets, but because they play upon our natural sympathy for women and children. Anyone questioning child support incurs feminist charges of defending “deadbeat dads.” Further, by appealing to superficially conservative values, feminists have gained allies among centrist Democrats as well as the neoconservatives who dominate Republican family policy. Even family-values conservatives are reluctant to challenge policies they know to be driving single motherhood and criminalizing fatherhood.
This tacit left-right collusion has locked us into a tragic bureaucratic cycle in which the cures are causing the disease. And the malady of fatherlessness will continue to worsen as long as government officials have a free pass to socialize childrearing.
Whatever its intentions, the state can never create or restore family life. The best it can do is stop destroying it.
Stephen Baskerville, an assistant professor of government at Patrick Henry College, is the author of Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland House).
This article first appeared in the January 2008 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Feds Order States to Search for Adoptable Children
What ‘Terrible Thing’ Happened in 1997?
Feds Order States to Search for Adoptable Children
By Nev Moore
January 2002
In 1997 President Clinton promoted the “Adoption and Safe Families Act.”
It was presented as a way to help abused and neglected children who languished in foster care for years. They were often shuffled among dozens of foster homes, never having a real home and family.
For every child that DSS can get adopted, there is a bonus of $4,000 to $6,000.
In a press release from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services dated November 24, 1999, it refers to “President Clinton’s initiative to double by 2002 the number of children in foster care who are adopted or otherwise permanently placed.”
It all sounded so heartwarming. In the stereotype about kids in foster care, we’re told to picture a forlorn, hollow-eyed child, thin and pale, looking up at us beseechingly through a dirt-streaked face. Unconsciously, we pull up old pictures from Life magazine of children in Appalachia in the 1930s.
We think of orphans and children abandoned by parents who look like Manson family members. We play a nostalgic movie in our heads of the little fellow shyly walking across an emerald green, manicured lawn to meet Ward and June Cleaver, his new adoptive parents, who lead him into their lovely suburban home.
We imagine the little tyke’s eyes growing as big as saucers as the Cleavers show him his very own room, full of toys and sports gear. And we just feel so gosh darn good about ourselves.
Wake Up to Reality
Now it’s time to wake up to the reality of the adoption business.
Very few children who supply the adoption market are hollow-eyed tykes from Appalachia. Very few are crack babies from the projects.
When you are marketing a product, you have to provide a desirable one that sells. In the adoption business, that is nice kids with reasonably good genetics who clean up good. An interesting point is that the Cape Cod & Islands office leads the state in terms of processing kids into the system and having them adopted out. More than the inner city areas, the projects, Mission Hill, Brockton, Lynn, etc. ... interesting.
With the implementation of the Adoption and Safe Families Act, President Clinton tried to make himself look like a humanitarian who is responsible for saving the abused and neglected children. The drive of this initiative is to offer cash “bonuses” to states for every child they have adopted out of foster care, with the goal of doubling their adoptions by 2002, and sustaining that for each subsequent year. They actually call them “adoption incentive bonuses,” to promote the adoption of children.
Where to Find Children
A whole new industry was put into motion. If you have a basket of apples, and people start giving you $100 per apple, what are you going to do? Make sure that you have an unlimited supply of apples, right?
To accompany the new Act, the President requested, by executive memorandum, an initiative entitled Adoption 2002, to be implemented and managed by Health & Human Services. The initiative not only gives the cash adoption bonuses to the states, it also provides cash adoption subsidies to adoptive parents until the children turn eighteen.
Everybody makes money. If anyone really believes that these people are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, then I’ve got some bad news for you.
The fact that this program is run by HHS, ordered from the very top, explains why the citizens who are victims of DSS get no response from their legislators.
It explains why no one in the Administration cares about the abuse and fatalities of children in the “care” of DSS, and no one wants to hear about the broken arms, verbal abuse, or rapes. They are just business casualties.
It explains why the legislators on Beacon Hill I’ve talked to for the past three years look at me with pity. Because I’m preaching to the already damned.
The legislators have forgotten who funds their paychecks and who they need to account to, as has the Governor. Because it isn’t the President. It’s us.
How DSS Gets Dollars
The way that the adoption bonuses work is that each state is given a baseline number of expected adoptions based on population.
For every child that DSS can get adopted, there is a bonus of $4,000 to $6,000.
But that is just the starting figure in a complex mathematical formula in which each bonus is multiplied by the percentage that the state has managed to exceed its baseline adoption number. The states must maintain this increase in each successive year. ... Like compound interest.
The bill reads: “$4,000 to $6,000 will be multiplied by the amount (if any) by which the number of foster child adoptions in the State exceeds the base number of foster child adoptions for the State for the fiscal year.” In the “technical assistance” section of the bill it states that, “the Secretary [of HHS] may, directly or through grants or contracts, provide technical assistance to assist states and local communities to reach their targets for increased numbers of adoptions for children in foster care.”
The assistance is to support “the goal of encouraging more adoptions out of the foster care system; the development of best practice guidelines for expediting the termination of parental rights; the development of special units and expertise in moving children toward adoption as a permanent goal; models to encourage the fast tracking of children who have not attained 1 year of age into pre-adoptive placements; and the development of programs that place children into pre-adoptive placements without waiting for termination of parental rights.”
In the November press release from HHS it continues, “HHS awarded the first ever adoption bonuses to States for increases in the adoption of children from the public foster care system.” Some of the other incentives offered are “innovative grants” to reduce barriers to adoption [i.e., parents], more State support for adoptive families, making adoption affordable for families by providing cash subsides and tax credits.
A report from a private think tank, the National Center for Policy Analysis, reads: “The way the federal government reimburses States rewards a growth in the size of the program instead of the effective care of children.”
Another incentive being promoted is the use of the Internet to make adoption easier. Clinton directed HHS to develop an Internet site to “link children in foster care with adoptive families.” So we will be able to window shop for children on a government web site. If you don’t find anything you like there, you can surf on over to the “Adopt Shoppe.”
If you prefer to actually be able to kick tires instead of just looking at pictures you could attend one of DSS’s quaint “Adoption Fairs,” where live children are put on display and you can walk around and browse. Like a flea market to sell kids.
