Christian Ex-Lesbian "Kidnaps" own Kid over Custody DisputeFollow

Can't speak for the child support but apparently the birth mother asked a judge to dissolve the civil union and decide custody. The judge decided that primary custody would go to the birth mother and visitation to her partner. The judge also ruled that her partner was legally a parent. This ruling was upheld in both the Vermont and Virginia supreme courts. The SCotUS declined to hear arguments on the case.

Here's a story although it doesn't explicitly mention the partner bing a legal parent as I read elsewhere. Money quote:

And her name was on the birth certificate. Pretty sure you usually don't need to adopt a kid whose birth certificate has your name on it. (My parents didn't need to adopt me or my brother...)

His grandmothers in Cuba also wanted him back in Cuba. I can't find any information suggesting that his father had somehow abandoned him, just that they were no longer married.

Edited, Jan 5th 2010 3:54pm by Xsarus

Virus is still butthurt that the government didn't just ship the whole clan of those foreigners back where they came from.

Gestapo???

That kid was an illegal alien! If he was still here today, he'd no doubt be stealing your job and all sorts of welfare. If you cared about America, you'd be praising Clinton for taking a stand.

One is allowed to stay in the US. Ipso facto, he was an illegal alien

Obviously because society recognizes the value of a two-parent family and, much like it provides financial incentives, we provide visitation rights to encourage stable family structures. Geez. It's so obvious...

I haven't seen a cite saying her name was on the birth certificate unless I just missed it. Someone said it was true upthread and everyone just kind of ran with it.

The quote about asking for adoption papers seems to imply that her name wasn't on the birth certificate, thus her needing to adopt the child. The birth mother said that wasn't necessary because, if a meteor fell on her, her "spouse" would automatically get custody. Ironically, that seems to have been kind of true since a lower court and two state supreme courts have agreed that both women are parents to the child.


I don't know if "spouse" is the correct legal term for a civilly joined partner regardless of what we may say informally.

I find it telling that I wrote a post which was a clear mockery of one of your own points on a different subject, and it's one of the few posts which you took seriously.

But as I stated the last time you made this point. That's an extremely rare exception in the case of heterosexual couples. There's an automatic process in place (whatever it is) which assumes that the spouse of the mother of a child is the biological father of the child. Yes. Even in the case of an artificial insemination process we make this legal assumption. The state doesn't know or necessarily care about how the woman was impregnated. It just knows that a child was born.

We do this because it's correct the overwhelming majority of the time. It makes more sense to just assume this by default and let the courts handle the exceptions if they come up and are contested than the other way around.


But here we have a case where every single same-sex marriage in which a child is born, that child is not and cannot be biologically related to the spouse. The exception is the norm here, so perhaps we should address that somehow.




Dunno. And I suppose there could be a court battle over that. I'd be willing to bet that every womans rights group supporting Jenkin's right to have custody of the child in this case would be supporting the womans right to deny her ex-husband custody in your example though. Not making a point about the case or the issue, but just a general stab at how ludicrous some side taking is...


Let me state again. I don't have any direct stake in this case, nor particular care how it's decided. I'm more interested in looking at how the law treats births to same-sex couples. The courts are going to do what the courts do, but as I've stated repeatedly, our laws should be tailored to address the most common outcomes in a logical and reasonable manner so as to hopefully limit the frequency with which this sort of court case occurs. There are no winners here Joph. I hope you agree with me on that.


Thus, we should be looking at how we avoid the issue the next time. If the law was clear on this, they could have taken the correct actions and the correct result would also be clear. It's not precisely because the historical assumptions about children to married couples doesn't make as much (or any) sense in this situation. And it's not going to make any more sense the next time it happens either. Or the next. Or the next. And no amount of courts deciding one way or the other is likely to prevent the inevitable lawsuits and painful court battles which will result.

They already have a process developed (not used in Humans yet) that can take the egg from one female, the mitochondrial DNA from another, and the sperm from a male and create a baby. This was tested to eliminate certain disorders that come from the mitochondrial DNA.

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/08/27/meet-a-monkey-with-two-mothers/

So there we have two females as genetic donors to a child.

Edited, Jan 5th 2010 9:33pm by TirithRR