ALFRA State Meeting in Birmingham Sept. 12, 2010

Special Guest Speaker will be Stanley Charles Thorne, a nationally known constitutional law attorney. 

See Thorne's website at www.afjp.org.

The state meeting will be held at

Hampton Inn
3930 Grant's Mill Road
Birmingham, AL 35210

Time: TBA this weekend.

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12 Rules that women should follow according to Sue Bell Cobb, Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court

31 August 2010 - Decatur, Alabama - Sue Bell Cobb spoke at a women's luncheon where she gave her insight on rules women should follow in a male dominated world.

The 12 rules are as follows.

1.  Don't try to “bust up” the old boy network. The goal should be to navigate it, not to destroy it.

2.   Seek out men with daughters because they understand female ambition.

3.   Cross gender lines. To truly succeed, you need to develop relationships with both men and women.

4.   To succeed, women need to “be someone people like.” That means being an encourager, not a whiner.  People will never help people they don’t like.

5    Widen your comfort zone. If you’re easily offended, get over it.

6.  Take risks. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Do not be so afraid of losing.

7.   Take a stand. Let people know where you stand.

8 .  Persistence, she said, is essential. Another way of defining that is, ‘No means maybe.  How do you win a white-water rafting race? You stay in the raft. That, she said, is persistence.

9.   Follow through. Women are better at this than men. The rooster crows, but the hen delivers. Women know how to get things done.

10.  Women need to know the difference between friends and allies. Friends are there at high times and lows.  Allies are useful on a particular issue, but they may be gone the next time you need them.

11.  Dance with those who help you. Loyalty doesn’t just come up, it goes down. The people that are working with you — what are you doing to show your appreciation to them? They say, ‘Be careful of the people you step on on the way up, because you may see them on the way back down.’ Be loyal to them always. Don’t just use people and throw them away.

12.  Never ever, ever forget that you’re a woman.

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What are Associational Rights?

29 August 10 - Have you heard of associational rights? Many have not.  Allow us to explain.  When you spend time with friends and family that time spent together  laughing, talking, eating, etc.  these activities are associational rights.

Associational rights hold true when you tuck your child into bed, read him/her a book, watch T.V., and/or just being together.

When a court denies time with a parent and child and does so without any written findings of parental unfitness, the parent and child are being denied associational rights, which are protected by the Constitution of the United States as being fundamental liberty interest rights. 

The privacy of association rights are embedded in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Associational rights have been ruled upon only a couple times by the Supreme Court of the United States and one of those cases happened to be in Alabama.

An ALFRA poll of Alabama Attorneys tells us they know nothing about associational rights. 

If associational rights were argued at time of divorce each parent and the children would have more balanced time together.  But realize it may take the U.S. Supreme Court  for Alabama courts honor the Constitution. Why? Well, read below and you will understand what we are saying.

To protect your constitutional rights in a child custody case have your attorney study and argue associational rights.  Additionally, they must read the entire U.S. Supreme Court opinion of Troxel v. Granville, (2000)  including the dissenting opinions.

Read more below.

Associational Rights

While the United States Constitution's First Amendment identifies the rights to assemble and to petition the government, the text of the First Amendment does not make specific mention of a right to association. Nevertheless, the United States Supreme Court held in NAACP v. Alabama that the freedom of association is an essential part of the Freedom of Speech because, in many cases, people can engage in effective speech only when they join with others. The Supreme Court has found the Constitution to protect the freedom of association in two cases (NAACP v. Alabama, (1958); and Roberts v. United States Jaycees, (1984).

1. Intimate Associations. A fundamental element of personal liberty is the right to choose to enter into and maintain certain intimate human relationships. These intimate human relationships are known as "intimate associations." The paradigmatic "intimate association" is the family.

2. Expressive Associations. Expressive associations are groups that engage in activities protected by the First Amendment-speech, assembly, petitioning government for a redress of grievances, and the free exercise of religion.

Associational Rights were first attached to the First Amendment of the Constitution by the U.S. Supreme Court in NAACP vs. State of Alabama U.S. (1958). The State of Alabama attempted to shut down the NAACP and the state of Alabama demanded a member list, which the NAACP refused. 

This case was sent to the U.S. Supreme Court three (3) times because Alabama Courts would not follow or honor Federal law or obey remand orders from the U.S. Supreme Court. 

In NAACPthe U.S. Supreme Court said,

"It is beyond debate that freedom to engage in association for the advancement of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of the 'liberty' assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which embraces freedom of speech."

"This Court has repeatedly held that a governmental purpose to control or prevent activities constitutionally subject to state regulation may not be achieved by means which sweep unnecessarily broadly, and thereby invade the area of protected freedoms." The power to regulate must be so exercised as not, in attaining a permissible end, unduly to infringe the protected freedom."

