Why RaiseYourRights Is Fighting to Change California’s Family Courts

Winston Churchill once said, “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” The goal here isn’t to chase an abstract ideal of how family or juvenile courts could work. The goal is far more immediate: to confront the way California’s family and juvenile dependency courts have used the “awesome power of the state” to extract money from parents and separate children from the people who love them. These courts must change.

Family courts frequently claim they are “protecting children from conflict,” using that phrase to justify removing a fit parent’s fundamental parental rights during divorce. But who defines “conflict”? And at what point do normal family disagreements suddenly become “abuse” in the eyes of the state?

Juvenile dependency courts—CPS—assert that they must “protect children from inadequate food, shelter, clothing, sanitation, and more.” Yet this same language is often used to take children from low‑income parents based solely on a government worker’s subjective view of what counts as “inadequate.”

The Declaration of Independence warns that when a “long train of abuses and usurpations” reduces people to “absolute Despotism,” they have both the right and the duty to resist. Or, as the film National Treasure puts it: when something is wrong, those who can act have a responsibility to act.

Recently, a new civil‑rights professor told a student to leave his classroom and never return. Then he turned to the rest of the class and asked whether they thought that was fair—and why none of them spoke up. His message was unmistakable: when people stay silent in the face of injustice, it doesn’t take long before there’s no one left to defend any of them.

History shows, in painful detail, what happens when people stop speaking up. Family rights were no exception. We failed as a nation to confront injustice. Thus, the system grew bolder, and its power over parents expanded. Families across the nation becomes vulnerable to the same unchecked authority.

RaiseYourRights is acting. We are working to protect children from what is happening inside family and juvenile dependency courts—precisely when they are most vulnerable. We believe parents should have the right to a jury of their peers before the government makes life‑altering decisions about their children.

Our mission is straightforward: keep children surrounded by the people who love them—on both sides of their families—and help them grow into responsible, caring, respectful adults.