Truth Bomb 1

First Amendment Truth Bomb: Parental Rights in Family Court

Introduction

Navigating family court, especially in child custody cases, can be daunting. It's crucial to understand your rights and how to protect them. This article provides a "First Amendment truth bomb" to help you keep your judge under control and ensure your constitutional rights are respected.

Understanding Your Constitutional Rights

The Constitution applies to your judge and limits their power. You and your children have rights that must be respected, even in a child custody suit between fit parents. The most important and highly protected rights are your First Amendment rights.

The Nine Truth Bombs

This article will provide a series of nine different "truth bombs" to help you present to your judge the requirement that they must do more than just express their personal viewpoint about what is best for your child. Your judge must pass First Amendment scrutiny before violating your rights.

The Source of Constitutional Protection

Your relationship with your child is the source of constitutional protections for your parental rights. It is not the marriage between you and the child's other parent that provides this source. If you are a natural parent and the child is biologically yours, you have parental rights based on the association you establish with your child.

Challenging Outdated Beliefs

Many people are stuck in a 19th-century viewpoint that parental rights depend on marriage to the child's other parent. This outdated belief, invalidated by the Supreme Court, still persists in family law. To stop this, assert your rights strongly and powerfully, forcing the courts to justify their actions.

Individual Rights vs. Marriage-Based Rights

Your rights are not based on marriage; they are individual rights. Your child's rights to you are also individual rights, not related to a nuclear family or a fantasy idea of the perfect family. One parent, one child—that's a protected association by the Constitution.

Intimate and Expressive Association

This association is protected as both an intimate and an expressive association by the First Amendment. Many attorneys argue that intimate association rights are only protected by the 14th Amendment, not the First Amendment. However, this is incorrect.

The Test of Intimate Association

Whenever an attorney or state court judge throws this argument at you, ask them: "How is it possible to have an intimate association without expressing that intimacy to the other partner, and that partner receiving that expression of intimacy?" Without that, there's no intimate association. Therefore, an intimate association, while unique, is undeniably an expressive association. They cannot be separated.

Expressive Associations

There are expressive associations that are not intimate, such as belonging to a political party. All members of the party are not intimate with one another; they don't share private aspects of their lives, which are hallmarks of an intimate association.

Protecting Your Rights

Always keep in mind that your intimate and expressive association with your child is an individual right that you and your child both have. It is protected as an individual right and as a First Amendment right. As a fit natural parent, you have every right to establish and maintain this association.

Minor Children and Parental Rights

Your minor child cannot protect their rights on their own, but you, as their fit parent, have every right to say, "My child is going to have an association with me, and because I am a fit parent, I have a constitutionally protected right to make this choice."

Supreme Court's Stance on Family Relationships

The Supreme Court has expressed this idea almost exactly like this, stating, "We have emphasized that the First Amendment protects family relationships." This is as simple as it gets. Your state court judge and opposing attorney are not arguing with you; they are arguing with the United States Supreme Court.

Association as a Penumbral Right

The First Amendment doesn't explicitly mention association. It's a penumbral right, emanating from the First Amendment. It's protected because the First Amendment protects speech, but not in a vacuum. It protects your right to speak with other people and their right to receive what you have to say. This only happens if you can associate with those people.

The Right to Association

The right to association is essential and necessary to protect the right of speech. That's where the right of association comes from, and why it's a First Amendment right. It's also protected by the 14th Amendment as a liberty interest.

Liberty Interest and the Fourteenth Amendment

The definition of liberty in the 14th Amendment incorporates the definitions of all the protected elements of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court applies First Amendment protections to the states by incorporating First Amendment definitions into the word "liberty" under the 14th Amendment.

Critical Implications for Child Custody Cases

This is critical in child custody cases because you have the right to speak to your child and educate them, and your child has the right to receive that speech from you. You have the right to share intimacy with your child, explain that you love them, and care deeply about them. These are private matters of personal choice, like religion and your place in the world, protected as matters of conscience.

Interference with First Amendment Rights

When your custody court interferes with that, they are interfering with your most basic First Amendment rights and your child's most basic fundamental rights. There are strong rules that come along with First Amendment violations, well-litigated with tons of cases. The Supreme Court has said you and your children have these rights, protected against the government.

State Court Judges and Super-Parenting

Your state court judge cannot become a super-parent and dictate what you can and cannot say to your child. That is a clear violation of the First Amendment that will not survive any challenge. The courts would hold it so if they properly applied First Amendment law.

Inherent Rights and the Constitution

Your rights to your child were inherently a special type of property right when the Constitution was created and even when the 14th Amendment was ratified. Our founding fathers thought about protecting parental rights, as several of them were parents. Thomas Jefferson, a single parent, certainly thought the Constitution protected those rights under property law.

Evolving Views on Children as Property

We can no longer tolerate the idea of children as property, even if it was a special kind of non-chattel property. They were treated as property in that the adult parent had pretty much total control over them. Rules of property were a good way to deal with this because they were clear and well-understood.

