Stephen Baskerville (2019 TFRM Conference in Vegas) Part 1: The Constitutional Disaster of Family Courts

In 2019, I aided in helping facilitate the TFRM conference held at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas, Nevada. There were several speakers and workshops; one such speaker was Stephen Baskerville, who called for fathers to lead a movement against family court injustices. “The injustices of the family court and the connected government machinery are the most destructive and dangerous injustices in our society today,” he stated. This series restates his speech, starting with his critique of family courts as a violation of constitutional rights.

A System of Injustice
Baskerville described family courts as perpetrating “the confiscation of children from innocent parents, mass incarcerations without trial, mass plunder and expropriation of innocent people by government officials, the perversion of the legal system for use against innocent people and much more.” He detailed these abuses in his book Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (2007), which he said remains unrefuted. He argued that these practices threaten not only fathers but “all parents and… all citizens,” echoing Martin Luther King’s maxim: “An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

No-Fault Divorce’s Radical Impact
Central to the crisis is no-fault divorce, which Baskerville called “the most radical legal innovation ever undertaken in the English-speaking democracies.” He explained: “If all that is required to act against the defendant is a finding that a marriage has ‘irrevocably broken down,’ then the plaintiff’s complaint is true by virtue of being stated.” This system, he argued, ignores the marriage contract, elevating one spouse’s will to law and turning courts into “administrative agencies that implement a predetermined procedure.” Unlike true courts, “principles of justice, violations of law, rules of evidence—none of these will or can have any impact on the outcome.”

Constitutional Violations
Baskerville outlined how family courts violate the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights. “The entire resource divorce regime is nothing less than a massive assault on every major principle of the US Constitution,” he asserted. Examples include:

• First Amendment: “Family courts routinely control what parents can say and do with their children… issue gag orders criminalizing parents for disclosing what they… say in public.”

• Fourth Amendment: “Parents are routinely ordered to surrender… diaries, notebooks, correspondence, financial records and other personal documents.”

• Fifth Amendment: “Courts… jail parents for weeks, months, or even years without trial… The presumption of innocence has been inverted.”

• Sixth Amendment: “Custody trials are held behind closed doors… Parents jailed for… civil contempt in child support can be legally presumed guilty until proven innocent.”

He cited cases like Zed McLaren, punished for publicizing court abuses in Massachusetts, and noted courts altering transcripts, as McLaren exposed. These practices, Baskerville argued, blur civil and criminal contempt, leaving parents unaware of charges, as per a National Conference of State Legislatures handbook: “The parent may not even know the charge against which he has to defend himself.”

Beyond Fathers: A Broader Threat
Baskerville connected family court tactics to wider abuses, stating: “It is important to understand that these injustices and this method of politics by accusation were largely pioneered in the divorce courts.” He cited the 2018 Kavanaugh hearings as an example, where “extremist ideologues… use sexual accusations to attack political figures… for political purposes.” He also mentioned the “Broad Nariak case in Norway,” which made international headlines, and threats against homeschoolers, showing how “practices [are] spreading throughout the judiciary and beyond and poisoning our entire system of government.”

A Call to Expose the Truth
Baskerville urged fathers to demonstrate that family court injustices threaten everyone’s freedom. “If a legally unimpeachable citizen sitting in his own home minding his own business is not safe from being summoned to court… then no one is safe,” he warned. “Our government is no longer democratic and our society is no longer free.”

In Part 2, we’ll explore his arguments on how divorce and child support destroy marriage and fatherhood.

-David B
Fathers Anonymous