Another Mom Arrested? Not If We Can Help It!
You probably remember seeing it on the news: Georgia mom Brittany Patterson was arrested on October 30th after her almost 11-year-old son walked unattended to the local store, less than a mile from his home.
Now, your Parental Rights Foundation is working to make sure this doesn’t happen to another Georgia parent ever again. And we need your help!
Georgia Mom Arrested
According to multiple news sources, Brittany was charged with misdemeanor reckless conduct because she left her house without first knowing where her son was. She had seen him in his room a few minutes before, so she thought nothing of it when she called for him and received no answer as she was leaving to take her older son to a chiropractor appointment.
According to CNN, “‘There’s no freeloaders in my house,’ [Brittany] said. ‘The children cut the grass. They keep the wood stove burning. They take turns doing the laundry. And they roam around the woods.”
And that’s what Brittany thought had happened on October 30th too: her younger son had gone off into the woods, to a place where he likes to be alone when he’s upset. He’d done it before, and he’d always come back home. Nothing to worry about.
Only, on this day, he’d decided to walk “into town” to the local store. I put “into town” in quotes because we’re talking rural Appalachia. The whole town’s population is 370. “It isn’t even a town, really,” Brittany says.
The boy was never in any danger. But that’s not how one stranger framed it when she called it in to the local sheriff. The caller said she’d seen a boy “about six or eight years old.” Brittany’s son was days away from being eleven. And due to his rural surroundings and his parents’ choice to raise him with a sense of independence and personal responsibility, he was used to having the kind of freedom that would let him wander.
Just not to the local store, apparently.
Sadly, the danger here was never that he would be hit by a car or abducted by a stranger. Yes, those things can and do happen. So do car accidents, but that doesn’t keep us from putting our kids in the car and leaving the driveway.
The danger was that a stranger might not like that the boy was alone, might misjudge his age or level of self-sufficiency, and might call a law enforcement agency too eager to “help” by intruding on a family’s rights.
Which is exactly what happened here.
Brittany’s lawyer, David DeLugas, is executive director of ParentsUSA. He points out the irony of the date of Brittany’s arrest.
“The very next night, October 31, a lot of parents let their kids wander the streets, many of them with no more supervision than Brittany’s son had. But only Brittany got arrested for it,” David told me in a phone conversation (paraphrased).
“Selective Enforcement”
What’s more, the law used to arrest Brittany has only been used against another parent once, more than twenty years ago. That’s because the Georgia Supreme Court in that case found it faulty.
In the 1997 case of Rosalind Hall, the court ruled in a 4-3 decision that the statute as applied to parents (as in Brittany’s case) “lacks definite and explicit standards to guide its enforcement, thereby making it susceptible to arbitrary and selective enforcement by police, prosecutors, and juries.”
It is this “arbitrary and selective enforcement” that parental rights are all about preventing. If states and localities must respect a parent’s fundamental right to direct the upbringing, education, and care of their own children, there is no more room for “arbitrary enforcement.”
And that’s why we’re taking action in Georgia.
How You Can Help
First, we’re working with Brittany’s lawyer to change the Georgia law that was used (or abused) to arrest her. DeLugas has crafted a bill that he’s bringing to the Georgia legislature to make sure parental rights are respected and such arbitrary enforcement disappears.
But we’re also working with our long-term friends at LetGrow to bring to Georgia the common-sense Reasonable Childhood Independence law that we helped draft several years ago.
Together, these two measures will protect families from being split up, as Brittany’s was when she was hauled off to jail unnecessarily, and as many other families are when children are removed without cause by the Department of Children and Families.
They will clarify the law, allowing parents to make the best decisions for their own children. And they will put teeth into parental rights, so agencies that encroach on families without cause will have to answer for it in court.
As a 501(c)(3), our lobbying activity must necessarily be limited to a small proportion of our overall work. And it is. Because we’re not just talking about promoting these bills in the Georgia legislature.
We’re also talking about the hours spent drafting, reviewing, and editing model legislation like LetGrow’s Reasonable Childhood Independence model. And I’m honored to have had the chance to review David DeLugas’s bill, as well.
And we’re talking about the time invested in educating lawmakers, lawyers, judges, and the general public on the fundamental liberty of parents and how the protection and exercise of those rights in turn keeps children safe.
By working with allies like LetGrow and ParentsUSA, and by drafting or reviewing policy models to make sure states bring to bear the 100-plus years of Supreme Court recognition of fundamental parental rights, we are empowering legislatures to make positive changes to keep parents like Brittany Patterson out of jail, and to keep their families at home together, where they belong.
But these efforts are not cheap. To be prepared to seize opportunities like this one in any state where they might appear, we need to be properly funded and resourced.
So far, thanks to you, we have always been ready to respond when states ring that bell.
Can I count on you to continue your support now with a one-time gift of $25, $55, or even $105 to fuel our work in Georgia…and in the home state of the next Brittany Patterson?
In a world where a mom can be arrested because her son walked a mile to the store, we need champions like you to step up and push back the reach of the nanny state. We must not leave these moms (or dads!) to stand and fight alone.
With your partnership, we can make Georgia a better place for parents, and the world a better place for families!