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When an eight year-old Grand Forks boy imitated a FOX NEWS reporter on the school yard – his mother motioned the Minnesota Family Court and accused the child’s father of maltreatment – because the child’s father is a journalist.

The child had seen a regional news team on the school grounds in the summer of 2013 reporting on the extreme heat. The child turned on his I-Pod and recorded himself imitating the news reporter.

Rhonda Callahan, Grand Forks, filed a Motion to the Minnesota Family Court against the child's father, and included the recording as evidence to support her claim the child is being psychologically abused.

The child’s father, Timothy Charles Holmseth, is a former newspaper reporter turned author. Callahan's lawyer, Michael Mattocks, Charlson & Jorgenson Law Office, argued to the Court that the child is in danger because he is imitating his father – an investigative author that wrote a book about a missing child from Florida named HaLeigh Cummings.

In a Memorandum of Law filed with the Court today, Holmseth stated:

The Constitutional rights of [the minor child] were infringed upon by Respondent when she stated in a Motion the child was being abused because he imitated a FOX NEWS reporter he saw working on the school yard. Respondent claimed the minor child was imitating his father, which was presented to the Court as a symptom of abuse because the child’s father is a journalist. It was stated the child imitated a reporter saying ‘what is going on at this school?’ -  ‘can you connect the dots’? This was presented as child abuse, being committed by the father, for having allegedly inspired the child’s desire to think and problem solve.

• [The child] has a Constitutional right to admire and emulate his father. [The child] has a right to think and problem solve. The State has no legal right to encroach or infringe upon this God given right, which belongs to [the child].

• The internal and spiritual reflections of a growing child becoming a man are poetically captured in a famous song by Christian singer/songwriter Paul Overstreet. 

Timothy Charles Holmseth with his baby son in the ICU at Meritcare in Fargo

“I’m seeing my father in me – yes that’s how it supposed to be – and I find I’m more and more like him each day – I noticed I walk the way he walks – I notice I talk the way he talks – I’m starting to see – my father in me – and I’m happy to see – my father in me”
     - Paul Overstreet / Seein’ My Father in Me

• John D. Ashcroft, Attorney General, et al. v. Free Speech Coalition, et al., 535 U.S. 234, 122 S.Ct. 1389, 152 L.Ed.2d 403, (2002): The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the Ninth Circuit's judgment…[the challenged law] was overly broad and unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote: "First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought."

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