To Earnest, with Love

This is a confession and an explanation and a passive aggressive indictment of my friends. Read it or not, like it or not, this is my truth and however you choose to take it, I will manage.  I’m angry.  And I’m angry about being angry.  Being angry about what I’ve experienced means that it matters to me, and I’ve spent my life determined for it not to matter.  If it matters, then it means they got to me; that they have power over me; that I’m weak; that I’m pathetic.  I am surprised at the depth and breadth of my anger, and I am still desperate to stuff it down; to ignore it; to deny it; to detach myself from it.  When I’m detached, I can rationalize why it shouldn’t matter; why they are the pathetic ones; why they are the ones to be vilified and despised. When I’m angry, I'm trapped between rage and shame. I was devastated when Trump was elected.  And I’m not one to be “devastated.”  I’m not sure I even understood what it meant until Trump.  It deconstructed me in a w

The author People - mostly people who call themselves republicans - keep asking, "what's wrong with a 'temporary' ban to make sure people coming here aren't terrorists?" Here's my two biggest complaints: 1) There is no evidence that this "temporary" ban (indefinite for Syrian refugees) is based on any imminent threat from those people who have already been subjected to extensive vetting (over two years) and are now cleared to come here but for Trump's ban; and 2) even if the current vet ting process could be better, and keep people here in the US "safer" (from foreign-born terrorists), we are already infinitely safer than so many of the people coming here, and certainly all of the refugees who are fleeing, literally, unimaginable horror, at least if you've lived here you entire life. Is there a risk that a "bad" person will slip past all of the extensive screening we already have in place? Sure - there is abs

P arents often ask me, in one form or another, why our family court system is so broken.  How can the judges, attorneys, therapists, police officers, etc., who are supposed to protect children fail so miserably?  How can “they” deny due process, violate the First Amendment, ignore the rule of law, and inflict so much pain and suffering on families in the name of justice and get away with it, every day, right here, in the greatest country on earth? All over the world, people suffer this and worse, I'm sorry to say. Look at Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, the Sudan, Nigeria, to name just a few.  “Injustice” doesn’t begin to capture the reality of those places.  You think because you’re Americans and you live in the "greatest country on earth" that you are guaranteed "liberty and justice."  You entrust your freedoms to others; put yellow-ribbon stickers on your cars; share warm and fuzzy memes on Facebook; choose your elected officials based on a two-second

It's October, and that means it's Domestic Violence Awareness month so to commemorate it, I am going on a hunger strike.  The only nourishment I will take for the entire month of October is JUSTICE because I'm starved for it.  And I'm not the only one; there are millions of us out there who are starving for justice. They are the victims of domestic violence, the protective parents, and the victims of social services who turned to the courts seeking justice, and are starving for it still. Unlike most, if not all of them, though, I am in a privileged position to do two things that most people can't: I can speak out about the travesties that are taking place in our courts every day; and I can literally starve for justice. In honor of Domestic Violence Awareness month, throughout October lots of non-profits, governmental agencies and celebrities will make extra efforts to urge anyone trapped in violent and dangerous relationships to leave their abusers and find safe

It should be obvious by now that if someone is determined NOT to know the truth, then it doesn’t matter how much truth is put in front of her or him, the truth will be ignored.  But for anyone interested in facts underlying my journey to disbarment, here they are. The underlying events dealt with allegations of abuse of two small children which gave rise to a custody case in Mississippi, an intra-family adoption case in Louisiana, and a petition seeking emergency relief, also filed in Louisiana. On July 20, 2011, Chancellor Deborah Gambrell, the Mississippi judge presiding over the custody case in Mississippi, issued  an illegal order  affecting custody and visitation of the children. The order was issued without prior notice to mom, and it was done in the judge's chambers so there was no record of what was said. Those two factors alone make is absolutely null, according to the U.S. Constitution and Mississippi law. The order allowed dad to have supervised (by his mother w