Administrator’s Note: This is the first of a three-part series we call the “Thanksgiving Trilogy.” With all the uncompensated work we have put into our joint reform efforts over the years, we have neither the resources nor the time to make it viral. We leave that to you, our fellow victims, tortured as you must be right now. So kindly pick one, pick them all, and make good therapy of your time by sending them out to the world. Send it to your representative in Congress or state legislature, a commission, good government group, your lawyer, even your parent “adversary” on this “thankless” family day. Maybe you’ll be very happy you did.

By Dr. Leon Koziol

Parenting Rights Institute

You have to wonder how they do it: America’s family court predators. They sit down each year at their Thanksgiving Day tables pretending to be normal and family oriented; the voodoo judges, practitioners and evaluators who have done more to destroy Thanksgiving than Hitler could have hoped for. They are the profiteers of a “custody” racket that would make any underworld figure envious. They are the real turkeys eating their own young.

There has never been a comprehensive study of the vast harm which these predators are causing to parents, children and families, let alone our productivity as a nation. We all know that any such study would be blocked or diluted by bar associations and other special interests. After all, it is a trillion-dollar gold mine they have cultivated and they mean to protect it at all costs (as I learned firsthand).

These predators feed off the almighty “custody” award, a lucrative engine for service fees of all kinds. It is mandated by federal law, Title IV-D of the Social Security Act. Nowhere in that law is there any provision for shared parenting, and it has been adopted by states to obtain federal funds for court operations. Such “awards” make the winners feel real special. But in the end, they can become big time losers.

In my travels, I have come across custodial parents begging for the opportunity to turn the clocks back, to save their consciences and children from the harm which these “awards caused them. One of my predecessors, Georgia Senator Nancy Schaefer, traveled the country exposing the corruption until 2010 when she was found dead in her bedroom, victim of a highly suspicious murder-suicide by her husband of 51 years.

I have submitted reports to judicial commissions, our Justice Department and a congressional oversight committee. All were ignored, lost or destroyed. In a nutshell, the lucrative “custody” battles fueled by Title IV-D results in creatures of statute known as “custodial” and “non-custodial” parents in place of the traditional mom or dad. Bizarre terms such as “custody” and “visitation” keep this long broken engine running, a Model T in an era of the internet.

Such terms are more appropriate for prisons and funerals. “Non-custodial” dads and moms are treated as visitors in their children’s lives, eventually ousted altogether as truly functioning parents. Meanwhile their “custodial” counterparts are not real “moms” or “dads.” They are doing everything in their “power” to find fake substitutes to keep the tax-free welfare benefits coming (child support).

These “antiquated” terms have been condemned by progressive jurists because they bring out the worst in parents when children need their best, i.e. veteran Family Judge Dennis Duggan in Webster v Ryan, 729 NYS2d 315 (2001) at fn. 1. But such decisions are quickly overturned and suppressed. And so, the band plays on, a regular freak show known as “family court,” a tribunal which one Supreme Court Justice labeled a Kangaroo operation, In re: Gault, 387 US 1 at 27-28.

In the spirit of Stalin and Hitler, we now have children spying on their parents to enrich their court appointed lawyers. It has become so absurd that the tail is wagging the dog, an “inverted order of childrearing” as I have called it in my studies, a formula so psychotic that logical minded “non-custodial” parents are ultimately forced to abandon their time-tested roles. And that’s when the state takes over (refer to your “custody order”).

Welcome to “Fatherless and Motherless America.”

Dr. Leon Koziol, Director

(315) 796-4000