PAAO Introduction to the Green Book

Tonight, we are very fortunate to have Ron and Sherry Palmer with us. Ron is a constitutional scholar. Both Ron and Sherry are strategists. In addition to their professional expertise, their lives have been personally touched by experiences with the family court system. Their new book "NOT in the child's Best interest is receiving High Praise and acclaim from Parental Alienation experts such as Linda Gottlieb.

and they are being highly sought-after for interviews of speaking engagements. So tonight PAAO USA North Texas chapter is very very fortunate to have Ron and Sherry Palmer with us unveiling a new presentation for the groundbreaking book "NOT in the Child's Best Interest." So please join me in welcoming Ron and Sherry Palmer. Thank you, Wendy. I think I met several of you and I just want to introduce myself a little bit for those that I didn't get to meet, and I'm Sherry Palmer obviously and just wanted to let you know that we do understand the process, unfortunately and the pain of what all of you are going through.

I still currently have two children that are adults now. that are not including me in their lives and I have two children that I finally got the court to give me primary so that I have authority in their lives again. We've had to work on working with them working through all of the things that they were taught to believe about me and so we do relate. Getting to the presentation I wanted to start with the pain part of it, there's nothing more painful and frustrating than watching your children get hurt and feeling helpless.

and you can tell it's still very emotional for me because as a parent you think that you're going to be able to protect them, at least until they're 18 from being in situations that are going to hurt them especially from people that you believed cared about them. So I remember the first time and I'm sure you remember the first time your child was withheld from you.

So let me just kind of take you through that a little bit some of those emotions real quick. As you can tell I had to revisit those and that's really difficult to do. But I'm sure. one of those was Panic the first time you couldn't get your child on your time and then Some of you might have felt fear when people you thought were there to protect you didn't help.

pain Which turned into urgency. This board's probably going to be small for me here, so just bear with me. and shock So what do you do? You hire an attorney? Right? So here's your attorney. You think he's going to protect you. You think they're going to make it all stop? After they do everything they tell you to do. What are you left with?

It's not your kids. feeling powerless penniless not feeling penniless, but they make you penniless and cost you tremendously to get that kind of protection you thought you were paying for. You're alone. Because now your representation has probably dropped you. They may even be suing you. So you're going through all this. This causes you to react. Which leads you into depression and some PTSD?

So now you're alone. You're feeling hopeless. This is the result you got. Cuz you listened to your attorney. Today we're going to talk about turning this devastation, pain, and anger into strength by empowering you and helping you learn how to be more effective. When we take this devastation in this anger, and we focus it properly we can actually learn to use it as energy.

I know it sounds kind of strange but it is a form of energy and you'll feel less helpless. if you actually know that there's something you could be doing to help you change what's going on, right? So that's what we looked for, My husband and I. But first I realized that I had to change my views because I thought they knew everything.

I paid them to protect my rights, right, but they never told me I had any right so I had to change my views and what I was going to be able to achieve. At first I thought that I was, that I had to battle everything that they accused me of. And that's one of the first mistakes I think people get into is they think that they have to defend everything that they say you did wrong.

And where do you end up, a very expensive litigious battle that goes nowhere and ends up forcing somebody to choose between you and the other parent. So having something empowering to channel my energy into was helpful for me and I hope it will be for you as well. Listening to attorneys got us bankrupt and childless. And I'm not telling you not to do what your attorney says so please don't misunderstand you'll understand as we go through the presentation.

We're just saying just strictly following blindly got us into a bad situation and that's why it's so important that you start to learn these other ideas so you can keep yourself out of those bad Pathways. Okay? We knew there had to be a better way. So while there are no perfect ways to win this war, there are some ways that are more effective than others.

We're sharing some of these with you today. The first idea that I want to share with you that I think people forget even the attorneys practicing and the legislators is attorneys, judges, and the legislators have a responsibility and a duty to uphold your constitutional protections. And I wish and I know I wrote this on one of Kevin Avard's recent interview videos. I wish that we could actually require attorneys and judges to have to tell you that you do have parental rights. Butr we're not quite there yet.

So it's your job as "We the People" to remind and advise them when they are not doing this. It's your job. You're going to have to turn the panic, and the fear, and the pain, that urgency and shock, into empowerment. So you're going to play their game, but you're going to change the rules on them. And it's a very scary process because all of you know that if you say the wrong thing, or you talk about the wrong things, you're afraid somebody's going to turn around and use it against you and I have my two younger ones and I don't want to lose that so there's always that pressing fear to that

somebody's going to look to attack again. So, you know how Sherry said that wouldn't it be great if if your judge told you that you've got constitutional rights? Raise your hand if your judge told you that word, anybody? My vision is sort of like a Miranda rights reading, you know, where they tell you immediately when you're served with these types of things that you do have the following rights.