If one of them begs you to take him home you can always say, “Sorry. Just looking.”
The incentives for government child snatching are so good that I’m surprised we don’t have government agents breaking down people’s doors and just shooting the parents in the heads and grabbing the kids. But then, if you need more apples you don’t chop down your apple trees.
Dollars for Foster Parents
That covers the goodies the State gets. Now let’s have a look at how the Cleavers make out financially after the adoption is finalized.
After the adoption is finalized, the State and federal subsidies continue. The adoptive parents may collect cash subsidies until the child is 18. If the child stays in school, subsidies continue to the age of 22. There are State funded subsidies as well as federal funds through the Title IV-E section of the Social Security Act.
The daily rate for State funds is the same as the foster care payments, which range from $410-$486 per month per child. Unless the child can be designated “special needs,” which of course, they all can.
According to the State Subsidy profile from DSS, “special needs” may be defined as: “Physical disability, mental disability, emotional disturbance; a significant emotional tie with the foster parents where the child has resided with the foster parents for one or more years and separation would adversely affect the child’s development if not adopted by them.”
...But their significant emotional ties with their parents, since birth, never enter the equation.
Additional “special needs” designations are: a child twelve years of age or older; racial or ethnic factors; child having siblings or half-siblings. In their report on the State of the Children, Boston’s Institute for Children says: “In part because the States can garner extra federal funds for special needs children the designation has been broadened so far as to become meaningless.” “Special needs” children may also get an additional Social Security check.
Social Security Money for Foster Parents
The adoptive parents also receive Medicaid for the child, a clothing allowance and reimbursement for adoption costs such as adoption fees, court and attorney fees, cost of adoption home study, and “reasonable costs of food and lodging for the child and adoptive parents when necessary to complete the adoption process.”
Under Title XX of the Social Security Act, adoptive parents are also entitled to post adoption services “that may be helpful in keeping the family intact,” including “daycare, specialized daycare, respite care, in-house support services such as housekeeping, and personal care, counseling, and other child welfare services”.
...Wow! Everything short of being knighted by the Queen!]
The subsidy profile actually states that it does not include money to remodel the home to accommodate the child. But, as subsidies can be negotiated, remodeling could possibly be accomplished under the “innovative incentives to remove barriers to adoption” section. The subsidy regulations read that “adoption assistance is based solely on the needs of the child without regard to the income of the family.”
Mothers Never Get Help
What an interesting government policy when compared to the welfare program that the same child’s mother may have been on before losing her children. She was not allowed to own anything, had to prove that she had no money in the bank; no boats, real estate, stocks or bonds; and could not even own a car that is safe to drive worth over $1000. This is all so she could collect $539 per month for herself and two children.
The foster parent who gets her children gets $820 plus. We spit on the mother on welfare as a parasite who is bleeding the taxpayers, yet we hold the foster and adoptive parents [who are bleeding ten times as much from the taxpayers] up as saints. The adoptive and foster parents aren’t subjected to psychological evaluations, ink blot tests, MMPI’s, drug & alcohol evaluations, or urine screens as the parents are.
Negotiate on Welfare?
Adoption subsidies may be negotiated on a case by case basis.
... Anyone ever tried to “negotiate” with the Welfare Dept.?
There are many e-mail lists and books published to teach adoptive parents how to negotiate to maximize their subsidies. As one pro writes on an e-mail list: “We receive a subsidy for our kids of $1,900 per month plus another $500 from the State of Florida. We are trying to adopt three more teens and we will get subsidies for them, too. It sure helps out with the bills.”
I can’t help but wonder why we don’t give this same level of support to the children’s parents in the first place? According to Cornell University, about 68% of all child protective cases “do not involve child maltreatment.” The largest percentage of those cases are for “deprivation of necessities” due to poverty. So, if the natural parents were given the incredible incentives and services listed above that are provided to the adoptive parents, wouldn’t it stand to reason that the causes for removing children in the first place would be eliminated?
How many less children would enter foster care in the first place? The child protective budget would be reduced from $12 billion to around $4 billion. Granted, tens of thousands of social workers, administrators, lawyers, juvenile court personnel, therapists, and foster parents would be out of business, but we would have safe, healthy, intact families, which are the foundation of any society.
That’s just a fantasy, of course.
May is national adoption month. To support “Adoption 2002,” the U.S. Postal Service is issuing special adoption stamps. Let us hope they don’t feature pictures of kids who are for sale. I urge everyone to boycott these stamps and register complaints with the post office.
I know that I’m feeling pretty smug and superior about being part of such a socially advanced and compassionate society. How about you?
This is a modified version of an article which appeared in our August 2000 edition.
Massachusetts News has written many stories about the perils of the 1974 Act of Sen. Mondale and other problems with DSS. Most of them can be found on the archives by searching for “Nev Moore” or “Ed Oliver."
http://www.massnews.com/2002_editions/01_Jan/0102dss2.htm
Feds Order States to Search for Adoptable Children
By Nev Moore
January 2002
In 1997 President Clinton promoted the “Adoption and Safe Families Act.”
It was presented as a way to help abused and neglected children who languished in foster care for years. They were often shuffled among dozens of foster homes, never having a real home and family.
For every child that DSS can get adopted, there is a bonus of $4,000 to $6,000.
In a press release from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services dated November 24, 1999, it refers to “President Clinton’s initiative to double by 2002 the number of children in foster care who are adopted or otherwise permanently placed.”
It all sounded so heartwarming. In the stereotype about kids in foster care, we’re told to picture a forlorn, hollow-eyed child, thin and pale, looking up at us beseechingly through a dirt-streaked face. Unconsciously, we pull up old pictures from Life magazine of children in Appalachia in the 1930s.
We think of orphans and children abandoned by parents who look like Manson family members. We play a nostalgic movie in our heads of the little fellow shyly walking across an emerald green, manicured lawn to meet Ward and June Cleaver, his new adoptive parents, who lead him into their lovely suburban home.
We imagine the little tyke’s eyes growing as big as saucers as the Cleavers show him his very own room, full of toys and sports gear. And we just feel so gosh darn good about ourselves.