". . . Even though the governmental purpose be legitimate and substantial, that purpose cannot be pursued by means that broadly stifle fundamental personal liberties when the end can be more narrowly achieved."

The U.S Supreme Court in NAACPalso said, 

"Novelty in procedural requirements cannot be permitted to thwart review in this Court applied for by those who, in justified reliance upon prior decisions, seek vindication in state courts of their federal constitutional rights."

Again, in a second Associational Rights case, the U.S. Supreme Court in Roberts v. United States Jaycees, (1984) said,

"The void-for-vagueness doctrine reflects the principle that "a statute which either forbids or requires the doing of an act in terms so vague that [persons] of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning and differ as to its application violates the first essential of due process of law....

...The requirement that government articulate its aims with a reasonable degree of clarity ensures that state power will be exercised only on behalf of policies reflecting an authoritative choice among competing social values, reduces the danger of caprice and discrimination in the administration of the laws, enables individuals to conform their conduct to the requirements of law, and permits meaningful judicial review.

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Has Alabama DHR negatively affected your life as it relates to Child Support?

22 August 2010 - If Alabama DHR has negatively affected your life WITHOUT providing proper Due Process including sending untimely notices or preventing a right to be heard, email us your story.  ALFRA is working on a report about DHR, child support and the denial of due process. 

Your name or email will NOT be used or given to anyone for any purpose.   In other words, your personal information will be kept private. 

Your comments may be included in our official report to which ALFRA will provide to federal and state officials. 

The Subject line of the email should be: DHR/Child Support.

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Does Your Attorney Represent You Well?

2010 Aug 22 - Read the Alabama Rules of Professional Conduct here.

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ALFRA Live on Talk Radio - B'ham

On August 22, 2010 from Noon to 1 p.m. Kenneth Paschal, Birmingham chapter, has a live radio interview Hot 1077 radio in B’ham.

Call-in number is 205-741-1077.

The website is www.hot1077radio.com.  You can listen live on the website.

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Mississippi State child support cases under review

13 August 10 - JACKSON, MS (WLBT) - Hundreds of child support cases from the Mississippi Department of Human Services (DHS) are under review last month.  Court records showed the process servers claimed they delivered papers to people who were incarcerated and even to a woman who had been dead for two years.

Company Involved: Young Williams Child Support Services. 

The Jackson, Miss. company has a 23-million-dollar DHS contract.

Read the entire story here.

Editor's Note:  The Alabama Family Rights Association legal research team is investigating  multiple due process violation claims by Alabama DHR.  

Over the last few months several Alabama citizens have provided us with written documentation due process protections afforded by federal and state laws are not being followed.

Our report will be published when completed.

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Hear Ye, Hear Ye!  Attention Alabama Judges!

Rights of Biological Parents ‘Precious and Fundamental’

27 July 2010 by Robert Franklin, Esq. of Fathers and Families.org

This case out of the Ohio Supreme Court does little but suggests much (Leagle, 7/22/10). Reading the court’s dicta, i.e. the verbal embroidery with which it decorates its actual holding, fathers’ rights in adoption cases just got a huge boost.

Back in July 2005, Susan Tuttle gave birth to a child. She was married to Jeremy Tuttle at the time and his name was placed on the birth certificate. The court’s recitation of facts leaves us to guess at just how and why certain events transpired, but, a month later, DNA testing on the baby had been performed. It showed that Tuttle was not the child’s father; Gary Otten was. Just who asked for the testing to be done is anyone’s guess. Whether Otten requested the testing or whether he even knew it had been done, the court doesn’t tell us.

Whatever the case, not surprisingly, Jeremy Tuttle divorced Susan in November of that year. A little over a year later, Gary Otten filed a suit to establish his paternity rights and presumably to get some sort of a custodial order. But then Susan married another man, Kevin Crooks, who filed a petition to adopt the child who was then almost two years old. In order for Crooks to adopt the child, Otten’s parental rights would have had to be terminated by the probate court.

At this point, it’s a good idea to recognize an important fact. There are two types of adoptions - stranger adoptions and non-stranger adoptions. Stranger adoptions are the kind most people tend to think about when they think about adoption. They’re the ones in which a couple adopts a child they don’t know, a child, in other words, who is a stranger to them.

Crooks wanted to do the other type of adoption. He knew Susan Tuttle’s child; he was married to Tuttle and wanted to formally recognize his parental relationship with her child and tie himself legally to the child should the pair ever divorce. That’s a non-stranger adoption.

In the United States, there are about 125,000 adoptions completed each year. Of those, about 75,000 are stranger adoptions and about 50,000 are the non-stranger variety.

Why does it matter what kind of adoption this was? If a stranger adoption doesn’t go through, it may well be that the child will have no parents at all, or at best a single parent. The child may sit unnoticed in an orphanage. If a non-stranger adoption doesn’t go through because the biological father asserts his rights, the child will still have two parents - a mother and a father - the same as if it had gone through. From the child’s standpoint, then, nothing is lost by allowing the dad to assert his rights.

