In a recent interview on the topic of protecting privacy, Tucker Carlson and his guest Yannik Schrade, say some exalted things indeed about the importance of privacy, all of them no doubt true: Privacy is synonymous with freedom, no less. But as with Carlson’s previous panegyrics to freedom of speech (below), this one is limited and selective. Carlson and Schrade are most concerned with threats to privacy posed by technology. But you hardly need to worry about losing your privacy to surveillance bots when you readily give it away to judges seated right in front of you. And how can you claim to be defending privacy while ignoring government officials and government bodies that routinely
1. summon legally innocent people to their presence;
2. demand that they surrender personal documents, papers, and effects about their private life;
3. order them out of their homes;
4. demand access to their bank accounts and empty the contents;
5. confiscate their wages;
6. regulate their conversations with their family members, including their children;
7. demand that children act as informers about their private lives;
8. supervise and micro-manage the upbringing of their children;
9. regulate their speech, expression, and religious practices;
10. order the physical mutilation of their children;
11. jail them without trial; and most serious of all,
12. seize control of their children and keep them separated from their children most or all of the time?
Privacy is protected in the United States by the Fourth Amendment (among other constitutional provisions). (And it is not emphasized enough that the US Constitution is rooted in the English Common Law, so its protections are at least implicitly morally binding on other English-speaking countries, which is why the US Constitution is admissible, for example, in English courts.)
I write about routine violations of the Fourth Amendment by family courts in my book, Taken Into Custody. Here is a brief excerpt:
The Fourth Amendment protects the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures.” Yet…parents suspected of no legal wrongdoing and who have given no grounds or agreement for divorce are routinely ordered without warrants to surrender not only their children but personal diaries, notebooks, correspondence, financial records, and other documents. Those unwilling or unable to produce the demanded documents can be fined, ordered to pay attorneys’ fees, and summarily incarcerated. … Fathers are regularly interrogated behind closed doors about intimate family matters…such as conversations with their children and spouse, and they can be jailed for failing to answer. … In shades of Soviet psychiatry, citizens who refuse to submit to this inquisition – and even those who do not – can be ordered to undergo a “mental evaluation.” Fathers against whom no evidence of wrongdoing is presented are now routinely ordered to submit to “plethysmographs,” where an electronic sheath is placed over the penis while the father is forced to watch pornographic films involving children. Parents’ homes are routinely entered by government agents to determine fitness, even when it has never been questioned. If the strains of losing their children or undergoing this legal nightmare are too great, parents are wise to conceal any contact with therapists, family counselors, or physicians, since these otherwise privileged consultations and records can be demanded, examined, and used to separate them from their children. Parents swept into this litigation are terrified to discuss anything with their children or spouses (or anyone) for fear that what they say will be used against them in court. This of course is likely the intent. “Uncontrolled search and seizure is one of the first and most effective weapons in the arsenal of every arbitrary government,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, shortly after serving at the Nuremberg trials in 1949. “Among deprivations of rights, none is so effective in cowing a population, crushing the spirit of the individual and putting terror in every heart.” Family courts routinely use children as informers against their parents…and to report on how they otherwise conduct their private lives. …
Though the courts claim that the secrecy in which they operate is necessary to protect family privacy, the personal information they coerce from parents is readily available to anyone. Thus the secrecy would seem to be protecting less family privacy than judges. [A local official] has described inconsistencies in the secrecy rules governing his county’s family courts and how easily private information coerced from involuntary litigants is readily available to anyone who seeks it. “Every document filed in a domestic relations case must contain some of the most private information about a person’s life,” he writes.
On this last point, family court judges certainly protect their own privacy — even at the expense of public justice — by operating in secret. Elsewhere in the book, I explain the reason:
Family courts usually operate behind closed doors and generally do not record their proceedings. Ostensibly the secrecy is to protect the family privacy of litigants, though more often it has precisely the opposite effect: The secrecy provides a cloak not to protect privacy but to invade it with impunity. “Is it possible,” asks columnist Al Knight with reference to legislation that would automatically seal all family court records, “that the district court judges, divorce lawyers, special advocates and guardians ad litem, and a cadre of social workers might simply like less public attention paid to their activities?”
When family court judges violate the Constitution, it does not just threaten the freedom of litigants; it threatens the freedom of everyone.
If you want to read more about how the US Constitution protects privacy – and how family courts are the most serious and frequent violators of those provisions and of the entire Constitution – you can find it in my book Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (and my other books). You may even wish to send a copy to Tucker Carlson.
Stephen Baskerville