Wake Up to Reality
Now it’s time to wake up to the reality of the adoption business.
Very few children who supply the adoption market are hollow-eyed tykes from Appalachia. Very few are crack babies from the projects.
When you are marketing a product, you have to provide a desirable one that sells. In the adoption business, that is nice kids with reasonably good genetics who clean up good. An interesting point is that the Cape Cod & Islands office leads the state in terms of processing kids into the system and having them adopted out. More than the inner city areas, the projects, Mission Hill, Brockton, Lynn, etc. ... interesting.
With the implementation of the Adoption and Safe Families Act, President Clinton tried to make himself look like a humanitarian who is responsible for saving the abused and neglected children. The drive of this initiative is to offer cash “bonuses” to states for every child they have adopted out of foster care, with the goal of doubling their adoptions by 2002, and sustaining that for each subsequent year. They actually call them “adoption incentive bonuses,” to promote the adoption of children.
Where to Find Children
A whole new industry was put into motion. If you have a basket of apples, and people start giving you $100 per apple, what are you going to do? Make sure that you have an unlimited supply of apples, right?
To accompany the new Act, the President requested, by executive memorandum, an initiative entitled Adoption 2002, to be implemented and managed by Health & Human Services. The initiative not only gives the cash adoption bonuses to the states, it also provides cash adoption subsidies to adoptive parents until the children turn eighteen.
Everybody makes money. If anyone really believes that these people are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, then I’ve got some bad news for you.
The fact that this program is run by HHS, ordered from the very top, explains why the citizens who are victims of DSS get no response from their legislators.
It explains why no one in the Administration cares about the abuse and fatalities of children in the “care” of DSS, and no one wants to hear about the broken arms, verbal abuse, or rapes. They are just business casualties.
It explains why the legislators on Beacon Hill I’ve talked to for the past three years look at me with pity. Because I’m preaching to the already damned.
The legislators have forgotten who funds their paychecks and who they need to account to, as has the Governor. Because it isn’t the President. It’s us.
How DSS Gets Dollars
The way that the adoption bonuses work is that each state is given a baseline number of expected adoptions based on population.
For every child that DSS can get adopted, there is a bonus of $4,000 to $6,000.
But that is just the starting figure in a complex mathematical formula in which each bonus is multiplied by the percentage that the state has managed to exceed its baseline adoption number. The states must maintain this increase in each successive year. ... Like compound interest.
The bill reads: “$4,000 to $6,000 will be multiplied by the amount (if any) by which the number of foster child adoptions in the State exceeds the base number of foster child adoptions for the State for the fiscal year.” In the “technical assistance” section of the bill it states that, “the Secretary [of HHS] may, directly or through grants or contracts, provide technical assistance to assist states and local communities to reach their targets for increased numbers of adoptions for children in foster care.”
The assistance is to support “the goal of encouraging more adoptions out of the foster care system; the development of best practice guidelines for expediting the termination of parental rights; the development of special units and expertise in moving children toward adoption as a permanent goal; models to encourage the fast tracking of children who have not attained 1 year of age into pre-adoptive placements; and the development of programs that place children into pre-adoptive placements without waiting for termination of parental rights.”
DSS Gets $100 Million/Year in Bonuses
Mass. DSS receives over $100 million/year in bonuses from the federal government. None of that money goes to the general state treasury. It all goes directly to the bureaucrats at DSS.
In the November press release from HHS it continues, “HHS awarded the first ever adoption bonuses to States for increases in the adoption of children from the public foster care system.” Some of the other incentives offered are “innovative grants” to reduce barriers to adoption [i.e., parents], more State support for adoptive families, making adoption affordable for families by providing cash subsides and tax credits.
A report from a private think tank, the National Center for Policy Analysis, reads: “The way the federal government reimburses States rewards a growth in the size of the program instead of the effective care of children.”
Another incentive being promoted is the use of the Internet to make adoption easier. Clinton directed HHS to develop an Internet site to “link children in foster care with adoptive families.” So we will be able to window shop for children on a government web site. If you don’t find anything you like there, you can surf on over to the “Adopt Shoppe.”
If you prefer to actually be able to kick tires instead of just looking at pictures you could attend one of DSS’s quaint “Adoption Fairs,” where live children are put on display and you can walk around and browse. Like a flea market to sell kids.
If one of them begs you to take him home you can always say, “Sorry. Just looking.”
The incentives for government child snatching are so good that I’m surprised we don’t have government agents breaking down people’s doors and just shooting the parents in the heads and grabbing the kids. But then, if you need more apples you don’t chop down your apple trees.
Dollars for Foster Parents
That covers the goodies the State gets. Now let’s have a look at how the Cleavers make out financially after the adoption is finalized.
After the adoption is finalized, the State and federal subsidies continue. The adoptive parents may collect cash subsidies until the child is 18. If the child stays in school, subsidies continue to the age of 22. There are State funded subsidies as well as federal funds through the Title IV-E section of the Social Security Act.
The daily rate for State funds is the same as the foster care payments, which range from $410-$486 per month per child. Unless the child can be designated “special needs,” which of course, they all can.
According to the State Subsidy profile from DSS, “special needs” may be defined as: “Physical disability, mental disability, emotional disturbance; a significant emotional tie with the foster parents where the child has resided with the foster parents for one or more years and separation would adversely affect the child’s development if not adopted by them.”
...But their significant emotional ties with their parents, since birth, never enter the equation.
Additional “special needs” designations are: a child twelve years of age or older; racial or ethnic factors; child having siblings or half-siblings. In their report on the State of the Children, Boston’s Institute for Children says: “In part because the States can garner extra federal funds for special needs children the designation has been broadened so far as to become meaningless.” “Special needs” children may also get an additional Social Security check.
Social Security Money for Foster Parents
The adoptive parents also receive Medicaid for the child, a clothing allowance and reimbursement for adoption costs such as adoption fees, court and attorney fees, cost of adoption home study, and “reasonable costs of food and lodging for the child and adoptive parents when necessary to complete the adoption process.”
Under Title XX of the Social Security Act, adoptive parents are also entitled to post adoption services “that may be helpful in keeping the family intact,” including “daycare, specialized daycare, respite care, in-house support services such as housekeeping, and personal care, counseling, and other child welfare services”.