Shifting Authority and Supreme Court Rulings

In attempting to give women more authority over their children, they switched away from property rights. The Supreme Court holds that when you come forward and create an association with your child, taking over the responsibility of being a parent, the Constitution protects your rights.

Presumptions and Asserting Parental Rights

With women, this is presumed because they carry the child in their bodies for nine months and give birth. Fathers, on the other hand, have to somehow assert their parental rights over their child. One way is if you're married to the mother, the law generally presumes you are the natural parent. But the moment you come forward and take care of your child, building that parent-child association, your rights receive constitutional protection under the First Amendment.

Historical Context: Bastardy Codes

In the early days, before the early 1970s, the rights of parents came from the marital relationship between the child's parents. If they weren't married, the father had no rights to the child. These fathers weren't even required to pay child support in many places. The law was that parents of illegitimate children were not required to even care for them.

Punishing Children for Parents' Sins

In the early 1970s, a series of cases came to the Supreme Court on different subjects related to the legitimacy of children. The courts ultimately said that the law cannot punish a child for the sins of the parents. If the parents do something the government does not like, it is cruel and unjust to punish the child for what the parents did.

Individual Rights and Family Codes

The courts held very clearly that the rights are individual rights, not dependent on marriage or a nuclear family. One parent, one child creates a family unit protected by the Constitution. This transformed the landscape everywhere in law, but it didn't catch on in family law between fit parents.

Outdated Beliefs in Family Codes

Every family code is based on outdated, discredited, overturned 19th-century beliefs that your rights as a parent depend on your marriage to the child's other parent. In Texas, for instance, the judge is allowed to grant these natural parents rights after they divorce. This presumes that the rights disappear simply because you got divorced, following the old 19th-century bastardy codes.

Unconstitutional Practices

Those are unconstitutional. The famous case that said fathers had to care for their illegitimate children and child support was a Texas case that went to the United States Supreme Court. The United States Supreme Court said, "Knock it off, Texas. If a legitimate child is entitled to care, then an illegitimate child is entitled to care." The rights are individual.

The Importance of Knowing Your Rights

It's important to know and realize that everything these family codes are doing and everything these child custody judges are doing has no foundation. It's based on 19th-century beliefs that are discredited, overturned, and unconstitutional. Everything they're doing is wrong, and they know it.

Taking Action and Using Your First Amendment Rights

They only get away with it because you let them get away with it. As long as you continue to let them get away with it, they will continue to do what they've always done. Use your First Amendment rights to put a stop to this. Let them know that you know your rights are individual and cannot be taken away from you simply because you either did not marry or because you divorced the child's other parents.

Exercising Your Constitutional Rights

When they do, what that is is punishing you and punishing the child for your exercising a constitutionally protected right of choice regarding marriage. Your right to get married is a constitutionally protected choice. Your right to not get married is a constitutionally protected choice. Your right to dissolve the marital association is a constitutionally protected choice, as association rights protected by the First Amendment.

The Right to Associate and Not Associate

Your right to associate also includes your right not to associate, either by never associating or by terminating an association. Your state can't punish you for that, and they certainly can't punish your child for that. Yet, that's what they're doing.

The Real Enemy: The Judge

Knowing that your rights are individual and protected by the First Amendment is vital. This knowledge changes the game completely. Your ex is really not the enemy. It feels like your ex is the enemy, and you've got a lot of emotion tied to the ex, and the ex is certainly trying to take your rights away from you. But the ex has no state power; they have no government power.

Government Power and Child Custody Judges

They can try to take your rights away from you, but on their own, they cannot accomplish this. They have to reach out and exercise government power to take these rights away from you. The individual that does that is your child custody judge. Your child custody judge is violating the Constitution every single day of his or her life, and they know it.

Taking a Stand

It's your job to put them on the spot and let them know that you know it too, and you're not going to tolerate it. There's a lot involved in that, and we help you with every stage of that, but this is the core part of it. Knowing that the real enemy in these cases, child custody suits, is not your ex; it's the judge. The sooner you realize that, the sooner things will turn around in your case.

Fighting the Corrupt System

If you're going and begging your enemy to give you something they don't want to give you, they may laugh in your face, or they may act like they're going to give it to you and torture you with the hope that they're going to give it to you. In the end, they're going to do whatever the heck they want because they have the absolute power to do that unless you know how to stop them.

The Power of the First Amendment

The power that stops them is the First Amendment. Take this truth bomb, put it before your judge. Take the other eight truth bombs, put them before your judge. Get the motions that we provide, get the education and knowledge we provide on our membership site so that you know how to put this before the judge in a way that they cannot deny and that they cannot fight.

Conclusion

You have two choices: fight the corrupt system, knowing why the system is corrupt and how it's corrupt, or go along with the system and hope for the best. We like fighters, we're fighters, we've fought and won, and we're here to help other fighters fight and win for their children. Good luck, and I'll see you at the next truth bomb.