“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Edmund Burke

From the Film
Tears of the Sun
featuring Bruce Willis

In America today, our government is engaged in the lucrative expansion of a child control bureaucracy that is harming our families, productivity and moral fiber as a nation. This vast public enterprise has invaded every aspect of private life, often wielding power beyond that exercised by the NSA, CIA or IRS. It is a silent and insidious trend eroding parental rights repeatedly declared by our Supreme Court to be the “oldest liberty interest” protected by the United States Constitution.

This interest is shared equally by fathers and mothers. But in practice, the male half has not been accorded its rightful place among our human rights due to a profit motive in family court driven by needless custody, support and divorce contests. Census Bureau reports continue to show the gender disparities on all domestic fronts. After promoting a parental rights cause in Paris recently, I was amazed to note how a million people together with world leaders could rally in that city within days to support free speech. Meanwhile, here in the states, more than 70 million fathers have yet to mobilize after a century of widespread discrimination.

Such discrimination is having harmful impacts on all aspects of society and quite likely the female population more so than its counterpart. Veterans, minorities and high profile figures are particularly vulnerable to a court system that has placed money and politics over genuine parent-child relationships. Fathers are a vital component of any social or family structure as they have been since the beginning of civilization. Unfortunately federal entitlement laws and incentive funding to the states have marginalized that role to a point of virtual extinction. This has led to educational costs, heinous crimes and moral deterioration on a vast scale corroborated by an exodus from all manner of religion. In practical terms, our taxpayers are funding the creation of social ills and then forced to pay for it on the back side with costly welfare programs.

Future generations will look back one day and be amazed at how truly barbaric our domestic relations courts once were. A scheme of laws and processes derived from feudal equity doctrines has been retained which features loving parents engaged in brutal contests over their offspring in a public arena. A winner-take-all battle for custody leads to overregulation of families by the state and marginalization, alienation or outright extinction of one fit parent from the children’s lives. Anal investigations of the combatants’ backgrounds by self serving advisors incite further controversy to last a lifetime. It is a spectacle reminiscent of the Roman Coliseum.

No person or entity has ever been able to achieve a comprehensive study of the vast detriment which this archaic custody and support system has had upon our society. Any such effort would assuredly be stymied because custody and unequal parenting are highly profitable. Yet common sense dictates that our nation could be well served with sweeping reforms here in our least scrutinized branch of government. We can put a man on the moon, split atoms, engage artificial intelligence and achieve vast breakthroughs in medicine but remain unable to extricate family courts from their nineteenth century practices.

On March 1, 2015, I released a Public Initiative Summary and Funding Request which aims to make family court family-friendly. Entitled “We Are Fathers,” it is a nationwide effort to promote shared parenting laws and accountability in our nation’s divorce and family courts. A six point action plan features a rally in our nation’s capital on the Friday of Father’s Day Weekend and a Political Action Committee comprised of parental advocates from our fifty states. It is an ambitious project but one which warrants our time and financial support. It will take literally millions of dollars to successfully oppose the bar associations and political insiders who profit from father discrimination. Yet since this initiative was released, followers of our site continue to pass over the “donate” and court program options.

One experience illustrates why fathers can expect more abuse in these courts for decades to come. One father in Florida contacted me for advice on how to find a good lawyer after his last one cost him $10,000 and did absolutely nothing. He wanted to visit lawyers in action to discover one who would truly fight for him. I offered our court program for a mere $299 which explains how lawyers’ hands are tied by the federal support and funding laws. It shows how custody is abused to fleece money from extended families with small chances of altering the status quo no matter how much is spent on lawyer fees. Nevertheless he was committed to throwing more money after bad with another $10,000 donation to the lawyers. Nothing was committed to his true allies here.

If you have a heating problem in your home, it might well be considered an emergency. You don’t just look at it and pontificate with your neighbors because you then risk greater problems when your pipes freeze. So you logically pay for a repair service, preferably one with the experience and commitment to do the job right, and your family’s well being is thereby preserved. In the father’s rights movement, the opposite is occurring. We are actually feeding the system which has resurrected debtor prisons, effectively criminalized fatherhood, and made us pay for the child alienation and marginalization of our roles as natural parents. We see the emergency and know the consequences, yet the victims keep multiplying with apathy and some misguided notion that reform is free and easy, that there is always someone else out there who will do the repair work for you.

Anyone who has followed this site, Leon Koziol.com, knows that I have sacrificed everything for this cause. It is a worthy initiative with impacts to last generations. However, it is also plain to see that my public message is being discredited by our adversaries with the goal of extinguishing any promising reform effort. There is a reason why this site and its sponsor are being so targeted. However my efforts can last no longer without meaningful support. So if you truly believe in your country, your free speech rights and most important, your children, do not pass over the donate button. In fact, you should go that extra step by soliciting other donors to the cause and sharing this post. Finally you should start a personal initiative to grow the numbers for a rally in June. If our government does not hear of a problem, it will not act upon it. That’s just how a self governing society works. Our military sacrifices for these rights every day. Let’s honor them properly. Will you finally make your voices heard, all 70 million of you?

Dr. Leon R. Koziol
National League of Fathers, Inc.
(315) 796-4000

 Be sure to follow Leon Koziol on Twitter @leonkozioljd