...Wow! Everything short of being knighted by the Queen!]
The subsidy profile actually states that it does not include money to remodel the home to accommodate the child. But, as subsidies can be negotiated, remodeling could possibly be accomplished under the “innovative incentives to remove barriers to adoption” section. The subsidy regulations read that “adoption assistance is based solely on the needs of the child without regard to the income of the family.”
Mothers Never Get Help
What an interesting government policy when compared to the welfare program that the same child’s mother may have been on before losing her children. She was not allowed to own anything, had to prove that she had no money in the bank; no boats, real estate, stocks or bonds; and could not even own a car that is safe to drive worth over $1000. This is all so she could collect $539 per month for herself and two children.
The foster parent who gets her children gets $820 plus. We spit on the mother on welfare as a parasite who is bleeding the taxpayers, yet we hold the foster and adoptive parents [who are bleeding ten times as much from the taxpayers] up as saints. The adoptive and foster parents aren’t subjected to psychological evaluations, ink blot tests, MMPI’s, drug & alcohol evaluations, or urine screens as the parents are.
Negotiate on Welfare?
Adoption subsidies may be negotiated on a case by case basis.
... Anyone ever tried to “negotiate” with the Welfare Dept.?
There are many e-mail lists and books published to teach adoptive parents how to negotiate to maximize their subsidies. As one pro writes on an e-mail list: “We receive a subsidy for our kids of $1,900 per month plus another $500 from the State of Florida. We are trying to adopt three more teens and we will get subsidies for them, too. It sure helps out with the bills.”
I can’t help but wonder why we don’t give this same level of support to the children’s parents in the first place? According to Cornell University, about 68% of all child protective cases “do not involve child maltreatment.” The largest percentage of those cases are for “deprivation of necessities” due to poverty. So, if the natural parents were given the incredible incentives and services listed above that are provided to the adoptive parents, wouldn’t it stand to reason that the causes for removing children in the first place would be eliminated?
How many less children would enter foster care in the first place? The child protective budget would be reduced from $12 billion to around $4 billion. Granted, tens of thousands of social workers, administrators, lawyers, juvenile court personnel, therapists, and foster parents would be out of business, but we would have safe, healthy, intact families, which are the foundation of any society.
That’s just a fantasy, of course.
May is national adoption month. To support “Adoption 2002,” the U.S. Postal Service is issuing special adoption stamps. Let us hope they don’t feature pictures of kids who are for sale. I urge everyone to boycott these stamps and register complaints with the post office.
I know that I’m feeling pretty smug and superior about being part of such a socially advanced and compassionate society. How about you?
This is a modified version of an article which appeared in our August 2000 edition.
Massachusetts News has written many stories about the perils of the 1974 Act of Sen. Mondale and other problems with DSS. Most of them can be found on the archives by searching for “Nev Moore” or “Ed Oliver."
http://www.massnews.com/2002_editions/01_Jan/0102dss2.htm
Fundamental Right to Direct the Upbringing of One's Child
The Right to Direct the Upbringing of One's Own Child, otherwise known as the Parental Liberty Doctrine, is a crucial civil liberty. It includes direction of a child's education, health care, lifestyle, regimen, religious observance, and discipline. The characterization of the liberty as "fundamental" under the substantive due process of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution makes an enormous practical difference to home educators and court litigants.
"Fundamental" Liberties
In the parlance of United States constitutional jurisprudence, a "fundamental" right is a civil liberty of paramount importance. Whenever an individual can show that the government is interfering with an exercise of a "fundamental" civil liberty, the government has the burden to prove to a court that the government action can survive the "strict scrutiny" standard of court review.
The strict-scrutiny test upholds state intervention as proper only if (1) an authorizing state regulation exists that can be justified by a compelling state interest, (2) the means chosen are essential to furthering that interest, (3) there is a clear and present danger to the interest the state may lawfully protect, and (4) the tactic used is narrowly tailored and the least restrictive means of discharging the government's compelling interest.
"Non-Fundamental" Rights
In contrast to a "fundamental" liberty, other rights are entitled to very limited protection. Whenever an individual can show that the government is interfering with an exercise of a "non-fundamental" civil liberty, the individual has the burden to prove to a court that the government action fails the "rational basis" standard.
The rational-basis test stops state intervention as improper only if (1) the governmental action does not represent a reasonable means to a legitimate state interest, and (2) the relationship between the reasonable means and the legitimate state interest is not at least debatable. The test does not require the government to use the least intrusive or most creative regulatory scheme to achieve legitimate state ends.
Typically, the "rational-basis" test is used as a constitutional justification for the application of the "best interest of the child" statutory (or regulatory) test. The "best interest" test allows government agencies, and judges, to supplant parental decisions about child raising with their own subjective determinations about what is in a child's "best interest."
The "best interest" test is almost totally arbitrary, and in practice it allows virtually unlimited government interference with families. Additionally, governmental agencies often have structural conflicts-of-interest, often related to budgetary incentives, which cause them to systematically act contrary to a child's bona fide best interest. For these reasons, the "best interest" test is only appropriate in divorce cases, or in an adoption placement decision where the consent of a biological parent and any other blood relative are not feasibly available even after the performance of due diligence. "Best interest" is an inappropriate review in other situations where the biological parents are united in their opposition to the government's proposed disposition of a child.
Contrary to the common assumption, children in government care are not in a safe environment. Thousands of children every year are abused, murdered, or developmentally retarded while under government supervision. Often this suffering is because of systemic, multi-party incompetence, corruption, and neglect. In many cases, financial or political incentives built into state and federal law create conflicts-of-interest which compromise the objective judgment of intervening professionals and adjudicators. Often such incidents represent violations of constitutional protections. See Tumey v. Ohio, 273 U.S. 510 (1927); Ward v. Village of Monroeville, 409 U.S. 57 (1972); Gibson v. Berryhill, 411 U.S. 564 (1973); Connally v. Georgia, 429 U.S. 245 (1977); Young v. United States ex rel. Vuitton et Fils S. A., 481 U.S. 787 (1987).
