Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family

by Stephen Baskerville

Book Overview

Taken into Custody' exposes the greatest and most destructive civil rights abuse in America today. Family courts and Soviet-style bureaucracies trample basic civil liberties, entering homes uninvited and taking away people's children at will, then throwing the parents into jail without any form of due process, much less a trial. No parent, no child, no family in America is safe. The legal industry does not want you to hear this story. Radical feminists,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1581825943
• ISBN13: 9781581825947
• Release Date: September 2007
• Publisher: Cumberland House Publishing
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.57 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A Must Read For All Citizens

I have known Stephen Baskerville and his work for years. I am pleased and proud to review this important work by one of the United States leading scholars. "Destroy the family, and you destroy society." (V. I. Lenin) No-fault divorce was invented by the Bolsheviks in 1918. The Bolsheviks destroyed the old bourgeois notions of the family and the home, and recreated an allegiance to the government. The United States began a social experiment with no-fault divorce with California's passage of the Family Act of 1969. The term no-fault divorce is misleading. Rather than no-fault divorce, what we have is unilateral divorce. No-fault divorce is the dissolution of a marriage, upon petition to the court by either party, without the requirement of fault on either party. Either party may request, and receive, the dissolution of the marriage, despite the objections of the other party. Marriage is a contract, and no-fault divorce allows either party to breach the contract without penalty. There is no legal defense against a petition for dissolution of a marriage under no-fault divorce. The radical swing from 100% fault-based divorce to 100% unilateral non-binding marriage is a failed social experiment. It is today's equivalent of Prohibition. Over 50% of all first marriages end in divorce. The statistics for subsequent marriages are even worse. More than half of all these marriages that end in divorce involve children. Whether these are contested divorces or not, the family court will control the careers, incomes, wealth, debts, and lives of these mothers, fathers, and children until the children are between 18 and 21 years of age. According to the Americans for Divorce Reform, as the divorce rate soared, so did the number of children involved in divorce. Since in 1972, over one million American children every year have seen their parents divorce. There are over 40 million non-custodial parents and over 50 million children of divorce. There is much discussion about the protection of marriage, and President Bush proposed a marriage amendment to the Constitution. While this is admirable, it will not protect the institution of marriage until we end our failed social experiment with Bolshevik no-fault divorce. The unintended consequence of prohibition was the rise of organized crime. The (unintended?) consequence of unilateral divorce is the achievement of Lenin's goal, the destruction of the family. Attorneys, who were elected to their state's legislature, or to the Congress, wrote most of today's divorce laws. When one becomes an attorney, one becomes a member of the Judicial Branch of government. The separation of powers doctrine of the Constitution prohibits a member of the Judicial Branch from also being a member of the Legislative Branch. These attorneys were successful in creating a complex network of laws that guaranteed their involvement in our lives. In 2004, the Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court declared that marriage was no longer an

Social Security Title IV-D - Scourge and Bane of this Country

It is about time that a book like this was published! Ever wonder why things happen the way they do in family courts across the country? Wonder why the custody of children usually always goes to the parent with the lowest income? Why custody always goes to the mother unless she voluntarily gives it up or is in prison? Why fathers can't seem to get more than about 35% physical time with their kids when both parents are fit and live close together? Common sense and wisdom would dictate that, with all other things being about equal, the parent with an income significantly higher than the other would be better able to provide for and raise a child following a divorce - especially considering how expensive it is these days with the rising cost of college tuition, clothes, food, and extracurricular activities. But, then whey is it that it seems that the parent with the highest income is always the one made to pay outrageous sums to money to the parent with the lower income? And the courts will unabashedly tell us that a 'child must be maintained in a standard of living he/she would have enjoyed had the divorce not happened'. Please! All too often, we run around examining individual cases in disbelief and outrage at the way father's are methodically ostracized and demonized in today's culture without searched for doing a 'root cause' analysis. This is similar to finding an apple tree and trying to determine why just about each apple we pick is poison and trying to determine this on an apple by apple basis. We MUST stop analyzing the apples and start looking at the tree trunk and its roots! THERE is where we will find the problem! The poison is the TITLE IV-D and IV-E sections of our Social Security Law! It can be found by going to this link http://www.access.gpo.gov/uscode/title42/chapter7_subchapteriv_.html It is United State Code (USC) Title 42 Chapter 7 SubChapter IV. You MUST read all the sections of these laws in their entirety and you will then begin to understand how every state in the union is PROFITING big time on the backs of parents going through divorce. They are profiting so big that if divorces stopped tomorrow, their state budgets would be in the RED big time! And NO mainstream media outlet will TOUCH this! The so-called conservative big-mouths like Limbaugh, Hannity, and Savage will talk all day long about Hillary's 'SChip' program for child medical care (which is another joke), but they won't dare talk about what is already in place and is ruining this country from the inside. Most mainstream radio stations won't even let organizations purchase time on their stations to try to expose it! This is how well-kept the dirty secret is! This book exposes this dirty secret, but I wish it would have gone into even more detail about it. For low level details, the best website I have found is www.laryholland.com. This person has done extensive research thru Freedom of Information Acts (FOIA) requests and has the 'goods' on

Excellent - Top Notch Analysis of a Corrupt and out of Control System

This book is a must read for not only victims of the family courts (both 'Winners and Losers') but also anyone living in this great country of ours. It describes, in rational, well-thought out, objective terms a government controlled and funded 'system' which rapes good and loving parents both emotionally and financially. Baskerville does this with a significant flair for literature and more importantly with complete backing of research and prior studies all of which are appropriately foot-noted. This country, and many which are based on our system, need this book, need the right people exposed to this book and need it badly. The government has basically taken on the role of patriarch and done so to the exclusion of loving parents - this has had disastrous results and if not stopped by our immediate actions will have even more disastrous results in the not so distant future. Even if you have an intact family - Baskerville makes it clear that you are largely fooled (or perhaps brainwashed) that this family is actually yours, because lurking just behind the governmental guise of 'the best interest' the government is waiting to swoop down, take your children and your money and do with them whatever they see fit. It sounds like paranoia, but please be aware, this is happening on a daily basis in this country - go sit in on a family court for a full day - you will leave shocked and dismayed that we call these procedures 'court-room justice.' All the government needs is a little catalyst - someone just needs to say 'no-fault divorce.' Buy this book! Read it thoroughly and pass the word on.

Tremendous book that challenges one's views on family law

Had I not gone through the divorce system, I would have never believed what was written in this book. It is very scary that in America, with no-fault divorce and no wrong even being alleged, that the government can strip a parent of custody. Criminals have a higher burden of proof and the right to a jury trial; fit, loving parents don't. The precident this sets from a legal standpoint should scare every American who cares about our country. Most important, he shows that children are suffering at the hands of our judicial system. The "best interest of the child" is nothing more than a subjective slogan to plunder dads who have done nothing wrong and care about their children. I hope every judicial officer in the country reads this book. In America, the opinion of a custody evaluator is almost never challenged, and if it is, seldom overturned. If you want to hear the bizarre reasons dads are stripped of custody, join a father's right's group. You'll be shocked. Pull the court files and you'll find that what they tell you is true. We need a presumption of joint physical custody NOW. Divorce will decline, there will be less abuse, children won't be put in the middle. The mean-spirited advocates who want to label men as all bad will diss this book, no doubt, but this book is spot on.

An incredible expose on all facets of the divorce/custody system

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.