A nasty custody case in Virginia highlights the way that the relentless push for same sex marriage threatens our core understanding of the nature of family. The desperate determination to honor gay rights undermines such fundamental values as the importance of motherhood, and the state's obligation to consider the welfare of the child.
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Regardless of the final outcome of this sad story, the case demonstrates the way that the militant gay rights agenda trumps long-standing patterns and preferences in family law. [...] Judges and child welfare agencies give the mother principal custody except in cases of blatant abuse, neglect or irresponsibility. No one accuses Lisa Miller of such mistreatment, and yet she is stripped of responsibility for her seven-year-old daughter by an ex-lover with no biological connection to the child. [...] It's hard to think of a non-related, heterosexual adoptive parent in a high profile battle who has been awarded custody precedence over a birth parent the way the courts have given precedence to this non-related homosexual partner.
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Aside from the relevant legal arguments, theres an inescapable underlying question concerning the whole dispute: in what sense would a seven year old girl benefit from regular parental contact with an unrelated female now bitterly estranged from her mother?
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If she had been in a non-romantic room-mate of the little girls mother, or even a dear old auntie who helped with the infants care, its hard to imagine the courts would have granted her custody years later. But the illogical insistence that gay partnerships must be treated as identical to procreative heterosexual unions gave Jenkins special claims to parenthood based more on the nature of her relationship to the mother than to the history of her connection to the child. In any event, the synthetic, unnatural nature of those claims based almost entirely on the securing of civil union status from the Vermont bureaucracy some nine years ago means that Jenkins parental standing rests on an artificial governmental construct, on forms and signatures, rather than any sort of organic or experiential connection.
One of the most common arguments by gay marriage advocates involves the insistence that the expansion of matrimonial rights will merely enlarge marital opportunities, with no impact at all on existing couples or the institution itself. The Miller-Jenkins case shows the absurdity of this contention and demonstrates the way that redefining marriage inevitably changes parenthood as well, turning the most fundamental, natural, elemental human relationship of mother-and-child into an officially sanctioned fiction altogether dependent on governmental fiat.
See the entire column: "Custody Case Highlights Artificiality of Same Sex Marriage."
Also see Opine blogpost: "Heather's Other Mommy Wants Custody."
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