Due to "shield laws," information about specific incidents of government child abuse are withheld from the public. Mistreated children who are removed often suffer far greater abuse while in government custody. This dynamic is true for government schools, government foster care, government mental health facilities, government prisons, and government child care.
Government officials and majoritarian populations simply do not have interests which are as closely aligned to a seized child as the interests of that child's parent (who is often a member of a demographic minority). Native Americans and Aborigines, as two examples, have suffered terribly as a result of the "best interest" standard, which was historically invoked to abduct, forcibly educate, and ethnically cleanse many thousands of their children.
The United States Congress realized that the "best interest" standard could be easily abused against large numbers of demographic-minority families, and enacted a higher statutory standard pioneered by Native American advocates to provide an extra layer of legal protection. Ironically, many Native American families on Reservations now enjoy a higher level of practical protection for parental liberty than many white American state residents. See Indian Child Welfare Act Subchapter I, 25 U.S.C. 1912.
Attendant Evidentiary Protections
For temporary or preliminary court orders, such as home searches or child seizures, except for termination of parental custody or visitation, the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States requires probable cause.
For final court orders, or for permanent termination of parental custody or visitation, clear and convincing evidence is typically required under United States law. Procedural due process is also required for the parents and child. At minimum, the government must make an initial showing, by clear and convincing evidence, that a parent has inflicted harm by placing the child in clear, present, and grave danger.
The fundamental right to physical liberty is implicated with any restraint of a child's physical body or sensory faculties in a captive informational environment which occurs without consent of the minor's parents, regardless of whether the government restraint is achieved through compulsory school attendance, government assumption of child custody, involuntary hospital admission, containment in a mental health facility, confinement in a concentration camp, forced national "service" to the community, or incarceration in a criminal correction facility.
Irreparable harm is caused even by temporary derogations of First Amendment familial association, or of other fundamental rights such as Fourteenth Amendment family liberty. Such violations may be stopped by injunction or stay. Elrod v. Burns, 427 U.S. 347 (1976).
Proponents of the "best interest" standard often attempt to trump or entirely sidestep these evidentiary and procedural protections.
Convergence of Parent's Rights and Interests with the Child's Rights and Interests
State interference with the parent-child bond is often framed as a "parental rights" issue. However, the same issue could also be framed as one of state interference with the right of a child. Courts have noted that children have a concomitant fundamental right to the state of well-being which derives from "'the continuity of affectionate care from those to whom [they are] attached through bonds of love."' Roe v. Conn, 417 F. Supp. 769, 776 (M.D. Ala. 1976)(cite omitted); see also In re J.P., 648 P.2d 1364, 1369, 1377 n.13 (Utah 1982)(citation omitted)(“‘prior and fundamental right of a parent to rear his child; and concomitantly, of the right of the child to be reared by his natural parent’”); In re Perales, 369 N.E.2d 1047, 1051 (Ohio 1977). The right described in Roe is sometimes called the Child Liberty Doctrine, for it is a right describing a child's right to be free from harmful and arbitrary state confinement.
A child cannot represent him or herself, and thus has a right to be represented by those who have the most similar alignment of familial, biological, property, and economic interests. When the state interferes with the parent-child bond, it imposes a disinterested caretaker upon the child. Over a long period of time, the service rendered by a caretaker who is motivated by the bonds of affection and/or a close alignment of interests with the child is likely to be quite different than the service rendered over the long term by a disinterested party. Caretakers with professional expertise in some specialty may have a more refined clinical approach to some facet of a child's development, but professionals have no special systemic motivation to apply their services to obtain the maximum benefit for a particular child when assistance requires a significant personal, emotional, or financial investment or risk.
The same concept applies to other concerns that are de facto concerns when parental rights are litigated. For example, parents who are forced to defend against improper state interference often must expend tremendous quantities of time, money, and emotional energy in the effort. Yet if parents' financial resources are depleted defending against state interference, the children of those traumatized parents are also likely to have a lower standard of living and a depleted inheritance.
Consequently, "while there is still reason to believe that positive, nurturing parent-child relationships exist, the parens patriae interest favors preservation, not severance, of natural familial bonds." In re J.P., 648 P.2d at 1377 n.13 (quoting Santosky v. Kramer, 455 U.S. 745, 766 (1982)); see also Parham v. J.R., 442 U.S. 584, 600-03, 610-11 (1979); Dickson v. Lascaris, 423 N.E.2d 361, 363 (N.Y. 1981) ("rule fosters both [parents' and child's] interests by recognizing that they ordinarily converge").
The Parental Liberty Doctrine is really a component of the much broader Family Liberty Doctrine (which overlaps with the Right to Family Autonomy, a facet of liberty oriented towards familial privacy and association). Jurists, journalists, and politicians have tended to focus on "parental rights" or "parental liberty," because parents are often in a better position to assert family prerogatives in protection of the children. Often the public does not understand any term other than the widely-used colloquial expression parental rights. But to be technically precise, the Child Liberty Doctrine protecting the interests of children, as well as the state's interests in general health and safety, are similarly intertwined with and served by the Family Liberty Doctrine. Children and society are better off when children are not treated as creatures or property of the state.
http://www.quaqua.org/standardreview.htm
"Fundamental" Liberties
In the parlance of United States constitutional jurisprudence, a "fundamental" right is a civil liberty of paramount importance. Whenever an individual can show that the government is interfering with an exercise of a "fundamental" civil liberty, the government has the burden to prove to a court that the government action can survive the "strict scrutiny" standard of court review.
The strict-scrutiny test upholds state intervention as proper only if (1) an authorizing state regulation exists that can be justified by a compelling state interest, (2) the means chosen are essential to furthering that interest, (3) there is a clear and present danger to the interest the state may lawfully protect, and (4) the tactic used is narrowly tailored and the least restrictive means of discharging the government's compelling interest.
"Non-Fundamental" Rights
In contrast to a "fundamental" liberty, other rights are entitled to very limited protection. Whenever an individual can show that the government is interfering with an exercise of a "non-fundamental" civil liberty, the individual has the burden to prove to a court that the government action fails the "rational basis" standard.
