I don’t know why the MSM is so enthused about these “landmark gay custody cases,” which are supposedly “bringing us into the 21st century.” These cases, unfortunately, illustrate I am completely justified in my concerns about the direction of family law, under the tutelage of the gay lobby and the influence of same sex marriage. This is a case in which the courts are trying to assign parental rights to a person who is not related to the children, either through biology or adoption.
Let us call this person a “non-parent.”
Translation: the courts are trying to assing parental rights to a non-parent. This is good because?
Because the non-parent in this particular case is the former lesbian partner of the biological mother. That is supposed to make it ok. However, according to the mother:
Davis counters that Harmon was not a parent, the children don’t regard her as such, and that Harmon was abusive and has no legal right to joint custody because she is not their biological mother.
The article goes on to note:
Currently, the only people who can petition for custody are biological parents, or the husband of the biological mother if the child was born during their marriage.
This isn’t quite accurate. The one other class of person who could petition for custody is adoptive parents. I don’t know whether Michigan permits second party adoption, or whether the biological mother in this case woudl have consented to having her children adopted by her lesbian partner. However, an adoptive parent has parental rights, and therefore woudl have standing to sue in a case of this kind.
But this would not be acceptable to teh Gay Legal Establishment. Lesbian former partners want to be treated as ex-husbands. they say it is unfair that they are not treated as ex-husbands. They pretend to not see that the ex-husband, in 95% of the cases, is in fact, the biological father of the child, and hence has the same kind of connection to the child as the biological mother. The law of marriage traditionally tried to attach both mothers and fathers to their children, and to one another, as an act of justice to the child, and to each of the parents.
In this case, the children’s father has been completely cut out of their lives by the legal travesty of anonymous sperm donation. And the lesbian partner did not go through the legal steps normally required of non-parents to become parents, namely, the adoption process. The advocates of same sex marriage hope that calling a same sex relationship a “marriage” will eliminate the need for all of these steps. But I say that it is more just to everyone concerned, as well as more realistic, to make people go through these steps explicitly, rather than trying to collapse them all under the label of “marriage.”
The Gay Legal Establishment claims that this makes same sex couples into second class citizens. However, this case makes it perfectly clear that NOT taking these steps makes the biological mom in a lesbian partnership into a second class citizen. She is a perfectly fit mother. She has not lost or surrendered parental rights to her children. But she is in danger of losing control of what happens to her own children.
This kind of case illustrates that we are in the process of redefining parenthood, along with redefining marriage. This woman probably had no idea that by entering into a lesbian relationship, that her parental rights could be in jeopardy. She no doubt, had the idea that giving birth to a child created an unrebuttable presumption that she is the mother of the child. Now, a court will decide whether she really had a sufficiently well-defined agreement with her friend, that her friend counts as much as the mother as she does.
Question for all moms out there: how many of you are eager to share your motherhood with another woman? Is that something you can imagine would be an easy thing to do, even with your best friend?
Think about it.