I really hope that someone with legal experience will comment and provide some insight here, because this makes no sense to me why this woman should lose the child she gave birth to. It just further illustrates why marriage is, and should be, between one man and one woman.Ex-homosexual Lisa Miller has apparently disappeared following a court order to transfer custody of her daughter to lesbian Janet Jenkins, her former partner, on January 1st.
Miller failed to comply with the order yesterday, and her whereabouts have been unknown for over a month, according to the Vermont judge overseeing the case.
According to ABC News, Jenkins has filed a police report. However, no arrest warrant has yet been issued.
Judge Richard Cohen, who has granted visitation rights and now custody of seven-year-old Isabella Miller to Jenkins despite the absence of any law authorizing it, said in a hearing on December 29 that "it appears that Ms. Miller has ceased contact with her attorneys and disappeared with the minor child".
Cohen also stated that "no one has had any contact with Lisa Miller or IMJ [Isabella Miller Jenkins] since the court's order of November 20th. Her attorneys have attempted to contact her, but she had not returned any messages. The present whereabouts of Lisa Miller and IMJ are unknown."
Miller, 40, has battled since 2003 to protect her daughter from Jenkins, 43, who was joined to her in a Vermont "civil union" in December, 2000. After a relationship that Miller says was abusive, she left Jenkins and returned to her former faith in Christ, renouncing her previous homosexual behavior.
During her relationship with Jenkins, Miller was artificially inseminated and gave birth to Isabella. Miller states that Judge Cohen granted parental rights to Jenkins and ordered visitation, despite a lack of biological relationship and the absence of any law granting parental rights to civil union partners.
story here
3 comments:
If you read the whole history of the case, I believe you will see why.
This situation is commonplace in heterosexual marriages; the sexual orientation of these two people is (or should be) irrelevant.
It is common in heterosexual divorce for an insecure, unemployed, unstable biological parent to be assigned custody. That parent repeatedly violates the visitation rights of child and the non-custodial parent. In time, after enough violations, the courts decide that the only way to protect the visitation rights of the child and non-custodial parent is to transfer custody.
What I describe above is what happened in the case of Isabella Miller. Her custodial mother Lisa is chronically unemployed, emotionally insecure, and for five years she has violated the visitation rulings of two states and sought to damage the close ties between Isabella and Janet.
The fact that you tie this situation to your opposition to same-sex marriage is part of the problem: Anti-marriage activists like you have encouraged Lisa for years to violate the law as it relates to visitation, and the courts have responded by transferring custody away from this lawbreaker.
Lisa would never have lost custody if she had obeyed the law and if anti-marriage activists had not encouraged her lawlessness.
I'm anti-marriage? LOL!
certainly not...I just refuse to redefine mariage for everyone who wants to suit themself.
What if someone loves their pet?
Should we redefine marriage for them also?
I'm a heterosexual male, a Christian, and a consultant on custody cases in Colorado. Mike seems to have provided a pretty dispassionate analysis, and the fact that you reject this indicates to me that you are looking for justification of faith, not legal analysis. But even in heterosexual custody cases, matters of faith and passion (political, cultural) etc., must not be determinants, unless they can be shown to truly affect the quality of caregiving. You cannot by law favor an evangelical over an atheist as a parent, for example.
Two recent heterosexual cases come to mind: the little boy from Cuba who had been raised in Miami for many months. His natural father in Cuba had primary rights. Cuban-Americans did not like that because they did not want the boy going back to Cuba. But Fidel Castro was not on trial. The boy's father had primary rights. Similarly, many Brazilians supported the stepfather in the Brazil case two weeks ago, though the natural father's rights were clearly paramount. The Brazilian courts realized this, even though many Brazilian citizens did not.
On the issue of gay parenting, even if gay marriage never becomes law in all 50 states, gay parental rights are likely to be recognized in all 50 states very soon. At that point, the courts cannot consider whether a parent renounces homosexuality, etc., but only who has shared rights and how they have complied with the law. It is not unusual at all for all custodial rights to be denied to a natural mother, even though courts are usually skewed against fathers. If a mother ignores the rules of the courts, and is very irresponsible (drinking, drugs) or simply refuses to meet with the court, she risks having all rights as a parent taken away. This is what happened in this case, and correctly so. What Lisa Miller's faith tells her is irrelevant to the law. She was unwilling to reach a compromise solution with the court, so now she is a fugitive.
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