The rational-basis test stops state intervention as improper only if (1) the governmental action does not represent a reasonable means to a legitimate state interest, and (2) the relationship between the reasonable means and the legitimate state interest is not at least debatable. The test does not require the government to use the least intrusive or most creative regulatory scheme to achieve legitimate state ends.
Typically, the "rational-basis" test is used as a constitutional justification for the application of the "best interest of the child" statutory (or regulatory) test. The "best interest" test allows government agencies, and judges, to supplant parental decisions about child raising with their own subjective determinations about what is in a child's "best interest."
The "best interest" test is almost totally arbitrary, and in practice it allows virtually unlimited government interference with families. Additionally, governmental agencies often have structural conflicts-of-interest, often related to budgetary incentives, which cause them to systematically act contrary to a child's bona fide best interest. For these reasons, the "best interest" test is only appropriate in divorce cases, or in an adoption placement decision where the consent of a biological parent and any other blood relative are not feasibly available even after the performance of due diligence. "Best interest" is an inappropriate review in other situations where the biological parents are united in their opposition to the government's proposed disposition of a child.
Contrary to the common assumption, children in government care are not in a safe environment. Thousands of children every year are abused, murdered, or developmentally retarded while under government supervision. Often this suffering is because of systemic, multi-party incompetence, corruption, and neglect. In many cases, financial or political incentives built into state and federal law create conflicts-of-interest which compromise the objective judgment of intervening professionals and adjudicators. Often such incidents represent violations of constitutional protections. See Tumey v. Ohio, 273 U.S. 510 (1927); Ward v. Village of Monroeville, 409 U.S. 57 (1972); Gibson v. Berryhill, 411 U.S. 564 (1973); Connally v. Georgia, 429 U.S. 245 (1977); Young v. United States ex rel. Vuitton et Fils S. A., 481 U.S. 787 (1987).
Due to "shield laws," information about specific incidents of government child abuse are withheld from the public. Mistreated children who are removed often suffer far greater abuse while in government custody. This dynamic is true for government schools, government foster care, government mental health facilities, government prisons, and government child care.
Government officials and majoritarian populations simply do not have interests which are as closely aligned to a seized child as the interests of that child's parent (who is often a member of a demographic minority). Native Americans and Aborigines, as two examples, have suffered terribly as a result of the "best interest" standard, which was historically invoked to abduct, forcibly educate, and ethnically cleanse many thousands of their children.
The United States Congress realized that the "best interest" standard could be easily abused against large numbers of demographic-minority families, and enacted a higher statutory standard pioneered by Native American advocates to provide an extra layer of legal protection. Ironically, many Native American families on Reservations now enjoy a higher level of practical protection for parental liberty than many white American state residents. See Indian Child Welfare Act Subchapter I, 25 U.S.C. 1912.
Attendant Evidentiary Protections
For temporary or preliminary court orders, such as home searches or child seizures, except for termination of parental custody or visitation, the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States requires probable cause.
For final court orders, or for permanent termination of parental custody or visitation, clear and convincing evidence is typically required under United States law. Procedural due process is also required for the parents and child. At minimum, the government must make an initial showing, by clear and convincing evidence, that a parent has inflicted harm by placing the child in clear, present, and grave danger.
The fundamental right to physical liberty is implicated with any restraint of a child's physical body or sensory faculties in a captive informational environment which occurs without consent of the minor's parents, regardless of whether the government restraint is achieved through compulsory school attendance, government assumption of child custody, involuntary hospital admission, containment in a mental health facility, confinement in a concentration camp, forced national "service" to the community, or incarceration in a criminal correction facility.
Irreparable harm is caused even by temporary derogations of First Amendment familial association, or of other fundamental rights such as Fourteenth Amendment family liberty. Such violations may be stopped by injunction or stay. Elrod v. Burns, 427 U.S. 347 (1976).
Proponents of the "best interest" standard often attempt to trump or entirely sidestep these evidentiary and procedural protections.
Convergence of Parent's Rights and Interests with the Child's Rights and Interests
State interference with the parent-child bond is often framed as a "parental rights" issue. However, the same issue could also be framed as one of state interference with the right of a child. Courts have noted that children have a concomitant fundamental right to the state of well-being which derives from "'the continuity of affectionate care from those to whom [they are] attached through bonds of love."' Roe v. Conn, 417 F. Supp. 769, 776 (M.D. Ala. 1976)(cite omitted); see also In re J.P., 648 P.2d 1364, 1369, 1377 n.13 (Utah 1982)(citation omitted)(“‘prior and fundamental right of a parent to rear his child; and concomitantly, of the right of the child to be reared by his natural parent’”); In re Perales, 369 N.E.2d 1047, 1051 (Ohio 1977). The right described in Roe is sometimes called the Child Liberty Doctrine, for it is a right describing a child's right to be free from harmful and arbitrary state confinement.
A child cannot represent him or herself, and thus has a right to be represented by those who have the most similar alignment of familial, biological, property, and economic interests. When the state interferes with the parent-child bond, it imposes a disinterested caretaker upon the child. Over a long period of time, the service rendered by a caretaker who is motivated by the bonds of affection and/or a close alignment of interests with the child is likely to be quite different than the service rendered over the long term by a disinterested party. Caretakers with professional expertise in some specialty may have a more refined clinical approach to some facet of a child's development, but professionals have no special systemic motivation to apply their services to obtain the maximum benefit for a particular child when assistance requires a significant personal, emotional, or financial investment or risk.
The same concept applies to other concerns that are de facto concerns when parental rights are litigated. For example, parents who are forced to defend against improper state interference often must expend tremendous quantities of time, money, and emotional energy in the effort. Yet if parents' financial resources are depleted defending against state interference, the children of those traumatized parents are also likely to have a lower standard of living and a depleted inheritance.
Consequently, "while there is still reason to believe that positive, nurturing parent-child relationships exist, the parens patriae interest favors preservation, not severance, of natural familial bonds." In re J.P., 648 P.2d at 1377 n.13 (quoting Santosky v. Kramer, 455 U.S. 745, 766 (1982)); see also Parham v. J.R., 442 U.S. 584, 600-03, 610-11 (1979); Dickson v. Lascaris, 423 N.E.2d 361, 363 (N.Y. 1981) ("rule fosters both [parents' and child's] interests by recognizing that they ordinarily converge").
