Say "YES" to Children's Rights...Keep Them Safe

Keep Our Children Safe. Keep Them From Harm. Protect Them.
Keep them from being raised and influenced by unfit fathers.

We, the undersigned, urge our appointed and elected representatives of the State of Illinois, to pay serious attention to the rights of our children.

In short:
In many of our states in America, courts are awarding unfit fathers with unsupervised visiting privileges and sometimes even joint custody putting the lives of the children in jeopardy. We believe this practice is deplorable, intolerable, and will have serious physical and emotional consequences for their children. To put a child at such risk is life threatening and unconstitutional.

Explanation At length:
The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States ensures every man, woman, and child their unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. As citizens, we are bound by the law of our land to guarantee that childrens rights are held sacred. We, who are parents, believe that it is our primary responsibility out of love, justice, and integrity to ensure these basic necessities for our children: freedom from hunger, freedom from danger, freedom from neglect, and freedom from the elements. Protecting them especially in their early years can have long-term effects that extend throughout their lives. Current evidence suggests that the early years of childhood are vital to his/her development and future ability to learn to thrive as responsible caring adults.

In the situation of legal civil cases concerning parentage and custody of a child, the courts are often taking away the responsibility for the well-being of a child from a fit parent and awarding it to an unfit parent, whether it be temporarily for visitation or sometimes even solely for custody. Whereas in todays age of Fathers Rights, court systems, judges, and lawyers, are bending over backwards to award fathers their rights due even when the opposite should take precedence by common sense. As the fathers pay their support, in return, they are granted visitation privileges with their children without concern as to how fit they are as a father and how capable they are to take care of a child. We find it totally unreasonable, impossible and unconstitutional to uphold these rulings of the courts. This puts the child in jeopardy and the mother in distress. This is unconstitutional to put the life of a child in danger.

Parents of a child who face custody disputes and visitation privileges should face the same standards of investigation and qualifications prior to the decision as do those facing qualification for placement of children with them in foster care or adoption. If any of the following circumstances are proven to have existed during the life of a child, a Judge should not even consider placing the responsibility of visitation rights on the shoulders of the father.

a) Charge of a Felony Crime
b) Evidence of Illegal Drugs
c) Chronic or Severe Alcohol Abuse
d) Charge of Driving under the Influence of Alcohol
e) Abandonment (including not filing a paternity petition in the first two years of a childs life in the cases of parents never co-habitating or marrying.)
f) Domestic Violence (be it physical or emotional abuse)

Visitation rights should be supervised by a third party. There should be no question of leaving a child overnight with an unfit father. If these privileges have already taken effect, they should be terminated. Custody certainly should not be allowed.

This petition was drafted because of cases in Lake County, Illinois where the rights of children are not protected from their unfit fathers. We are not saying that unfit mothers do not exist. We are not saying that unfit fathers should never see their children. We are saying that Children should be protected with third party supervision until they reach the age of 18 years old and can protect themselves.