And then they were I Envision and Ron came up with this idea that they would need to require you to actually put a written waiver down if you were going to Forfeit any of those right so that you were accidentally doing it in court. Which is what happens to so many which we're going to share with you so you know when you're actually forfeiting. Okay. So what we start with here is this crazy idea that we have the constitution, right? It is supposed to be the preeminent document in this country the basis of all of our laws. It applies all over the place and we see people getting their rights upheld all over the place.

But when you go into a Family Law Court room, you do not find the Constitution at all. About the only place you'll find the Constitution is when they talk about equal rights between the Sexes, right? So, at one point, years ago, they used to give all the kids to the father because kids were property back then and . . . We actually included a case in the book.

I think it might have been from Kentucky where they actually talked about it. The Supreme Court of Kentucky, about how this child was property and therefore it was allocated as property. After that parental rights became involved in liberty interest under the Fourteenth Amendment. So we started to find it as you have a liberty right to share a relationship with your child which is different from property right.

And so we moved away from property rights and women's rights became a big deal. So we can no longer give children just to the men. So then they started giving children just to the women. And so we have this Tender Years Doctrine and only the mother can take care of the children in these younger years. So what the courts were doing was discriminating.

They started discriminating with men because children were property. And then when children became part of a liberty interest, a constitutional liberty interest, than they said we had equal protection between the sexes they started saying, okay, well now we have to give the kids all to the women and discriminate against the dads. And now we've come to a place where they say "well, we can't really do either one because we have equal protection of of the Sexes.

So they just discriminate arbitrarily now to continue the Discrimination that they've always done. They have to arbitrarily find ways to pick one better parent over the other, right . And they'll find anything they can find to do this. And the reason they're doing it is because they've got three hundred years of arbitrary decisions around children and having this complete and utter power to do anything they want, and they really don't want to give it up.

Look at the Constitution. And after our battles kind of calmed down, we got a chance to really look into the Constitution and the Constitutional cases around family law. And when we put this book together, I was expecting a very little book. I thought this was going to take a month or two, and that this was going to be pretty simple. We got into it and I found so many cases that say parents have constitutional rights to care, custody, and control of their children all over the place. Cases that say you can only take the child if their child is in Clear and Present Danger by the parents. And we have all these rights.

None of which are applied in family law and divorce. They're barely applied when it comes to fit families having their children taken away by CPS. We all know stories about CPS going crazy. They came after me. They violated the law. We were able to beat it. We knew beforehand, but we really found the details to support all of this is that the Constitution doesn't give us our rights.

What our founding fathers said is there are certain natural unalienable rights that come to us by either God or nature. And they exist before the government exists. Our Founding Father's very clearly said we came together to create this government not to grant our citizens rights. But to ensure that our citizens get those rights against all of the people that are trying to take them away. And they put all kinds of special balancing the power all through the Constitution between states rights and federal governments rights, between the three equal branches of government; the judiciary, the executive, and the legislative. And they balanced this power so that it becomes very hard for people to take

your rights away, and we've been very successful in a lot of areas. Unfortunately, family law is just a horrible place for a constitution. It doesn't exist, doesn't exist. If you look at the cover of our book , that's what the cartoon is all about on the cover of the book, right? You've got a family law judge and two attorneys up here. The attorneys are saying, "Your Honor, we want you to decide the best interest of this child. And then the judge says, "Well, I certainly don't need the Constitution for this because according to the Constitution I don't have that Authority.

But since you're both asking me to do this then we'll go for it. And the states have statutes that are clearly unconstitutional, but they have statutes that give the judges cover that basically say they can do that. The reason they continue to do this is because nobody has framed these cases properly and presented them up the Appellate chain in the courts to get rulings specifically in divorce to say these rights apply and force the states to change their behavior.

They always have wiggle room. And too many people go in and say I have constitutional rights and that's it. They don't put any argument behind it. They don't put any of the details. They don't cite the proper cases. And they don't tie all of these cases together because they're all over in different places. Some of them don't even have to do with family law at all, but they set basic legal precedent and standards and ways of evaluating things that we draw. And then you pull it all together and you have a very coherent focused ability to argue that parents have rights under the Constitution.