The Parental Liberty Doctrine is really a component of the much broader Family Liberty Doctrine (which overlaps with the Right to Family Autonomy, a facet of liberty oriented towards familial privacy and association). Jurists, journalists, and politicians have tended to focus on "parental rights" or "parental liberty," because parents are often in a better position to assert family prerogatives in protection of the children. Often the public does not understand any term other than the widely-used colloquial expression parental rights. But to be technically precise, the Child Liberty Doctrine protecting the interests of children, as well as the state's interests in general health and safety, are similarly intertwined with and served by the Family Liberty Doctrine. Children and society are better off when children are not treated as creatures or property of the state.
http://www.quaqua.org/standardreview.htm
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Parental Alienation is a Fact of Life for Many Children
by Mark Godbey
April 2, 2009
Those who alienate their children from the other parent after divorce continue to clamor about the "junk" science behind Parental Alienation, but for those who do not know, Parental Alienation Syndrome has passed the Frye Test in federal court and is recognized as a scientific fact by both the psychological community and by the federal courts.
Once again in the state of California, an attempt is being made to create an illegal law in direct defiance of federal court rulings that recognized parental alienation as a fact. AB 612 is scheduled for a hearing in Sacramento on April 14, this year, in an attempt to get the law out of committee and up for a vote. Last year a similar attempt was made but failed. This year the law was reintroduced by Assemblyman Jim Beall, Jr. (D - 24th District).
Michael Robinson of the California Alliance for Families and Children stated on their website, "We are confident that the Family Law Section of the State Bar is again opposing this bill, as well as the California Psychologists Association. Moreover, this year we believe that Family Court judges (who have not been engaged in this discussion so far) will also oppose the elimination of parent alienation."
Parental Alienation Syndrome Passes the Frye Test
by J. Michael Bone, Ph.D.
In a recent article published in The Comentator(1), Miami psychologist, Michael Poliacoff, Ph.D., wrote an article arguing against the case for considering Parental Alienation Syndrome as a valid diagnosis, as well as for it not being admissible as evidence in court. His argument was legalistic in its posture, citing Frye Standards as well as Daubert. His conclusion was that Parental Alienation Syndrome could not pass these legal tests, and likely never would. That article was published in 2000.
It is perhaps ironic that on November 22, 2000, in the 13th Judicial Circuit here in Florida, that a Frye hearing was held wherein Richard Gardner, M.D., Parental Alienation Syndrome’s originator; and Richard Warshak, Ph.D., one of PAS’s leading psychological advocates ,testified for two days in a specifically styled Frye Hearing. The result was that the Court ruled that Parental Alienation Syndrome did indeed pass the Frye Test. The Frye test is related to a 1923 Federal Appeals Court Decision that for scientific evidence to be admissible in court that it must be gathered using techniques that have gained general acceptance in their field.2 This ruling was the first time in the United states, that PAS crossed this important legal threshold, obviously contradicting Dr. Poliakoff’s predictions.
The key points of the Courts ruling are briefly discussed below. Specifically, the court ruled, “If I do have to apply a Frye Test he has passed the Frye Test, and I find that Parental Alienation Syndrome has passed the Frye Test in my Courtroom which is a Circuit Court Courtroom in the Family Law Division, based on the evidence and the argument before me.”(3) The evidence cited included testimony from Dr. Gardner, his Cirruculum Vitae, excerpts from his writings and other works by other writers. The Court, in its opinion, specifically cited an article published some two years before this hearing in the Florida Bar Journal, which was determined to have “credibility.”(4)
The Court also heard from two psychologists who argued that Parental Alienation Syndrome was not accepted within the scientific community. Their argument was interpreted by the Court as being tantamount to there being some sort of disciplinary turf battle” wherein one faction does believe in PAS ,and the other faction does not. The Court concludes that this disciplinary divisiveness in no way invalidates the general acceptance of PAS by the scientific community. It was also argued that Parental Alienation Syndrome does not appear in the DSM-lV, which they offered as evidence of its nonexistence.
The DSM-lV is the official diagnostic manual used by mental health professionals in their work with patients. It is a resource containing diagnostic codes and diagnostic criteria. The argument was made that if PAS cannot be found in the DSM-lV, that it does not exist. The Court found that this argument was flawed. The Court reasons that PAS was first described in 1985, and the DSM-IV was last updated in 1994, only 9 years after PAS’s original description by Dr. Gardner. Since the DSMs are rewritten every ten to twelve years, reflecting growing scientific knowledge, The Court reasoned that it is not unreasonable that PAS would not appear in the DSM-IV so shortly after it was first described. To support this conclusion,the Court found compelling the argument that AIDS was not in the medical diagnostic manual when it was first described, but that obviously did not invalidated its existence. Additionally, the Court found compelling the argument that Gille de Ia Tourette first described his syndrome in 1885. It was not until 1980 that Tourettes’s Syndrome found its way into the DSM, some 90 years after its description. Therefore, the fact that Parental Alienation Syndrome has not yet appeared in the DSM only nine years after its original description, is an invalid argument against its nonexistence.
The court also found significant the fact that, as proffered by Dr. Richard Warshak, the American Psychological Association approvingly cites works by Dr. Gardner in its child custody guidelines. In fact, Dr. Gardner is the only author amongst this elite list of works cited by the APA, that has three different works cited as essentially being state of the art on the subject of child custody evaluation.
Finally, the Court ruled that all of Dr. Gardner’s arguments were bolstered and confirmed by Richard Warshak, Ph.D. who is a psychologist and full professor at a prestigious university. Also submitted into evidence were multiple articles by various authors that echoed and confirmed the existence of Parental Alienation Syndrome within the scientific community.
The fact that Parental Alienation Syndrome has generated so much controversy and heated debate is an interesting question on its own, and one that will be addressed in a future article. Suffice it to say that this ruling should begin to answer and calm some of these arguments.
References
1. Poliacoff, Jerome H. “Parental alienation Syndrome: Testing Gardner’s Theory in the Family Courts”
Commentator, vol. 9, pp., 2000.
