ATTENTION PARENTS:
TO SAVE THE AMERICAN FAMILY,THE MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR DIVORCE
INDUSTRY MUST DIE-- BY ABOLITION OF CUSTODY STATUTES

What is the basis for the multi-billion dollar divorce industry and the 50% divorce rate? Answer: Statutes which provide incentive to seek sole custody "awards" or which provide for "joint" custody as sole custody in disguise. This has numbed society from respect for the biological family. The logic of nature has been perverted by courts which exclude caring, law-abiding parents from their children's lives. No court should diminish any parent-child bond. Divorce is promoted by statutes which give attorneys something to fight about--custody, or control. Lawyers routinely counsel clients on how to snatch children away from the other parent, when they want out of a marriage, due to the existence of sole custody statutes. Attorneys counsel clients on how to use these statutes for the clients' own selfish desires. REAL incentives to promote family relationships upon divorce are absent.

It takes a village to raise a Child, but why do the Courts abandon the welfare of families by excluding natural parents from that village? Answer: Lawyers profit from creating or maintaining war between parents. It is not in their interest to remedy family disputes. This would diminish their source of income.

Federal courts do not generally deal with civil rights within a family. Why do federal courts abandon parents' and children's rights to life, liberty, property, due process, and the pursuit of happiness, ie., family life, by allowing state courts to routinely deny these constitutional civil rights to parents and children throug
h sole custody "awards"?

What causes "Deadbeat parents"? Answer: disregard for a parent's and his or her child's rights to each other. Studies show involved parents willingly pay more child support. This natural, biological right of any child to a willing parent and that parent's right to the child is being denied. Justice leads to peace. Peace leads to production of income.

THIS IS A CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE. Lawyers are the winners as long as they can prolong conflict between parents, or at least delay solutions. It is time to abolish the divorce industry, ie., mudslingers: attorneys, social workers, psychologists and all others who try to decide which parent should be discarded. How? Get families out of court by removing the incentive to seek sole custody--abolish it. KEEP FAMILY ASSETS WITHIN THE FAMILY, AWAY FROM LAWYERS.

Pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, we must repeal legislation which fails to recognizes a child's constitutional rights to equal parenting from both parents and both parents' rights to raise their children. Sole custody is an evil to be avoided at all costs. It is in fact unconstitutional, except perhaps in the most extreme cases, where a parent has been convicted of a serious crime in a criminal court.

King Solomon was right, in a sense--divide the child in half, not literally of course, but provide for the absolute, irrevocable right of both parents to equal time with their children, a 50/50 time share split, if at any time they so choose, and the divorce rate will drop. NO MORE SPOILS OF WAR for a so-called "winner" of custody. Stop the emotional terrorism against parents, usually fathers, and always children, for the sake of profits for attorneys. Stop the four-way division of family assets whenever lawyers are involved. They are stealing family assets from children, by the billions.

SOLUTION: THE FAMILY MUST GO ON, whether or not the marriage does. LET PARENTS, NOT THE COURT, DECIDE UPON A PARENTING PLAN, which recognizes the constitutional rights to family interests of all family members, before they are allowed to divorce, if they must do so, AND ENFORCE IT. REMOVE THE INCENTIVE TO DlVORCE--sole custody statutes, or joint custody statutes which allow one parent to have more control than the other--AND PARENTS WILL AGAIN COOPERATE WITH EACH OTHER. Children's rights must be respected. Their best interest is to have both parents cooperating with each other, which can only happen if both parents receive justice from the courts. COURTS CANNOT DENY OR ALLOCATE WHAT IS ALRFADY PROTECTED BY THE U.S. CONSTITUTION, IE., A PARENT'S LIBERTY INTEREST IN HIS OR HER FAMILY.

DEMAND YOUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS
HELP ABOLISH ALL CUSTODY STATUTES


WE DON'T REALLY CARE ABOUT OUR CHILDREN. IF WE DID,
WE WOULD DO THE FOLLOWING.

1. Mechanically record all hearings, either with video or audio. Its common practice for families to memorialize important occasions such as weddings, births, holidays or birthday parties. But, the most important event in the lives of many children of divorcing parents, the custody hearing, must be abstracted to words on paper only, stripping away all emotion, affectation, body language, theatrics, etc., and thus the ability of a reviewer to see what really happened in the courtroom. Judges know that the demeanor of a witness is crucial in discerning his or her veracity, i.e., truthfulness, yet in this state at least, we deprive access, even to a party of his or her own case, the use of the latest technological means to accurately record this most crucial event in his or her life and the lives of the children involved.