They are unalienable. They existed before the government ever came around. And we created this government so that we can protect those rights. It's about time the Family Law Court judges start protecting those rights. So all of this is based on the Constitution. All right, click again. One more time. All right, so we start out here with the judge in the traditional family law system.

The judge has broad discretion to determine the best interest of the child, all right? That's what all the state statutes say They have near absolute power to do this. The minute somebody files for divorce, they wipe away all of your constitutional rights, and they all get vested into the state. The state owns your child and the state is going to determine who gets that child.

How often they get them -- all the conditions. They determine everything. How do you stop this? Well, again, the basic idea is when the statutes and the attorneys stand up here and say, "Your Honor, you have broad discretion, we want you to determine the best interest, then the judge can do whatever they want. But we're saying is you start boxing the judge in. First thing you do in your pleadings and orally, certainly with your lawyer, you say my parental rights are a fundamental liberty interest under the Constitution. And that word fundamental is critical here because we have lots of liberty interest that aren't protected as strongly as fundamental liberty interests.

Your financial interests are liberty interests. But they're not protected anywhere near as strongly as a fundamental Liberty interest. When we talk about fundamental, we are talking about your right to freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom the to own a gun, the right to have a jury trial. All of these things. These are fundamental libery interests. And there are many many others that aren't written down in the Constitution. They are called substantive rights. But we couldn't exist without them. The right to travel freely from state-to-state. Nowhere in the Constitution that says we have that right. And yet the Supreme Court has said very clearly that that is a basic tenet of the idea of our federal system.

Is that a citizen of the United States has absolute right to travel from state-to-state, right? And they can't block it. They tried and the Supreme Court said this is not going to happen, right. You'll hear a lot of people say that if is not written down in the Constitution. You don't have it. It's not, it's not real. But that argument doesn't hold water.

There are countless rights that they would not give up that are fundamental that are protected, and parental rights is one of those. And the Supreme Court has said very clearly absolutely that we have this right , right. Click again. There's this idea of how strongly these rights are protected. And the in the Supreme Court has a series of tests, and they they review certain things that come to them with different levels of attention, different levels of focus, different levels of rigor around what the state can and can't do.

The first one is the rational basis test, and if the law has some rational relationship to what the government is trying to achieve, then they're going to let it stand. A lot of your financial regulation of legislation falls into this category. You have what they call enhanced scrutiny that says that's not enough. We're not going to apply the strongest constraints to how we evaluate this, but we're certainly not going to apply the least, the less strict way of doing it.

So that's enhanced. Now what the Supreme Court has clearly said, is that we have parental rights and that when those parental rights are associated with a First Amendment right, they absolutely get enhanced protection. This is enhanced scrutiny, so when the courts review it there's a higher bar that the legislation and the acts of the government have to meet. So the first thing we do is we say we have parental Liberty rights, but these are also vested in the First Amendment. Because in the 1st Amendment, you have the right to free speech, you have the right to freedom of religion, you have the right to freedom of association.

So as part of your to free speech you have the right to communicate with people and express your ideas. When you have children the fact that you communicate your values, your religious, your morals, your civic values to these children on a daily basis, not only through how you talk to them, but how you interact with them. You have teenagers they want to go to a movie and they say Daddy give me $10 so I can go to the movie. They're are conditions that go along with that $10, right?

So you get to let that child know what your values are when you hand them that $10. Number one, you're not going to be there was a boy. If I find out you're you know sucking face in the back of the movie theater, this is going to be the end of it, right. All of these kinds of values that we put down, and these are our choice, our right to do this, and these are protected by the First Amendment. And because these are our children, we have a right to freely and equally with both parents.

So it's not just the parent's rights we are talking. You are going to have a lot of people that will stand up and say "Oh, what about the kids, what about the kid's rights? Well, what about the kid's rights? Kids have the right to receive moral, civic, and religious education from their parents, do they not. Do they have the right to receive that same thing from their mother as they receive from their father. And shouldn't theyreceive that equally?

They have a right to free association. The government can't come in and tell you who you can associate with. These children certainly have those rights. Now as children, they can't exercise all of their right. Those rights are held in trust, but who holds them in trust? Not the government. The parents hold those children's rights in trust. The parents have a right to to determine what those children can and can't do at different levels throughout their lives. As they get closer to 17, 18 they tend to have more rights.

So we've got the fundamental liberty interest. We've got the First Amendment Association here, which is very very strong First Amendment is protected very strongly. All the family courts will trample all over your First Amendment rights all the time, and people don't know how to fight it properly. But they do. And that gets us up to intermediate level of scrutiny, right. How strongly the courts are going to review this.