2. Frye v. United States, 293F. 1013, 1014, (D.C. Cir. 1923)
3. Kilgore v. Boyd, Circuit Court of the 13th Judicial Circuit of the State of Florida, Hillsborough
County, Family Law Division, Case No. 94-7573, Div. D.
4. Bone, J. Michael and Walsh, Michael, “Detection of Parental Alienation Syndrome and What to Do
About it”, The Florida Bar Journal
April 2, 2009
Those who alienate their children from the other parent after divorce continue to clamor about the "junk" science behind Parental Alienation, but for those who do not know, Parental Alienation Syndrome has passed the Frye Test in federal court and is recognized as a scientific fact by both the psychological community and by the federal courts.
Once again in the state of California, an attempt is being made to create an illegal law in direct defiance of federal court rulings that recognized parental alienation as a fact. AB 612 is scheduled for a hearing in Sacramento on April 14, this year, in an attempt to get the law out of committee and up for a vote. Last year a similar attempt was made but failed. This year the law was reintroduced by Assemblyman Jim Beall, Jr. (D - 24th District).
Michael Robinson of the California Alliance for Families and Children stated on their website, "We are confident that the Family Law Section of the State Bar is again opposing this bill, as well as the California Psychologists Association. Moreover, this year we believe that Family Court judges (who have not been engaged in this discussion so far) will also oppose the elimination of parent alienation."
Parental Alienation Syndrome Passes the Frye Test
by J. Michael Bone, Ph.D.
In a recent article published in The Comentator(1), Miami psychologist, Michael Poliacoff, Ph.D., wrote an article arguing against the case for considering Parental Alienation Syndrome as a valid diagnosis, as well as for it not being admissible as evidence in court. His argument was legalistic in its posture, citing Frye Standards as well as Daubert. His conclusion was that Parental Alienation Syndrome could not pass these legal tests, and likely never would. That article was published in 2000.
It is perhaps ironic that on November 22, 2000, in the 13th Judicial Circuit here in Florida, that a Frye hearing was held wherein Richard Gardner, M.D., Parental Alienation Syndrome’s originator; and Richard Warshak, Ph.D., one of PAS’s leading psychological advocates ,testified for two days in a specifically styled Frye Hearing. The result was that the Court ruled that Parental Alienation Syndrome did indeed pass the Frye Test. The Frye test is related to a 1923 Federal Appeals Court Decision that for scientific evidence to be admissible in court that it must be gathered using techniques that have gained general acceptance in their field.2 This ruling was the first time in the United states, that PAS crossed this important legal threshold, obviously contradicting Dr. Poliakoff’s predictions.
The key points of the Courts ruling are briefly discussed below. Specifically, the court ruled, “If I do have to apply a Frye Test he has passed the Frye Test, and I find that Parental Alienation Syndrome has passed the Frye Test in my Courtroom which is a Circuit Court Courtroom in the Family Law Division, based on the evidence and the argument before me.”(3) The evidence cited included testimony from Dr. Gardner, his Cirruculum Vitae, excerpts from his writings and other works by other writers. The Court, in its opinion, specifically cited an article published some two years before this hearing in the Florida Bar Journal, which was determined to have “credibility.”(4)
The Court also heard from two psychologists who argued that Parental Alienation Syndrome was not accepted within the scientific community. Their argument was interpreted by the Court as being tantamount to there being some sort of disciplinary turf battle” wherein one faction does believe in PAS ,and the other faction does not. The Court concludes that this disciplinary divisiveness in no way invalidates the general acceptance of PAS by the scientific community. It was also argued that Parental Alienation Syndrome does not appear in the DSM-lV, which they offered as evidence of its nonexistence.
The DSM-lV is the official diagnostic manual used by mental health professionals in their work with patients. It is a resource containing diagnostic codes and diagnostic criteria. The argument was made that if PAS cannot be found in the DSM-lV, that it does not exist. The Court found that this argument was flawed. The Court reasons that PAS was first described in 1985, and the DSM-IV was last updated in 1994, only 9 years after PAS’s original description by Dr. Gardner. Since the DSMs are rewritten every ten to twelve years, reflecting growing scientific knowledge, The Court reasoned that it is not unreasonable that PAS would not appear in the DSM-IV so shortly after it was first described. To support this conclusion,the Court found compelling the argument that AIDS was not in the medical diagnostic manual when it was first described, but that obviously did not invalidated its existence. Additionally, the Court found compelling the argument that Gille de Ia Tourette first described his syndrome in 1885. It was not until 1980 that Tourettes’s Syndrome found its way into the DSM, some 90 years after its description. Therefore, the fact that Parental Alienation Syndrome has not yet appeared in the DSM only nine years after its original description, is an invalid argument against its nonexistence.
The court also found significant the fact that, as proffered by Dr. Richard Warshak, the American Psychological Association approvingly cites works by Dr. Gardner in its child custody guidelines. In fact, Dr. Gardner is the only author amongst this elite list of works cited by the APA, that has three different works cited as essentially being state of the art on the subject of child custody evaluation.
Finally, the Court ruled that all of Dr. Gardner’s arguments were bolstered and confirmed by Richard Warshak, Ph.D. who is a psychologist and full professor at a prestigious university. Also submitted into evidence were multiple articles by various authors that echoed and confirmed the existence of Parental Alienation Syndrome within the scientific community.
The fact that Parental Alienation Syndrome has generated so much controversy and heated debate is an interesting question on its own, and one that will be addressed in a future article. Suffice it to say that this ruling should begin to answer and calm some of these arguments.
References
1. Poliacoff, Jerome H. “Parental alienation Syndrome: Testing Gardner’s Theory in the Family Courts”
Commentator, vol. 9, pp., 2000.
2. Frye v. United States, 293F. 1013, 1014, (D.C. Cir. 1923)
3. Kilgore v. Boyd, Circuit Court of the 13th Judicial Circuit of the State of Florida, Hillsborough
County, Family Law Division, Case No. 94-7573, Div. D.
4. Bone, J. Michael and Walsh, Michael, “Detection of Parental Alienation Syndrome and What to Do
About it”, The Florida Bar Journal
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
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