Secret Courts In America

Taken into Custody: The War Against Fatherhood, Marriage, and the Family

From a review:

The greatest civil rights abuse in the Western world today is the forced removal of children from their parents, usually their fathers, by family courts and social services agencies. Family courts in America and other democracies have almost absolute power to take away people's children without giving any reason, confiscate their property, and incarcerate them without trial, charge, or counsel. These courts operate largely in secret.

A virtual publishing blackout has protected this abuse, and until now no comprehensive exposé of this political underworld has appeared. Some fine books by authors like Sanford Braver, Warren Farrell, Jeffery Leving, Dean Tong, and Jed Abraham, have partially broken the silence with gently worded critiques of family law and policy, along with numerous self-published books that reach a more limited audience. But this is the first time a major publisher has revealed the full horror of what is taking place in America's family courts and government bureaucracies. Not only the systematic removal of children from fit and loving parents but the criminalization of the parents, often in complete defiance of constitutional protections and due process of law, is widespread and routine.

All assertions are carefully documented by a writer with scholarly credentials (PhD from the London School of Economics and professor of political science at Patrick Henry College). Baskerville not only describes what is happening but explains why, demonstrating the unaccountable power, conflicts-of-interest, and extremist ideology driving the most tyrannical governmental machinery ever to arise in the United States. As such, this book bears comparison with Michael Harrington's The Other America and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

Yeah. This topic has gotten almost all my attention for the last day or two.

I have been lucky. No divorce to mess up my life. So far.

Cross Posted at Classical Values