The next time we have is the right to create a family, and the right to communicate within that family, and the right to make decisions within that family, are privacy rights. Where are the Privacy rights most famous and most strongly protected and most contentious in this country anybody? What's the A word? -- abortion Regardless of your feeling about abortion. This is not about abortion.

There are fabulous Supreme Court cases around abortion and the rights of privacy. These rights were solidly codified by the Supreme Court in several cases Roe v. Wade being one and Planned Parenthood vs. Casey being the other, which are the landmark cases. And there are lots of cases all around them. That refine this and tighten it up. And basically it says that people, individuals, have a right to privacy, and there's a whole list of privacy rights that they list in Casey.

And privacy rights must be reviewed at the strict scrutiny level. All right. What that means is the highest level, and we will go through what this means in detail in a minute, but the highest level of review. So what we're doing here. Click the next button. Is now instead of having the judge having broad discretion and ability to determine best interest and do whatever the judge wants to do because let's face it state state family law codes essentially boil down to one thing.

The judge has absolute power to make any decision that it wants and that's that. Every one of them that I've read and I've read several boil down to that. And they have all this nice stuff and says only if this applies only if that applies. Somewhere down in the fine print it says the judge can make whatever decision they need to in the child's best interest. And in Florida they say the judge can even do it in the parent's best interest.

So if you have children in Florida and you go into divorce not only can that judge take over the best interest of the child, they can take over the best interest of both of the parties, the adult parties. Which is great cuz that makes it clearly unconstitutional, and we're helping someone with an appeal right now to put all these arguments in it.

And that's one of the cornerstones right there cuz they absolutely clearly can't take over control of your life just because you get a divorce. So what we've done here. Click again. Is we boxed in this judge. We've drawn a box around him and said you don't have broad discretion. You cannot determine the best interest of my child. As a parent. I have these fundamental unalienable rights that have to be reviewed at strict scrutiny. The United States Supreme Court said the parents are the primary decision-makers for the children. Primary, number 1, 1st,. Not the state.

So what that means is the state cannot come in to determine the best interest of my child unless they meet a certain bar, a certain trigger. That trigger, that bar is defined by strict scrutiny. Click again. So strict scrutiny is what changes the game for us. This is what I've found in writing this book. And this current version doesn't quite pull it together as well as I'm telling it to you right now because the tightness of it dawned on me after I printed this book. The next version we'll adjust for that. But strict scrutiny changes everythin. Sstrict scrutiny the rules are: Number one.

Every statute that you test under strict scrutiny, the burden of proof shifts from the individual claiming that the statue is unconstitutional to the state. Now the state has to prove. This is huge. Because if it's anything less than strict scrutiny you go into court and you say this law is unconstitutional you bear the full burden of proving to the court that this law is unconstitutional. That's a huge bar for you to overcome particularly as an individual with limited budget. Now if you're a major news organization, and you're going in fighting for the First Amendment you have plenty of money to do this and you can do it. But parents can't doit.

We don't have any money. By the time you're done with this, you're broke, probably bankrupt. Certainly. You don't have any money to go fighting these kind of big fights. Oh, I skipped a step here. The first thing is the statutes are presumed to be invalid. Anything less than strict scrutiny, they presume that the statutes are valid. And that's where they catch everybody.

When people try to fight for their rights overthe constitution in family law, they go in and say well we presume, and it says right in the statutes in Texas and in other states it does as well, that it's presumed that these statutes are constitutional so you have to prove otherwise. Strict scrutiny flips that over. They are invalid. That's the starting point. The state has to come in and prove why they're valid.

And once you do this. There's a three-prong test. It's called the strict scrutiny test. The Supreme Court looks at three things. The first thing is the triggering mechanism. And you'll see triggering throughout the book. What is the condition that allows the state to step in and take ove? Not only in family law, but in anything. In anything you go to the state and and sue somebody or you get sued there has to be a trigger. And what is that trigger? In strict scrutiny it has to be a compelling State interest.

Not just a state interest, but an interest that is compelling. That's big, that we can see, that has weight behind it, right. And just saying that, "well, we want to look out for the best interest of the child. That is not a compelling State interest. It doesn't even come close to meeting the bar. A compelling State interest would say, "in this particular circumstance where there's violence going on, where there's clear and present danger to the child, we want to step in temporarily until we can sort this out and then we'll follow the Constitution. That is a compelling State interest, right.

