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

If the sun is really in the center of the Earth, then the child is really owned by the dog down the street.


Make up all the rules you wish to. The two women both signed the birth certificate because they agreed that the child belonged with both. Now that they are split up, the courts get to decide custody no different than if a man who isn't the real father and woman signed the certificate and later split up.

If you want your "this is the way it should be's" to be anything other than what if's, go lobby your state government to pass laws. But currently it's nothing more than the "gbaji make believe reasoning for why they are wrong and he is right, even though the laws and courts think otherwise".

You're avoiding the issue. She signed the birth certificate because she really had no choice about what was put on it at that point. State laws define under what conditions which names are put on it. She can only sign it or not. It's debatable whether she understood the ramifications of the names on the certificate at the time in question. Most people don't either, and the statement that she thought that her wife needed to adopt her child in addition to their existing civil union shows that Miller didn't believe that the child was legally both of theirs in the event something happened to her (or they divorced as it happened) well before they split up.


State laws typically mandate that the "husband" of the woman giving birth's name is put on the birth certificate as the father unless she was married to someone else when conception occurred, or if someone else challenges that condition within a relatively short amount of time. Presumably, the same requirements were simply applied to the spouse regardless of gender in the case of same-sex civil unions. That's the problem with putting a square peg into a round hole. It doesn't fit properly. Those laws exist because of a presumption of fatherhood in that case. But that presumption simply does not make sense in the case of same-sex couples.


It's a sad case, brought into existence by the sort of thing that us evil conservatives said would be problematic with same-sex relationships. The issue of child bearing, which is natural and relatively straightforward in heterosexual marriages, becomes ridiculously complex in gay marriages. But instead of addressing the issue as they should, the gay rights groups, in their haste to get what they wanted and avoid any sort of "separate but equal" situation simply demanded that all laws applicable to straight marriages apply to theirs.


This is the result of that lack of foresight. If we treated same-sex relationships as the different types of biological relationships which they really are, instead of insisting that they're just the same and the same rules should apply, we might have been able to create sane sets of rules to define those relationships, including things like child adoption, guardianship, support, etc. Instead, we're going to see more cases like this in the future as centuries of common law and statue and court precedent about marriage, all based on the biological realities of a man/woman relationship have to be re-tested and re-examined.


It would have been smarter, easier, and better to have created a new status tailored to the exact needs of same-sex couples. But no. We have to do this the hard way I suppose...




It's the "no differently" which is the cause of the problem. You get that this *is* different, right? It's the insistence that we treat same-sex relationships "no differently" than opposite-sex ones that is the cause of this problem, and presumably many more to come.




Excuse me if I find it more useful to look at what the law says, what it does, and why it does it and try to make some reasonable conclusions from that rather than just pick a side that I like and root for them. To me, the problem is that the law should not attempt to treat two types of relationships which are biologically different exactly the same when it comes to something which is uniquely biological in nature (child production). I know that some of you have a nearly pavlovian negative response to that suggestion, but if you step back and look honestly at this case, you should see that this entire problem was caused, not by some evil anti-gay action, but by the insistence that we apply laws which were shaped with one assumption to apply to situations in which that assumption is no longer true.


We should base our laws on how things actually are. Not some fairytale imagined state. But increasingly, it seems like we pass laws in order to try to force the world to be different than it is. In some situations, that might work. But no amount of declaring a woman to be the father of a child makes it actually true. We're just kidding ourselves and making a young child suffer for our silliness...

Except you can leave the other parent blank (at least, in my state you can). My aunt just did (she knows the father, but for some reasons she and he both don't want it known otherwise). My cousin did not sign the birth certificate of his girlfriend's baby, and she left it blank (he didn't want anything to do with the kid, she didn't want him around at all, etc).

They made a decision to sign it together. No different than if a man and a woman decided and later one didn't want it that way.

OP, judging by your last two posts, I take it you don't like Christians too much.

Edited, Jan 5th 2010 11:57pm by Dynas

During the custody case? Of course they do. Are you kidding me? You think the woman doesn't get a receipt or something after going through a pretty significant medical procedure? You think that, if its questioned, there's no possible medical way of determining whether or not the male in question is the biological father? Do you live in 1948 or something?

C'mon, now... you didn't actually mean that when you said it.


The part where you pretend that the court has no way of knowing how the child was conceived during a custody case. 'Cause, you know, that'd never come up. Look, in every custody case the party's lawyers try to find what's unique about their situation and what they can use to leverage against the other party. If the child was conceived via donation and you can prove it (which wouldn't be hard at all) then you bring that evidence before the court when you're making your case. This moronic crap about "How can the state know? We must assume he's the father!" is just that... moronic crap. They know because you're going to tell them and submit the evidence to prove it. Just as in this case, they told the judge what happened. Pretty friggin' amazing, huh? How you're allowed to tell the courts things that might be important?


No, it really doesn't.


Who cares? Say it 80 more times, it won't make it true. The law should cover the facts of the case at hand. If the law has already covered the event where a couple has a child via sperm donation and subsequently requires a custody case, then all the following cases should be handled using the same framework. Whether it's sixteen a week or once every decade. That's the whole idea behind legal precedent. It's not to say "Well, we handled this exact same sort of case back in 1992 but... wow, that was too long ago. Let's just pretend it's like a completely different case that happened yesterday!"

You want it to be like some other case because you know you can't argue it as some sort of coup for anti-gay marriage folks if it was handled like a heterosexual couple who conceived the same way. You can pretend that you "have no horse in this race" or whatever but you're fooling no one. You entered this thread half-cocked, crowing about how this proved you right and how this was all orchestrated by the Liberal Machine or whatever bullshit. You see now that you were 100% wrong and have fallen back on insisting that this case be treated like a totally different case because that's all you have left.

Edited, Jan 6th 2010 8:31am by Jophiel

It is fundamentally non-christian to do so.

Gbaji, you keep saying there are all these assumptions and automagical processes in place. This is simply false. sorry dude, hate to ruin your party. No one assumes anything. And in the case where there is any ambiguity, it's pretty darn easy to sort out what is the exact events in these scenarios. I'm also unsure why you have this obsession with biological relation.

Edited, Jan 6th 2010 8:17am by Xsarus

Because his whole anti-gay marriage argument rests on the (ridiculous) notion that any benefits to marriage exist for the pretty much exclusive reason to compel people to marry before creating babies. When people point out the multiple other ways in which one may lawfully acquire a baby of your very own, Gbaji says those don't matter because heterosexual couple can "naturally" create babies and homosexual couples can not.

So when we have a case where a heterosexual couple and a homosexual couple would be exactly the same (except that the heterosexual couple can be married and the homosexual couple 'civilly joined'), it's very important to Gbaji that we know they're really not the same at all and we should be comparing the homosexual couple to completely different cases where he feels he's on sounder ground. Because God forbid we discover that the law has already established how to deal with these situations.

This also leads to his arguments that the courts just can't possibly know if your kid was conceived via some medical procedure or not so they just have to assume you made a baby the old fashioned way

But it's obvious, don't you see?

Now now, he's never said he knows the facts better then a Judge, Just that he understands what the law should be and how to apply said law better then a Judge. He also understand all the ramifications of said law better then anyone really.

That's because whatever he happens to think is obvious is universally assumed by everyone else. Which, incidentally, is exactly the opposite of legal procedure. Everything has to be explicitly stated to prevent ambiguities.