Thread by @ThomasHCrown

Ok bleep it.

I have intensely personal reasons to hate the underwater-basketweaving-major-intense child protective services apparatus in this country, some of the harshest of which stem from when I was five. They're not what I'm going to talk about here.

(Because, first, not relevant -- every decent adult involved was educated, middle class, stubborn as Hell, and not afraid to risk jail time to keep their kids in the home away from psychotic sociology majors; and second, a distraction.)

I will tell you about a case I had when I was just growing out of being a baby lawyer, with names and identifying information scrubbed to protect my clients' privacy and my identity.

It began with a car wreck.

This was not just a car wreck. A detached semi slammed into the sedan in which my clients were traveling across state lines to visit family. The car was crumpled.

The adult humans fared little better. Dad, driving, lost part of his left arm after enough surgeries and his left side took months to fully function again. Mom had shattered bones all over.

The two children in the back did much better. Both were in full car seats because Mom and Dad were too poor to waste money on boosters, so they used the same seats they'd gotten as presents from family even past the best-use age.

Nevertheless, at that speed and with that much force, the kids got shaken up and bruised where their bodies hit their restraints. No broken bones, no internal bleeding, just some cuts and bruises where even blunted force hit their little bodies.

They were all whisked to a nearby hospital in the major city they'd almost reached when this happened. Mom and Dad were separated from the kids but assured all was well and their parents had been called.

Mom and Dad were in their early 20s, having married the day after high school graduation. Mom was exceptionally bright but had ended up in a family way and so had explained to Dad that they were getting married and she was raising some kids.

Dad had had some run-ins with the law for basically everything a stupid kid can do to attract police attention without killing someone, but by all accounts had found Jesus when his girlfriend showed him that stick and explained how the world worked.

As a side note, one thing that impressed me through the later months was the way you could tell they did everything with an eye to making everything better for each other. HI'm pretty sure they'd have walked through the sun for each other if needed.

Anyway, so they're getting patched up and the kids are being wheeled in for examination when some nurse WHO IS TOTALLY PROOF OF EVERY NURSE'S CONVICTION THAT THEY'RE SMARTER THAN DOCTORS concluded that the bruising the kids received was proof of abuse.

I want to stress again that this probably-a-Nobel-laureate-by-now had seen Dad come in with a stump where half his forearm used to be, Mom immobilized and breathing raggedly, and still she arrived at this conclusion.

Their charts -- ALL of their charts -- were replete with words like "auto accident" and "severe trauma" and "blood loss."

So she dialed child protective services.

Mobilizing the finest just-graduated-from-a-state-school-sociology-major they had taking out the garbage, CPS was on the scene with half a dozen cops an hour later.

The attending physician thought this was either a mix-up or a joke in amazingly bad taste.

She was still angry about all of this when I last spoke to her on an unrelated matter, ten years later.

They looked at the bruises on the kids, which, again, matched the pattern of the restraints in which they'd been sitting, down to some plastic shards being pulled out of one kid, and decided that the nurse was on to something.

They pulled the kids' diapers down and fingered their rectums to make certain they hadn't been abused. Mom and Dad, of course, knew nothing about this. Grandmas and Grandpas were pulled out of the room when they protested.

The attending physician was removed when she realized this wasn't a joke or a mistake.

The parents weren't allowed to see their kids while they were recovering, having awoken from surgery to discover they'd slipped crosswise into a weird nightmare playing out before them.

They were literally interviewed by two sets of cops AT THE SAME TIME, one asking about the accident, the other asking about the abuse they'd clearly inflicted on their kids.

They were so stunned and scared, they didn't yell MY LAWYER NOW PLEASE even though they didn't have one. Dad confessed he'd once spanked the older one on the butt for throwing something at Mom AND BUH-BAM.

He was TERRIFIED they'd discover the things he'd done as a teenager and take his kids from him and so he admitted to once popping a kid on the butt twice.

Mom, who was absolutely petrified of losing her kids, nevertheless denied that Dad had even done that -- it's not clear she even knew he ever had, not that she was upset about it -- and the cops explained she could go to jail for lying to them.

I'm gonna fast-forward for a bit here because I'm getting so angry my ears are popping.

Most states require CPS to provide some means by which parents and kids who've been taken from parents can be reunited. This was no exception, except that TWO states were involved, the home state and the state they were in.

I'm gonna skip the shuttling of the kids for a bit because ears popping.

The paternal grandfather of the kids was an old friend of my boss and so finally we got involved. It took three months of my clients proving to judges in two separate states that being upper-lower-class is not actually abuse before they got the kids back.

We had ministers, coworkers, nursery school teachers, A MAYOR, their pediatrician, their dentist, family, friends, etc., go through depositions we did pro bono and say what great parents they were and those motherbleepers in CPS -- both states -- still fought us tooth and nail.

EVEN IF, they said, EVEN IF these parents didn't abuse those kids DURING THE WRECK--

bookmark that

--they CLEARLY couldn't look after the kids because the three year-old wasn't fully potty-trained and they were both in the same car seats they'd had as infants.

The seats that had saved their lives.

So we got the kids back and I personally spent three weeks crafting the 1983 suit.

Now let me go back to that bookmark.

The cops and the underwater basketweaving major social worker were adamant that there had been abuse even though there wasn't a mark on those kids other than the restraint marks.

The story they settled on -- and got some quack to testify to, bless him -- was that Dad had *turned around* when he saw the trucking coming and slammed the restraints into the kids to hide other bruises that must have been there.

Hence the accident. To which the trucker pled.

I mention all of this because Mom and Dad were so exhausted of the whole thing they were basically read to cut off their own genitals just to appease the idiots on the other side, and remember: They had free legal representation.

An animating theme of the morons opposite us was that these people were too poor and therefore too stupid to avoid abusing their kids, let alone raise them correctly.

And because of their own histories and lack of resources, they'd made things worse by cooperating with the state.

I'm a conservative. I tend to think libertarians are at best utopians. But by God, I got a lot more libertarian after this.

If you are poor, undereducated, have a criminal history, etc., the system is stacked against you in ways it's hard even for those acting on that stacking to appreciate.

Those being acted on tend to appreciate it quickly.

I've skipped a lot of details here and deleted two tweets for exactly that reason. There's a lot more to this but I wanted to demonstrate the worst parts to show that the state tends to get a lot weirder when it thinks it's in loco parentis for adults, too.

And if my old boss is reading this, my cover is blown, but fortunately, he's too smart to be on social media except Facebook. I think.