That is a clear trigger. Police officer comes in, people are fighting, and the kids bruised. We want them to take that kid just for a short period of time right. Figure out what's going on and make sure the child is safe . . . compelling interest. Walking into a divorce saying, "Your Honor. I want sole custody." That's not a compelling State interest. That's somebody there wanting your child.

Yeah, you were married to this person before, but that doesn't give them the right to take your child. And it certainly doesn't give them a compelling State interest. So it gets even tougher than that though. Sometimes they will word things and they'll come up with something that looks like a compelling interest and they'll get past that trigger. The next thing is the statute has to be narrowly tailored.

The statute that says a judge a state judge has broaddiscretion to determine the best interest of the child is not narrowly tailored. It's broad right. Fails that test. Every family law code I've seen so far, except for Wyoming, which is a glowing exception over here on the side, failed this utterly because they just blanket give the divorce court judge all the power in the world.

Now the last thing ,even if they have a compelling State interest, even if they have a narrowly tailored law, the outcome from the ACT, whatever the judge does, whatever the state does and they order something, that outcome has to be the least restrictive possible outcome on the rights that are involved. So when we're talking about fundamental rights to be a parent, least restrictive law boils down to 50:50.

It means, and the thing you really split is the possession time. You don't really split custody cuz married parents have 100% custody. It's in conflict when you're married but you work it out. When you're divorced, you still have 100% custody. And the test for this is very simple. When the other parent dies, do you have to go to the state and ask for 50% of your custody back?

No, you don't. Why don't you? Because it's a natural unalienable right that resides with you as an individual. So least restrictive means that they have to split it down the middle, right? You have your total custody. You have the total right to care for your child. Now these aremportant terms, the Supreme Court uses care, custody, and control over and over and over again.

What does care mean? Care means, you provide all the basic needs for that child. You provide everything that allows them to stay alive. 200 years ago you did it by having a farm and going out hunting and literally doing it. Right. And you may not have $100 to your name all year long. Today, it means you go work in a job, you get paid money. You come back and you provide the house and the food, and the movie tickets, and all the other things with cash to support this child.

If you have that right, you have that right directly, to pay for your child directly. Remember when a child asks to go to the movies. Huh. You have a First Amendment right to communicate your values to that child. Why did the child have to listen? The child doesn't have to listen do they? If they want to go to the movies, if they want that $10 bill, they're going to have listen to mommy or daddy, right. That gives you your power and authority as a parent.

This strikes into this whole mess of child support. It gets into that and says wait a minute what they're doing with child support is a total mess. One of the reasons they are doing it is the federal government pays them to do child support in the Social Security Act Title -IV D, but that's a different thing. So, strict scrutiny, compelling state interest, narrowly tailored state statute, or state policy.

It doesn't actually have to be written down. It can be a policy in general, but it has to be narrowly tailored, and the outcomes have to be least restrictive. This is a huge huge huge burden for the state to overcome. And I have yet to see any family law code, except perhaps for Wyoming. I haven't studied it in detail, but it's essentially based on these ideas.

They simply can't meet the bar, and the whole, and I mean the whole child custody situation in divorce is about to be turned on its head. Everything's going to have to change, and it's going to be a watershed when it happens. It may take us several years to get enough people pushing this and talking about this, filing this in their pleadings before it catches hold and these courts realize they can't keep this lie up anymore.

And that's why you guys are here cuz you're the first wave of people who are going to walk in and make this argument in front of these judges. Next slide. This is where I come in and I try to make a little more sense of what he's telling you to apply for your individual cases, and that is When he talked about you have all these rights, but you went into court and none of that happened that way, right. So what he means is you're the first wave you can go in and present these to the court is that now you are aware that you need to look at your pleadings for certain things.

You need to take out the words. that say the judge has broad discretion. And you need to put in those things that he said; and put the argument like he said it. Here's why you have to use strict scrutiny. You actually put it in your pleadings. Now a lot of attorneys don't do it that way, but I'm assuming that once things progress after a while.

you can no longer afford attorneys andyou're doing it on your own as a pro se, it's more important for you to put these things in writing in your pleadings because there are times when you'll either forget to say it when you're in court or they just won't let you f. They'll threaten you, whatever they do, and then it's at least in the record.

So if they choose to decide against you, you have that in your file, and an appellate court will look at it. If it's not presented and it's not in your written pleadings they won't. So that protects you. So you want to put in there that you don't want the judge deciding best interest because that right resides with you until or if they prove you unfit or a clear and present danger.

