On Tuesday President Obama gave his “State of the Union” address, in which he gave his view of where our nation is right now and where we are headed.
But what about parental rights? Where are we and where are we headed? It turns out we are not as free and secure as we would like to be, and we’re heading in the wrong direction. Here is an overview of parental rights in America as we begin 2014
Medical Freedom – Hospitals:
Boston Children’s Hospital and the Massachusetts Department of Youth and Families take another child hostage because hospital staff disagree with the parents on the child’s medical diagnosis.
In California, “Baby Sammy” was taken from his parents because they left one hospital to seek a second opinion at another before subjecting the child to open-heart surgery.
In Ohio, an Amish family was forced to flee the country to spare their daughter unwanted and dangerous chemo-therapy, including a cocktail of drugs not approved for children by the FDA. Reports indicate the girl is in remission through natural means, but the Ohio hospital and child services department are livid.
The law is not on your side. In every one of these cases the judge ruled against legally fit parents. As a result, more and more parents are afraid to even take their child to the emergency room, lest one wrong answer lead to the removal of their child and the loss of their parental rights.
Medical Freedom at Home:
But keeping your child at home doesn’t provide any protection, either.
In May, 2013, charges were reinstated against Detroit resident Maryann Godboldo, who in 2011 was arrested after a 10-hour standoff with police and CPS who claimed she was not giving her daughter proper medication. The state later discontinued the medication as well, returned the daughter, and dropped the charges – until the appeals court this year sided with prosecutors looking to go after her again.
The law is not on your side. In the last decade alone, legislatures in 26 states have made 36 attempts to increase mandatory vaccination requirements, the large majority successfully requiring the HPV vaccine for pre-teen girls.
Mental Health and Counseling:
New laws in California and New Jersey make it illegal for teenagers struggling with unwanted same-sex attraction to seek reparative therapy, even if the teen, the professional counselor, and both parents agree on the desired treatment. This viewpoint discrimination takes decision-making rights away from parents and tramples the doctor-patient professional relationship.
The law is not on your side.
Public School Access:
In Tennessee, a dad was arrested trying to pick up his special-needs daughter at the end of the school day. No fighting, no yelling. Just asking for his children and not backing down.
A Georgia Army vet was banned from her child’s school grounds for posting her newly earned concealed carry gun permit online. No threats; no plans to violate the “gun-free zone.” She simply has a permit, and was banned from the school.
The law is not on your side.
Laws in a majority of states limit or entirely deny to parents any “right” to be present on school grounds where their child is in attendance. What’s more, some school districts have banned parents from sending a lunch with their child, requiring that they buy school-provided lunch instead. And a bill in New York would require that all parents attend state-provided parenting classes before their child can graduate the sixth grade.
But why do parents need to make decisions in the schools anyway? Surely they can trust the institutions where they leave their children every day, right?
Public School Content:
Tell that to the Kansas father who was livid last week over a poster in his daughter’s eighth grade classroom that lists “How …people express their sexual feelings.” Some of the examples are light enough, but others are very explicit – and in a middle school setting! The principal and school district defend the poster, saying it is part of the school’s abstinence-based sex education program, and in line with other schools across the country.
Tell it to the growing number of parents and organizations opposing Common Core, a new set of “national curriculum standards” set up by the National Governors’ Association and required for schools to qualify for federal Race to the Top education funding. The “standards” were adopted over the summer of 2010 without any review by parents or state legislatures. Last week, even the New York State Teachers’ Union voted to reject the standards, saying “We will be the first to admit it doesn’t work.”
But the law is not on your side. The Ninth Circuit in Fields v. Palmdale (2005) held that, “Parents…have no constitutional right…to prevent a public school from providing its students with whatever information it wishes to provide, sexual or otherwise, when and as the school determines that it is appropriate to do so.”
Educational Choice:
Still, the First Circuit Court of Appeals in its Parker v. Hurley (2007) decision states, “Parents do have a fundamental right to raise their children. They are not required to abandon that responsibility to the state. [They] may send their children to a private school that does not … conflict with their religious beliefs. They may also educate their children at home.” (emphasis added) But this may not be the case much longer.
A judge in Texas took the Tutts’ children away at the urging of a guardian ad litem who confesses there are no signs of abuse or neglect. Yet she implicated statutory language likely to cause the children to be removed (which it did), apparently because she opposes the family’s choice to teach their children at home.
In fact, several journals over the last few years have published articles by academic elites claiming “that public education should be mandatory and universal.” Says Emory University Law professor Martha Albertson Fineman, “Parental expressive interest could supplement but never supplant the public institutions where the basic fundamental lesson would be taught and experienced by all American children: we must struggle together to define ourselves both as a collective and as individuals.”
In the last decade there have been at least 22 attempts to expand public pre-school education, at least 31 attempts to make kindergarten mandatory, and nearly 150 efforts in 43 states to otherwise expand the compulsory attendance age range for public schools. None of these measures has been shown to improve education outcomes; they only serve to give more control to the state and less control to parents as children develop and grow.
The law here may be on your side, but it is quickly retreating. And so is the government.
The United States Department of Justice seeks to overrule the asylum status of the Romeikes, who fled Germany to keep their family together. Germany has rejected the parents’ right to choose the form of education their children receive, and the U.S. Administration actually supports Germany’s position! The case is now in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Bureaucrats Run Amok:
In Loudermilk v. Administration for Children, Youth, and Families, a federal district court ruled that Arizona social workers were protected by immunity when they forced their way into a family’s home without a warrant using threats of taking the couple’s children away. Such threats, according to the court, do not constitute coercion, so the parents’ Fourth Amendment rights – says the court – were surrendered voluntarily.
