Family Law Gone Berserk: A Kennedy Arrested for Wanting to Hold His Son and Take Him Out of Daycare

Even a member of the powerful Kennedy clan (one who, interestingly enough, turns out to be a Fox News reporter) is not immune to being victimized by the feminists' radical child "protection" laws. As José Martinez tells it in the New York Post,

The son of slain Sen. Robert Kennedy … was arrested in February after grappling with nurses who tried to stop him from taking the 2-day-old infant from the maternity ward at Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco.

… Douglas Kennedy … was charged with harassment and endangering the welfare of a child after his Jan. 7 run-in with nurses. The hospital also reported Kennedy to the state’s Child Protective Services.

“Our lives have been turned upside down simply because my husband wanted to take a walk with our son,” said his wife, Molly Kennedy.

Kennedy’s lawyer, Robert Gottlieb, blasted the prosecution as a “disgrace” and claimed two nurses have retained lawyers in a cash grab.

Arrested for being with your own son?! Charged with harassment and endangering the welfare of a child — one's own child?!

As Stephen Baskerville points out in his book, Taken Into Custody (The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family), which we referenced only a couple of days ago,

What is taking place here should be made very clear: Citizens who are completely innocent of any legal wrongdoing and simply minding their own business — not seeking any litigation and neither convicted nor accused of any legal infraction, criminal or civil — are ordered into court and told to write checks to officials of the court or they will be summarily arrested and jailed. Judges also order citizens to sell their houses and other property and turn proceeds over to lawyers and other cronies they never hired. Summoning legally unimpeachable citizens to court and forcing them to empty their bank accounts to people they have neither hired for services they have requested nor received on threat of physical punishment is what most people would call a protection racket. Were any other public officials to use their position of public trust to coerce money out of private citizens, they would likely face indictment. Yet family court judges do this as a matter of routine. This is by far the clearest example I have ever encountered in my professional research of what we political scientists term a "kleptocracy," or government by thieves.

…The regime of involuntary divorce, forcible removal of children, coerced child support, and knowingly false accusations is now warping our entire legal system, undermining and overturning principles of common law that have protected individual rights for centuries. The presumption of innocence has been inverted

…It is always tempting to dismiss such violations as aberrations, the result of excess by a few overzealous officials, since civil and human rights are violated be every government, even in democracies. Yet considered in the light of constitutional principle, the destruction of ancient protections is clearly systematic with the nation's family courts and endemic to a governmental regime whose very existence is predicated and dependent on the power to remove children from their parents. Far from simple violations of particular constitutional clauses, these practices and powers are undermining constitutional government in its most fundamental principles. The power to take children from their parents for no reason is arbitrary government at its most intrusive, since it invades and obliterates all of private life. Yet we have created a governmental machinery that exists for no other purpose.