You also want to request that they use strict scrutiny. I don't know if any of you remember in any of your pleadings but a lot of times they'll put down . . . like the other side will respond . . . and they'll say we want you to review this case under the following standard and they'll say like a preponderance of the evidence. Do any of you remember seeing it?

Okay, you want to put strict scrutiny, and I bet you none of you ever saw that in any of your pleadings, right? And that's the reason it doesn't happen. When you go into court attorneys or yourself if you're serving as your own attorney are the persons that are supposed to be guiding and advising the judge. I know that sounds strange because you're dragged in there like you're supposed to be there to be told what to do. And when you frame that that and you present yourself not confident and and "hey judge, tell me what to do their fighting me and I want you to side with me." That's what they're going to do.

But if you go in there and say "Your honor I'm respectfully advising you. I'm just trying to present to you what I've researched and found that these are my rights and I would like you to protect those rights. I would like you to honor these rights and use this standard." So you just nicely say it to them if they allow you or have it in your pleadings. Then they're not going to be quite as combative with you. When they start to get angry with you thats generally because they're starting to feel threatened.

Okay. So now you're threatening the judges power. You're threatening their attorneys power. You're not paying one or or you're changing up their politics in some way. Things that you have no clue about. You shouldn't even need to worry about okay. But that's what's happening. So realize if they start to attack you to step back and remind yourself why you're there and just to remind the judge t respectfully and then just object if they're going to choose to take the same course that they do.

If he says nope "it's my authority. I can determine the best interest." Then you say okay, I just want to object for the record and that I'm reluctantly going along with what you're doing because you know, I'm under duress you're telling me I have to. So many parents. don't say that and then when it gets to the appellate level if you didn't say some of those things they say you agree.

They get you off that track. Okay. So now you have in your head you're confident you walk into court and you're like, all right. I'm going to stand up for myself. Nobody's going to get in my way. And what do they do? You two have to get along. I'm not taking your rights. If you don't get along with this parent, I'm allowed to intervene because now your rights are in Conflict.

They're not really not all of them. Okay? So the way I would recommend you handling that is "Your Honor, there are some rights that will be in Conflict like maybe if we disagree what school the child goes to. But my right to spend time with my child equally doesn't have to be in agreement with the other parent because that's an individual right that right belongs to me just like it belongs to them and that right can't be destroyed just because the other parent wants to take it from me.

Okay, and so you just learn ways to communicate it to them. So don't go off your your path and get intimidated just say I don't believe that that's really the way that should be interpreted and you frame it for the judge. The judge is going to turn around in most cases and say to the other side cuz they usually have an attorney.

Do you agree with this? What's what's your interpretation of the . . . and they'll go through your honor the statute authorizes you to do this and they'll go right back to that. You just say Your Honor, I object, I believe that statue is actually not using strict scrutiny and it's in violation of my rights and then he'll probably disagree with you, but you have it on the record.

So then the next thing is you don't have rights until the court awards you rights. I think you understand now that you do. The only thing the court can do is take them from you. You already had those when you when you were married and in divorce. Children's rights are being ignored if you don't give them a choice between parent. Tthat's a huge one because the courts get inflamed very easily and especially when you're involved with a parent that's alienating. The courts can very quickly start to side with that alienator because they invoked their personal beliefs and their biases. And they start to believe they need to protect your child from you.

Okay, and that happens because the court is already set up thinking they need to make a choice. So as soon as one parent is, you know, made out to look worse than the other they think that that's what they need to do. So if you don't stick to your guns and you don't frame this strongly then you're not going to be able to overcome that. But if you did and the other parent tries to convince them, "Oh Your Honor, you can't give my kids to the mom or the dad.

They don't put them to bed on time. They don't feed him healthy meals. Then you say your honor. I'm sorry, but those are family privacy rights. My child's not starving. I'm supplying the basic minimum needs as required by state law. Is this court saying they're going to treat me differently than they did a married parent. And so you just put those ideas out there because the judge probably isn't thinking about those either. And so you can't be scared. When they intimidate you you forfeit your rights. If you finally just give in and say fine we'll go in the other room and we'll try to come to agreement.

Now you made the judge think that if you don't come to agreement, he's going to break the disagreement. Okay, so you got to stick to it. I know it's really hard. I went through it. I even had a judge at one time tell me go in there and agree to child support and all this stuff It's probably in a later slide. But the way you get out of those.