When it comes to terminating fathers’ rights, the adoption industry often likes to pretend that all adoptions are alike, and therefore that if we allow the biological dad to prevail, the child will miss out on having two parents. That can be true in a stranger adoption case, but not in a non-stranger one. It’s an important distinction that those who make money off of completed adoptions often prefer to overlook.

Back to the case. The Ohio Supreme Court held that, because Otten is the biological father, Crooks can’t adopt the child (and terminate Otten’s rights) unless he can show that Otten is unfit.

One important thing about that holding is that Otten had never registered with the Ohio Putative Father Registry. So according to that law, he wasn’t entitled to notice of the adoption proceeding. The Court of Appeals held that his failure to register foreclosed his paternity suit. The Supreme Court said that’s not so. Essentially, a biological father who’s asserting his parental rights can stop the adoption of his child whether he’s filed with the Putative Father Registry or not.

It’s hard to overemphasize the importance of the court’s language in this case. First, it focuses on core principles of parental rights - principles long acknowledged but often ignored. For many years now, I’ve written of my astonishment at the U.S. Supreme Court’s calling parental rights “far more precious than property rights” and then approving the most bald-faced deprivations of due process in cases construing the rights of fathers. Significantly, those are often in cases involving putative father registries.

Here’s some of the court’s dicta:

    [T]he right of a natural parent to the care and custody of his children is one of the most precious and fundamental in law…

    Few consequences of judicial action are so grave as the severance of natural family ties…

    [W]e have held that any exception to the requirement of parental consent (to adoption) must be strictly construed so as to protect the right of natural parents to raise and nurture their children.

Finally! Here’s a court that sees the obvious - that the rights of biological fathers have legal importance, and that courts and legislatures must respect them for the welfare of all concerned. Not only that, as important as parental rights are, in termination proceedings, states’ rights are virtually nil until a parent has been proven to be unfit.

    the parent’s interest is fundamental but the State has no legitimate interest in termination unless the parent is unfit, and finding that the State’s interest in finding the best home for the child does not arise until the parent has been found unfit.

Second, I believe that the Ohio Supreme Court is signalling a change of direction in adoption matters. That’s because in two instances it cites, not the majority in U.S. Supreme Court cases, but dissents. That suggests to me that Ohio court is ready to break with the past. I believe that it is ready to turn away from the notion, clung to for so long by so many jurisdictions, that any adoption is a good adoption even though it’s unnecessary. When a fit father wants to be a parent to his child, there is no legitimate state interest in denying him his parental rights.

This case can be viewed as extremely limited and many will argue for that reading of it. But courts often prefer to obscure the full impact of important cases. Judges fear being tagged “judicial activist.” Given the language of the case, I would not be surprised to find it holding unconstitutional Ohio’s Putative Father Registry law at some time in the not too distant future. Either that or so limiting its scope as to render it all but impotent.

And let’s not forget that, just last month, right next door in Kentucky the state Supreme Court ruled that biological parents rights were “inherent and equitable.” Here’s my piece on that case. It too suggested a significant expansion of parental rights based solely on biology.

It’s important to understand what this case does not do. Somehow, Otten learned about his child and was able to assert his rights. Thus the case deals only with a father who was able to make a timely claim. This case does little or nothing to protect a father from whom a mother successfully keeps his child. What if Otten had found out he was the father, not a year later, but five years later? Could he have asserted his rights then? The case doesn’t say because that’s not what happened.

Some day, that case will come before the court and it will have an opportunity to decide whether a father’s rights can be prejudiced by the fraud of the mother. That happens frequently in adoption cases as I’ve reported on before. But this is a court that says it respects the rights of biological parents. We’ll see how far that goes.

But remember that Kentucky case. That’s exactly the issue it ruled on and it held that a father who’d been kept in the dark about his paternity until the child was three years old, could not be denied his parental rights.

As Bob Dylan once said, “the times they are a-changin.’”

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Birmingham Chapter Meeting

ALFRA Birmingham Chapter Meeting will be held Thursday, August 19th 2010 at 6:00 pm at:

Hoover Public Library
200 Hoover, AL 35216

The library phone number is (205) 444-7800.

The meeting room will be posted at the library or ask someone at the desk.

Support group meetings are held immediately after our business portion of the meeting, usually around 6:45 PM.

ALFRA was officially founded November 1997 in Huntsville, and we need your help to make ALFRA a household name throughout the state of Alabama.

If you need advice, moral support, emotional support, or just want to share your thoughts, please come to the meeting.

