TOOL OF THE DAY: Equal Parenting Protects Children’s Health

CATEGORY: Family Law Politics

Senator Ebke of Nebraska stated that not having regular contact with a parent has become a “critical health issue”…that she said contributes to incarceration, truancy, and crime.”

Domestic violence advocates believe that it is harmful to have a presumption of equal parenting. They believe that having to prove allegations of abuse place a child at more risk.

The United States Supreme Court believes that it is reversible error when the proper due process is not applied to allow for the protection of these very important rights that protect these children.

We believe that it is more harmful, not to mention disrespectful, to act like parental rights are meaningless to the protection of our children, our families, and our way of life.

Let’s get something straight. A presumption of joint physical custody is not only required, but actually parents already have this when they break up in a relationship. These are inalienable rights. The state does not grant your rights as many statutes would lead you to believe.

Since parents already have equal custody before the courts step in, the courts are simply protecting that. This does not mean that the state cannot still step in immediately and protect a child in danger. Just as the state removed the children in the polygamist camp here in Texas when they were tipped off that the children might be being abused. Then they held hearings over a period of several weeks and decided which children they could return and which ones they should continue to keep away from the parents.

Divorce and separation does not change the ability of the state to protect a child.

So when we hear advocates of domestic violence victims say that equal parenting requires the victim to prove there has been abuse, we hear that they want to be able to assume that anyone accused is guilty and that they should not be questioned. Most people who have been on the other end of these accusations and treated like they were guilty before being proven guilty know how permanently damaging it is to ignore rights. Heck even criminals have realized the value of having rights protected. They passed Miranda laws not because they wanted more people to become victims of crimes but because they didn’t want to fill their jail cells with innocent people.

It has become common in family courts to punish parents without proving they have committed any crime or that they are any danger to the child. So when I hear legal directors like Robert Sanford say “We’re not necessarily opposed to shared parenting, but getting to that point puts victims at greater risk,” I say to this legal director of the Nebraska Coalition to End Sexual and Domestic Violence, it places the children at greater risk to be stripped of their fit parents just because one parent was able to inflame the judge and get them to use lowered standards.

Our children are too precious and important to continue to allow them to suffer. Our children deserve to be left alone and free from government interference and influence.

Society and the families deserve to be able to continue life without the fear of not being able to protect their own children from the wrath of an angry and emotionally hurt parent.

The experts who believe that each child custody determination has to start from the point where neither parent has rights until they are determined worthy to have them granted to them from a judge, and that each case is not cookie cutter but based on the merits of each case, are ignoring that in no other type of law do you have to ask for your rights to be granted.

When you get divorced you don’t ask the judge if you still have 1st amendment rights. You don’t ask the judge to grant you 2nd, 4th, 5th amendment rights, etc. You already have those. The only thing you would ask is for those to be protected if someone tried to interfere with them.

Why then if we know that it is so harmful to children to not protect them to equal access of their fit parents do we continue to allow special interest groups to inflame the courts and sweep the protection of our rights under the rug — supposedly in the name of the children right?

Why then is it so difficult to understand that? Have many of the children who have harmed themselves in these battles maybe have felt that perhaps it wasn’t that they weren’t being protected to analleged abuser but perhaps that they weren’t being protected from the damage the other parent and the courts were causing to the bond and relationship of the child and that other parent?

Adults tend to proscribe their interpretation of what might be affecting a child, and what that child might be thinking. In this instance, I believe that the children are feeling nprotected from being stripped out of the lives of each of their parents.

Read more at http://www.wral.com/-shared-parenting-bill-stirs-new-debate-in-nebraska/14510352/#OVqgs4sqZyUfTpzH.99

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