I did go in the other room, but I didn't come to agreement. I kept telling the judge no, no, no, no and then when I went in the other room, I realized wait a minute. They didn't even plead this properly. So I just sat there and let him try to beat me up and make me feel guilty You should do is for your kids it's what they want.

All this stuff. Didn't agree. Lawyer got upset. Headed back into the Court. He threatened me. I'm going to tell the judge you're not cooperating. Right? We've all heard that. Fine. Tell the judge I'm not cooperating. So he went in there. He tried that. "Your Honor, it's not properly plead." They didn't ask for this. So if you ever see that they try to ask for something they didn't plead that will shut it down.

A lot of people don't realize that and attorneys don't usually do that. They just allow them to throw things out and they fight. But no make them plead things properly that protects you. Okay, and especially if your pro se they'll usually be okay with you saying that and then tell them to properly plead or whatever if you have anything you can plead that's enforcement issues or anything else ask the judge to hear those first.

Okay. So if they're interfering with your ability to exercise your rights because so many times when you end up in in some of these temp hearings they have kept your child from you or or you know, they've done something that is interfering with your rights. To get that benefit, you need to point that out and you need to ask the court to hear those things first. It's very very important because that will set the stage. And I know so many of you get told don't be litigious or appear like you're not cooperative or you're wanting to fight but unfortunately, that's the wrong advice.

Just like counselors used to give the advice give your child time, you know, let them relax. Wrong advice right? Same thing in court when they tell you don't attack the other parent don't punish them in court, wrong. You have to do that. Cuz if you don't they're going to attack you and you're going to be left with no child and no effectiveness.

You'll have no Authority. There are anumber of other things that are supposed to be on the slide that haven't made it there yet. They're in the book and it's in chapter two. Some of the other fallacies. We must have a primary parent. Where did this come from? This came from 300, 400 years ago when we had Kings. We didn't have legislatures. We didn't have Republican government. We didn't have the democratic government.

We had one man sitting at the top and in control of everything. So this idea that a family is a hierarchical unit with one, back then, man, sitting at the top of this whole family structure, is the whole basis for this idea that we have to have one parent. It is total hogwash. It's against the Constitution to start with because we have to be treated equally under the Constitution right. Men and women are equal under the law period.

So you have no basis to set up that you have to have one. But this is something that's carried on for so many hundreds of years, that it's just it's deep in our psyche. There is a fundamental Individual and institutionalized bias and prejudice against divorced parents. And it runs throughout our whole society from people on the street. Married and divorced people carry the same bias.

You will see sometimes it happens family members where family members that are even divorced and remarried will put these same biases and prejudices on you when you get divorced and treat you badly and think all these horrible things when you get divorced, even though they went through it. And they know that they wern't horrible people. And yet they do all this stuff to you almost by default.

They don't even think about it consciously. They just do it. And this idea that there has to be one. That's one of those big ones. The idea that the child only has to have one home, or the child can only be settled if they have one room in one place where they spend all their time. Where did that come from? That's total hogwash.

They have no basis for this. Our children have two of everything. They have a home. My child has three. My ex-sister-in-law and ex mother-in-law lived with us for about six years. They bought a house about a mile away. My daughter has lived there as much as she's lived with her mother and so she has a room there a lot of stuff there.

She has a room with her mother. She has a room at my house . She has stuff at all these places right. Now financially we can do that. Not everybody can do that, but it works and she goes back and forth on a daily basis and every other weekend and she spends her time equally and she has her room and she's comfortable and she's well balanced and she you know, she's a good normal natural child it works.

Parents have to get along for equal custody to work. All parents need is a set of rules that the court will enforce. You will deliver and surrender this child by this time on this day every other day every other week. whatever your equal schedule is. If you don't do so you're going to jail, right. If they enforce that, why do you have to get along. It don't matter if you hate each other and don't talk as long as that person delivers that child and you in turn deliver when you're supposed to be. You don't have to get along.

You have to have defined agreements right, or defined orders by the court, and those have to be enforced. Why today you have to get along cuz most judges won't enforce their orders. They're meaningless, right or they'll only enforce them if they don't like you, but they don't. You have parents, particularly alienating parents that get away with it, violate an order Time After Time After Time After Time.

I know one case in particular where there were over 250 violations before anything was done. Courts must protect the status quo. Again, what's so important about this one particular instant in time where somebody decides to file divorce? Why do we freeze every family decision from that point and say this is the way things have to be for the next 20 years? It's absurd right?

