"You are a parent, as an exercise of your fundamental right. The state may interfere with that only if it proves you've abused or neglected your child. How this works out in divorce is simple: Each parent has the same fundamental right. Therefore, the state may not infringe either parent's right more than the other. This results in 50-50, and no relocation unless both parents agree to it, or the one who wants to relocate decides doing so is more important to him/her than maintaining an equal relationship with the child. Q.E.D."
If you are following his theory, it is contingent upon a child having no rights at all; the court having no right to even think about the child as a person and a parent having no right to present how their parenting plan would benefit a child.
He plans to use this hypothetical stripping of all rights as a way to treat the child as a mere possession, an inanimate object who just happens to breathe. The ulterior motive is that, once he gets the Supreme Court to decree that never again shall any court give any thought to children (beyond the exceptions that Jim has decreed acceptable), he can then claim equal rights of possession between parents, no matter how bad that may be for the children involved.
Jim is fatally flawed on both his premise and his conclusion, of course, but I did want to point out WHY Jim must take such an extreme stance: As Jim sees it, if the child's interests are any factor at all, the court may order inequality.
You and I are not extremists on this issue, because we both recognize that the interests of children AND parents should be weighed by the court.
Jim, on the other hand, can have no part of this triangular tug of interests. In order for his plan to unfold, he must whitewash any consideration of the children involved. He also must remove any hope of any other caretaker's role, such as a grandparent or foster parent who raises the child of an addicted, jailed or absentee parent. In his hopelessly crippled contention, the parents, and ONLY the parents, matter, regardless of all facts of a case.
After all these years, his rate of success is somewhat akin to yours, because a child DOES have rights and they are a legal entity and the darn little brats keep on breathing. No court in the land is going to agree to erase the weight of a child's interests. Nor is the court going to tell a parent that they may not mention their children in a child custody dispute.
Even if the skies themselves collapse and the Supreme Court decrees that the word "child" can not be uttered in a child custody case, and then further decrees that children are not humans, but bags of blood and bone, Jim still fails.
Laws still abound decreeing that the court must determine a "primary caretaker" (a statute that we don't hear a whisper about from Mr Loose). Laws also compel the court to consider the "status quo", which is the theory that whoever HAS the child, KEEPS the child. This law forces parents to grab the kids and prevent the other parent from having contact, yet there is nary a peep from Jim on this.
Sole custody was almost always decreed in the days before the "best interests" principle was made law. This may not be the case in Ireland or England, but it is surely the way it worked here. The CBI principle has been used as the only refuge for NCP's since the day it was enacted. If it goes away again, and it won't, the only thing left is "primary caretaker" laws.
The court is NOT required to divide all marital possessions evenly during a divorce. (Even when those "possessions" have a pulse) For example, if the husband is a lumberjack and the wife is a seamstress, the court may award the wood-cutting tools to the man and the sewing machine to the woman, even if they are not the same value. They may try to divide some possessions evenly, such as savings accounts, but they do not decree a possession to be handed back and forth.
When it comes right down to it, the court may do anything they please, especially if you follow Jim's lead and ease the restrictions on the court by removing one of their obligations.
So the next time you think I'm an extremist when I say that both parents and children have rights, remember the theory behind Jim's fiery anarchist manifesto. The sad truth is, even Jim doesn't believe his own blather. He only says it because he foolishly believes it to be a shortcut to more time with his child.
Now if only the child were a wood-cutting tool.