For more information please email: alfra.bhm.epr@gmail.com

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Exposing Truth About Alabama's Application of Title IV-D and Child Support Enforcement

Did you know for every dollar collected in child support by the state of Alabama the federal government gives the state two dollars?  That is $1000 of state income for every $500 of court ordered child support.  Is it really about the child's best interest or all about money for the state of Alabama?

27 July 2010 - Congress blames one parent for the child support problem in this country, by calling them "deadbeat parents" (even though it has been proven through studies and statistical analysis that less than 5% are true deadbeats) rather than admit its own dubious contribution to the suffering of America 's children. Politicians promulgate the myth that they are helping children through federal and state welfare entitlement programs. It is, in fact, these very programs which are responsible for the out of control rampage against children. Here is how the scam works.

The federal government levies taxes against citizens to redistribute as welfare entitlements among needy applicants. Congress created the Social Security Act, a section of which is called Title IV. Title IV describes how tax dollars will be distributed among the States to subsidize their individual welfare programs. In order for States to tap into the federal treasure chest, containing billions of dollars, they must demonstrate that they are complying with Title IV mandates to collect child support revenues. In other words, to get money from the federal government, each State must become a child support collection and reporting agency.

Every unwed or single parent seeking welfare assistance must disclose on the application the identities of the other parent of the children and how much child support the other parent has been ordered by a family court to pay. The parent must also commit to continuously reporting the other parents payments so that the State can count the money as "collected" to the federal government's Office of Child Support Enforcement. As with all bureaucracies, this process has developed into a monstrosity that chews up and spits out the very people it was designed to help.

States have huge financial incentives to increase the amount of child support it can report to the federal government as "collected".

To increase collection efforts, States engage in the immoral practice of dividing children from both parents in family courts.

Have you ever wondered why family courts award custody to one parent in 80%-90% of all custody cases, even when the other parent is determined to be just as suitable and fit to raise the child?

It is because the amount of child support ordered by the State is largely determined by how much time the child spends with each parent.

This means that the State "collects" less child support if parents share equal custody.

By prohibiting each parent from having equal custody and time with their children, the State's child support coffers are increased and federal dollars are received.

Opponents try to paint one loving parent as "deadbeat parent" for daring to challenge the one parent-take-all system of family law. This is nothing more than diversionary propaganda. The concern of most parents is not that they are unwilling to support their children financially. This is not an argument against paying child support. Any parent that cares about his/her child will do everything in their power to provide for the child. The concern is, rather, that children are being separated from one parent by family courts because the State stands to reap huge financial rewards as a result of that parent’s loss of custody. The higher the order of child support, the more money the State can collect - even if the amount ordered by the court far exceeds the reasonable needs of the child or if the  parent without custody is required to take second and third jobs to keep up with outrageous support orders and escape certain incarceration. The truth is that most parents don't care about the financial aspects of these family court verdicts nearly as much as they care about having their time with their children eliminated for nefarious government purposes.

The root of this evil is a State-level addiction to federal tax dollars being doled out as entitlement monies by a monolithic federal government. In the wake of this horror are millions of children drowning for lack of the care, guidance, and companionship of one parent. Statistics and empirical evidence universally confirm that children forcibly separated from one parent by family courts are considerably more likely to suffer anxiety and depression, develop drug addiction, engage in risky sexual activity, break the law, and commit suicide. This travesty must end.

Unconstitutional federal bureaucracy creates many of the societal ills it claims to be trying to solve. There are several steps incremental steps that could be taken to restore a child's right to the companionship of both parents. For example, citizens should insist that States abide by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. No father should be automatically deprived of his fundamental right to the custody of his children without due process of law. Being a divorced parent is not a crime.  Divorce does not make a parent unfit!  Absent a finding of true danger from a parent, family courts should order shared parenting rights and equal time sharing for divorcing parents. These rights are fundamental and should not be abridged. The automatic presumption of custody-to-only one parent is unconstitutional.

The history of America is brim with examples of the federal government denying basic rights to its citizens. Women were denied the right to vote until the women's suffrage movement secured the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. Black Americans also were denied the right to vote and suffered myriad other cruel and humiliating indignities under the law until the civil rights movement brought about desegregation, put an end to Jim Crow legislation and compelled the enactment of the 15th and 24th Amendments to the Constitution. In each of these examples, society was slow to recognize that a problem even existed or that some of our laws were unjust. It took considerable time, concerted effort, self-sacrifice and perhaps even divine providence to realign concurrent societal paradigms with the principles of liberty and justice for all.

Over the next month the Alabama Family Rights Association will expose how the Alabama Courts (Judicial Branch of Government) is in conclusion with the Alabama Department of Human Resources ("DHR") (Executive Branch of Government) to which neither branch is following mandates of Title IV-D of the Welfare Reform Act of 1996.  ALFRA will also demand the Governor of Alabama (in charge of DHR) and the Legislature to address these clear violations of federal mandates and the Constitution of the United States.
 

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