What should we conclude about courts where knowingly false accusations are treated as proven? Where hearing records are doctored? Where perjury is encouraged? Where knowingly innocent citizens are jailed without trial? Where those who criticize the government are ordered into psychiatric examinations?

And what should we conclude about journalists, prosecutors, and political leaders who know of these practices and refuse to investigate and even cover them up?

These are the routine practices of family courts – the most intrusive and corrupt arm of government today. Even some long familiar with family court corruption are shocked by the newest revelations.

• Consider the Ohio couple who found over 10,000 alterations in an official transcript from what was recorded in their child custody hearing. Words that were never spoken appeared in the record, and words that had been spoken were missing.

• Or the Massachusetts forensic audio-visual expert, who obtained photographic evidence that court records had been doctored. He was assessed $20,000 in fees for attorneys he had not hired, and jailed by the same judges whose tapes were doctored.

• Or consider the prominent psychologist and author who advised another court-appointed psychologist to fabricate charges of "violence" against an innocent man. "Try to get the label 'domestic violence' on the dad's behavior towards the mom," the psychologist writes. In other words, falsely accuse a citizen of "violence" who you know has committed no violence.

These are not isolated indiscretions. Divorce practitioners get away with this conduct because judges reward it.

The willingness of officials to bend the meaning of words – and with it the truth – is a matter of public record. The US Justice Department includes "name-calling," and "criticizing" in its official definitions of domestic "violence." The highest law enforcement agency in the land can redefine criminal "violence" to include things that are not violent. It is not difficult to imagine how secret courts can use such nihilism to convict the innocent.

So we have entered the world predicted by George Orwell, where white is black, war is peace, and violence is not violent.

"This is criminal misconduct," attorney Eugene Wrona says of similar practices in Pennsylvania, "and these people belong in jail." Instead the fathers against whom they are fabricating evidence in public courtrooms are the ones filling up our jails. In family court we have literally reached the point where the criminals are putting the law-abiding citizens in jail.

For FCF News on Demand, this is Stephen Baskerville.

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12/16/02

The American legal industry recently unveiled its blueprint for dismantling the family and extending government power over the private lives of all Americans.

The American Law Institute has published Principles of Family Dissolution, a textbook for judges, instructing them how to destroy families and transfer their assets into the pockets of lawyers. The work would legitimize government inquisitions into the private lives of citizens who have done nothing wrong and the seizure of children from legally unimpeachable parents.

Conservatives have already objected that the proposals undermine marriage by blurring the distinction between marriage and cohabitation. Yet they may be underestimating the dangers. The document is nothing less than an attack on the private sphere of life.

Common Law tradition has long recognized, as Justice Byron White said, a "realm of family life which the state cannot enter." Yet under this proposal, such a realm no longer exists. The government would extend is jurisdiction over "intimate relationships," in which the government will determine just how "intimate" the "relationship" is.

As Justice Potter Stewart observed, "For centuries it has been a canon of law that parents speak for their minor children." Yet the A.L.I. will give the government the right to decide what is best for your children, even if you have done nothing to forfeit that right yourself.

So if you can convince the government that you are in an "intimate relationship" with someone, you can sue that person for financial support. If you can convince the government that you once acted as a "de facto parent" to someone else’s children, you can sue for custody of those children – and for the lucrative child support that comes with them. The document is a bonanza for child snatchers.

In effect, you can now sue anyone for anything, or for nothing, so long as you are "intimate" with them. So nothing is too private for the government to investigate. Indeed, the more "intimate" the better. How will the government determine how "intimate" your relationship is? How will the government determine if someone was a "de facto parent" to your children? It will investigate your private life, of course. Be careful about standing too close to the mistletoe this Christmas.

The object of your suit is not required to have done anything wrong. Indeed, having done something wrong is specifically excluded as grounds for a suit. Adultery, for example, would be rewarded financially.

Gay and lesbian couples will now have their wish of receiving the benefits of married couples. So will cohabitors, though why they should want it is a mystery. These "benefits" include the right to be plundered by their "intimate partners" for any reason or no reason.

We of the sixties generation who sneered at marriage in favor of cohabitation also have our wish, though not quite the way we planned. The "freedom" of living outside marriage has brought the family police into our private lives.

But the most frightening thing about the A.L.I. proposals are that they are really not proposals. As the document itself points out, most of these measures are already in effect.

For FCF News on Demand, this is Stephen Baskerville.