They do it in custody considerations. They do it in alimony in states where there's alimony. That moment in time is what gets crystallized forever. There's no basis for it. Now in the short-term temporary orders, two or three months while you're sorting things out. Maybe I still don't like that maybe but certainly not long-term, right? You have to be allowed when you divorce somebody to restructure your life restructure your environment to suit your needs and your child's needs based on the change in circumstances.

If you have a job where you traveled most of the time you provided the money the other person stayed home and took care of the job. That's untenable after you get divorced. You were able to travel and do all that stuff because the other person was at home taking care of your children sharing your values and ideas with those children. If that agreement breaks down, I may not want to travel as much, I'm going to stay home and spend that time with my child. I certainly did that after I got divorced until I got remarried I travel most the time now.

But that was a decision that I have the right to make. It's a protected privacy decision. We have to be free to make it. Divorce courts want you to freeze it and say nope you can't do that. Particularly, if we charge you with alimony and you were making $100,000 a year when we charged you with alimony and you want to work half as much and be home with your child.

That's fine. But we're still going to charge you alimony at $100,000 a year. Absurd, but that doesn't happen in Texas except under some very specific circumstances. In other states it's terrible. Parents in divorce are no longer able to put their child's best interest first. Who says? I certainly did. She certainly did. You absolutely can until proven otherwise. That's what they have to assume. Under the Constitution they must assume that fit parents make the best decisions for their children. And the only way they can overcome that is through a strict scrutiny test.

So they can't just walk any say oh well, you're getting divorced, you can't make the best decisions anymore. Hogwash you can and you do. And you have a constitutional right to it. They must assume it. The parents rights and the child's rights are in conflict. When you get divorced all of a sudden they say your rights are in conflict with the child's. No they are not.

It was same as they were yesterday. And the Supreme Court has specifically said this is not a rights termination case, but they said the state must assume that the parent's rights and the child's rights are together, they are joined until the point where the state says you are unfit. Until they go through this full big hearing that usually takes a couple years and say you are unfit. Until that point they must assume that your rights align with the children's rights, you're interests align with the children's interests. It's very clear black and white.

This is a big one. This hit us. I found a Texas Supreme Court case that talks about this where the Supreme Court criticized one of the parents because they did this. Parents who fight for their rights don't put their child's needs first. Judges, will sit up there and tell you you need to stop fighting for your rights and you need to focus on the best interest of your child.

We're number one. My child's best interest is best served by me retaining my parental rights to determine what's in her best interest. There is no way around that. And if the Court's going to make an order that says they're going to violate my child's right to equally have time with me and to learn everything that I'm going to teach that child, then they can't be acting in that child's best interest. They are by default violating that child's rights, which cannot be in that child's interest, except for some very narrowly tailored circumstances that don't happen in the vast majority of these situations, and we have other mechanisms to deal with this. Imperfect mechanisms

as anybody who has dealt with CPS knows, but other mechanisms? We have a whole list of these. I don't think we have time for me to keep going through them. But these are important because these are where the fundamental bias and Prejudice comes from that is deep-seated over hundreds of years. Got to break these. I want to mention something on that too. If you do have the opportunity to get the book.

We're also donating one to the PAAO USA North Texas chapter Library. So if you have a chance to come in and read that chapter, it's chapter 2 If you have a chance to read through that chapter, it's really important cuz that'll help you change the way you argue those things in the courts. You can also look Google Books at least 20% of the book is available on Google Books.

Google.com, where you can see the book online so you can get a lot of this just going to Google it and seeing it. Not everything and It'll cut you off and turn off the chapter. A lot of those things that he was mentioning. How many of you went through a time period where you felt like Oh my God, how can the Judge side with him or her when they lived with me my whole life and I stayed home and took care of them.

k so basically you went into this believing that you had to prove you were the better parent, right? And that is how they how they framed it. But unfortunately, if you would know these things you would have known that even though you have those feelings cuz you're a parent and you want to protect your child that wasn't the way to represent it in court.

Okay in divorce, you're going to have to split time with the child. The child is going to have to experience other things and that's what I meant at the beginning which was so hard on me because I went through that saying, oh my God, they're gone to the same schools, they've lived in the same neighborhoods and he traveled all that, you know, and so I went through all of that and then I realized that I walked right into what the judges are used to having to decide and that's okay.

you guys are going to sit here and beat each other up and you're going to argue about things instead of presenting to me that you have rights, then I'm going to make a decision and that's where they think they need to go. Now as a judge, they should know the laws. They should know they're supposed to be upholding the constitution and your rights in this and again I said earlier they should be informing you.