This is just one of the ways the arcane legal system cloisters power unto itself, feigning the sanctity of the courtroom and the legal profession as being more precious than the truth. The right of parties to a video or at least an audio recording of this crucial event in then life is more important than preserving the occupation of court reporting. It would also be cheaper.

In my case, I was financially destitute following an injury on the job and unable to afford a transcript of my custody appeal in the circuit court for a very long time. Of course, my initial custody hearing in the juvenile and domestic relations court, which term is a cold abstraction for family court, was not even recorded. This was a crime, and supports the assertion that we do not really care about out children. The reason it was not recorded was to conceal the robbery of my parenthood, which is what took place in that courtroom in Newport News, Virginia in 1989.

2. Get lawyers out of family court, or at least limit their fees as is done for instance in Workers Compensation cases. In my kids' custody case, sole custody went to the parent who hired the largest law firm in town, i.e., custody went to the highest bidder, my ex-wife, whose attorney put on the best performance in the courtroom. Unfortunately, that performance is lost forever, because the hearing was not videotaped or at audiotaped. It was not deemed important to do so. The court did not really care about what happened to the children.

3. Actually look after the best interests of the children by presuming and maintaining the right to 50/50 shared parenting whenever either parent desires it both at the beginning of the divorce process and on a continued basis throughout child rearing. We must stop the raping of parent-child relationships. The presumption of shared parenting logically and necessarily follows from the commonly accepted legal requirement to support one's children. Sole custody should be a last resort only, in extreme cases where either parent is for demonstrably unfit to care for children. Sole custody is unnatural humans. It only sets the stage for a bitter war between the parents into which the children are necessarily dragged, sooner or later.

In my case, sole custody served to put a seal of approval on the tyrannical dictatorship by my ex-wife, and to break my heart by stealing my parental authority as a father, thereby necessarily alienating my children from me. I became the secondary, subservient, disposable less important parent. Is this what women's equality is about, raising up women by emasculating fathers? Do I have to pay for the sins of my forefathers who denied rights to women?

Sole custody is an evil which serves only to harm kids. When are we going to truly put kids' interests first? They have a right to both parents, as equally as is possible, and parents have a duty to respect this fact above their own preferences. Parents have a duty, which should be enforced by the courts, or whatever organization which would actually be willing to take on the responsibility which alleged to now reside with the courts, to really put their best is interests ahead of preserving a status quo. Sole custody is a cop out by the courts from this very responsibility. They really do not want to get involved, so they don't. And kids suffer from the incompetence of the courts. Its easier for a court to scapegoat a parent rather than to insist both parents cooperate.

4. Stop reducing all issues to the issue of money. Of course parents must pay for the support of their children, but preserving the parent--child relationship is the best insurance that children will be willingly supported. Parents will contribute to the support of their children according to the extent of their involvement with them and the quality of their relationships with them. The job of the courts or whatever other enforcers we choose should be to impartially facilitate both parents' relations with the children in the most equitable manner possible.

Where both parents want to be equally involved, both should be required to honor any agreements concerning career plans or choices for residence made before the children were born or before the marital dissolution. As things are at present, the courts avoid this responsibility by awarding sole custody and thus, in effect, judicial authority on the logistics of childrearing to the sole-custodial parent, usually the mother. This is not putting the best interests of the children first, because the best interests of the children are to have equal access to both parents. It is their birthright.

By making equal access of the children to both parents the first and paramount objective, the enforcing authority would facilitate more financial support of the children, because parents rights must be honored also. If parents are treated equally, they should be happier, and thus more productive. A disposed parent who is forced to pay while denied custody rights, is little more than a beast of burden or slave. Loss of custody without definite cause is dehumanizing, primitive, barbaric and criminal.

Where there is no justice there can be no peace. From a child's standpoint, shared parenting is a just solution to a marital dissolution. Perhaps no parent "wins", as in sole custody awards, but with shared parenting we will truly put the interests of the children fist, and they will be the winners.

Mark Young
Paralegal / Father

Mark Young, email: markyo@erols.com, fax:(703)524-0623, home: (703)544-0968, pager:(703)515-1009