I think you’re looking at the situation all wrong. My position is as follows. As human beings, we should all desire children to live and prosper so it’s insane to prevent anyone who wants to contribute to a child’s well-being from doing so*. In other words, if John Doe Philanthropist wants to write a check to Tommy Child, there should be no law preventing him from doing so. However, support to children consists of much more than just money, it also includes playing with them, teaching them, hanging out with them, and so on. Parenting rights actually are not so much the right to do these things - anyone already has that right by the above principle that we should all desire human children to live and prosper. Rather, parenting rights consist in the much more specific power to selectively exclude others from providing support to their children. This power is ultimately a protective power, the primary reason a parent would want to exclude someone from providing support for their child is precisely because they believe that support is self-seeking in some way, such as a pedophile hanging out with a kid and giving the kid gifts to earn its trust. It this protective power of exclusion that I think must be handed off in some kind of rational priority order.
Now, let’s look at the mechanics of a particular dispute. Alice is a single mother. She is an alcoholic and she beats her young son Bob when she’s angry. Charlie is a truly well-motivated stranger that just doesn’t like to see a kid being beaten up by an adult, even if that adult happens to be a parent. Note that stopping an abuse is the same thing as providing support, just in the negative.
One day, Charlie sees Alice beating Bob and decides to take action. He gets some evidence that Alice was beating Bob to back up his legal case then shows up at Alice’s front door-step to forcibly take custody of the child. At this point Alice calls her PDA and Bob’s PDA also shows up and the standoff is sent to court to be decided.
At this point, the dispute is of the following nature. Charlie’s position is “I am providing support for your son by preventing you from abusing him.” Alice’s position is “I’m the parent, I have the right to exclude you from attempting to care for my son.” There are two sides to this. First of all, Alice certainly has the power to exclude since she is the genetic parent, however, by our first principle that we should all desire to see human children live and prosper, she doesn’t have the right to both exclude support from others and refuse to provide that support herself. In the case of abuse, we can say it this way, a parent doesn’t have the right to exclude abuse-prevention from a stranger and abuse the child. The parent can only exclude abuse-prevention if he or she is not abusing the child. However, the parent can restore his or her right to exclude abuse-prevention simply by stopping abuse. So, in this case where Charlie has actual evidence of Alice’s abuse of Bob, Alice should agree to some kind of monitoring to prove she is not abusing Bob if she wants to prevent Charlie from intervening.
However, the legal liability for intervention must be unlimited. If a parent can later show that he or she was not, in fact, abusive or the case was irregular, or what have you, and the original decision is overturned, the entire period of time for which the child was removed from the parent’s custody must be categorized as kidnapping and all penalties for this must apply. Otherwise, you have a situation where strangers - such as pedophiles - can go fishing for cases where a parent doesn’t have good legal representation or whatever. The only way to stop this is to make sure that whensoever the parent can raise a proper legal defense - even if it is ten years into the future - the legal shyster will be punished for the true magnitude of his or her crime.
Also, I reject the concept of “abusive parent”. Legally, there should be no such concept, only “parental abuse.” The former is a psychological theory. The latter is simply a matter of determining what, in fact, has happened. I’m deeply suspicious of ad hoc psychological theories invented by legal activists to serve their own ends. In the example, even if Charlie wins the right to prevent abuse of Bob by Alice, this does not constitute a transfer of custody from Alice to Charlie since the matter at hand was not the psychological question of whether Alice is an abusive parent but, rather, whether Alice retains the right to prevent Charlie from intervening to stop an act of abuse.
Clayton -
*Actually, I want to reword this a little… by virtue of being a human being (having human DNA and the genetic impulse to human survival), I have a legitimate interest in the life and prosperity of any human child and, therefore, no one should have the right to prevent me from providing support to a child if I want to… except a parent (or, more generally, a guardian).