Meanwhile, social workers in Kentucky have been found to be corrupt, then vindictive when a mother stands up to them. Social Services took her children, children of her relatives (at 3:00 in video), and even removed the children of her lawyer (at 4:15) from the lawyer’s home!
But the law is not on your side. Every state authorizes certain personnel – doctors, police, social workers (the list varies by state) – to remove your children from your care without a warrant, a court order, or any proof of abuse or neglect. Though many abuses are overturned for those who can afford to appeal, such an atmosphere in the lower courts sees abuses getting worse every year.
What Can Be Done?
There is hope! A proposed Parental Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is already making its way through the Congress. Once adopted, the PRA will guard the fundamental right of parents to make decisions – medical, educational, in fact all kinds of decisions – for their children.
To join the effort, sign the petition at parentalrights.org/petition
To further support parental rights, visit parentalrights.org/donate
Sincerely,
Michael Ramey
Director of Communications & Research
P.S. — The above is a sampling, not an exhaustive list. This is an epidemic. Now let’s get to work on the cure!
Reprinted with permission from ParentalRights.org.
The only disagreement I would have is your use of “the law is not on your side” as I would say much of what is going on today is not lawful in any way, but the bureaucracy is not on your side. I live in the community of the current Autism epidemic and within our community also we see a second epidemic that has opened my eyes to the lawlessness of child protective services nationwide, if not world wide. The current system need not adhere to anything you and I would see as lawful or justice. They are free to act on a whim, personal vendettas, judgements of a single individual that has absolutely zero accountability. They can remove children from families on the flimsiest of motives and are not required to investiage and produce evidence of any kind. Simply the written and spoken words of a case worker are all that are required to get a judge to rubber stamp what amounts to kidnapping. Rules of court hearing are ignored and even when proven completely wrong and unjust it can literally take years for a family to regain custody of their child/children. No one is punished for destroying a family or the well-being of the children. There is no other system in the world where such actions can be taken without rules of evidence, scientific analyses, hard facts and then allowing them to hide behind the secrecy allowed in family courts based on some arbitrary rules of child privacy and best interests of the child. It is a farce when we know children in foster care are 40 times more likely to be drugged, abused, raped, and even killled. Studies have shown that children left in families with non-life threatening problems where the parents actively advocate for the return of their children, go through counseling, drug and alcohol abuse programs fare far better than children taken into foster care. In fact the very act of witnessing their parents successes build a child up rather than foster care that rips a child apart both mentally and phsyically.
These entities have been given far reaching and unchecked powers to alter and destroy people’s lives with zero accountability. Even when proven to have been vindictive, proven to have lied, proven to have used blackmail and coercion, they are left to offend again under the misguided belief they were acting under the best intentions and in the best interesst of the child. Since federal monies and adoption incentives were offered up during the Clinton administration, child protective services have become a huge money making machine requiring ever more kidnapped chilldren to keep the cash flowing and that means ever more ridiculous interference into the lives of ordinary citizens. And our own population doesn’t help. If anyone saw the survey suggesting that obesity would be a good reason to remove children from the custody of their parents, the online comments would scare the hell out of you as to how many people agreed with that idea. Every single American needs to “educate” their legislators on the necessity for drastic changes in a system that is not just broken but has become every parents worst nightmare that seemingly benign parental decisions will be cause for removal of your child with out evidence of crime or wrongdoing but because some caseworker doesn’t personally agree with your methods or decisions. A very scary and slippery slope we are going down. You should see the number of cases where children have been removed because schools are turning them in for refusing to medicate their children for Autism, ADD, ADHD and more.
While not in the U.S. you should look up the case of Derek Hoare of British Columbia Canada. The father of 3 children, two of whom are on the Autism spectrum, his youngest wandered from home one day after he ran inside for a minute. She has autism and he called the police to help locate her before something horrible happened. They found her in the back yard of a house on the same street. 3 days later, child protective services kidnapped her from her school, but left the two sons in the home. Their reasoning….well it was that Derek has too much on his plate and they were simply alleviating him from a burden. Like someone with too many puppies. It has been 2 1/2 years now and he still has not gotten his daughter back, and believe it or not, still never had his day in court. Every time a court date has been immenent, CSD instigates a mediation in which they promise a stepped return to her father and then it never even comes close to happening. In the mean time they have had her in psychiatric hospitals and under the foster care of a psych nurse and on 5 different anti-psychotics and neuroleptics. She was 9 when taken and now is approaching 13. She has gained tons of weight from the drugs and who know what kind of brain damage from those drugs being used on a developing albeit autistic brain. Derek has never been accused of a crime, of abuse, or even neglect. His daughter has eloped from her foster care home twice, once stark naked, the very catalyst for her removal yet not returned to her father. And it turns out in Canada that CSD entities are also the managers of care for children with disabilites, and hence have personnel within their school systems. It turns out those people had been asking Derek to put his daughter on psych drugs and he had refused. He tried to counsel them on the fact they were reinforcing bad behaviors in her by rewarding her without knowing it and that he did not have these problems at home. We now believe the elopement issue was simply an excuse they were waiting for to pounce and take custody of his daughter so they could put her in a chemical straight jacket, rather than deal with her behaviors in a lasting way.
I am sure all of these cases are simply the “tip” of an iceburg that should put any parent in the world in fear for the privacy and the sanctity of parental rights.
You are absolutely right that CPS operates completely outside of any proper oversight. (We’ve experienced that abuse of power firsthand.) Clearly, you and I agree that it’s a problem to have good laws and an out-of-control CPS that ignores those laws and gets away with it. But what is even worse is that same out-of-control CPS without the good laws – and we’re headed there on the fast track.