One of them, my readers are already praying for--Rifqa Bary. Jamal Jivanjee has another update on her situation here. He says that prior to the December 22 hearing, Rifqa was being allowed to talk with one friend on the phone but is now not permitted to do so. He also outlines the probable strategy of her parents' lawyer in trying to get her denied dependency status--to argue that there was no "conflict" in her home (which is legally significant in Ohio) until one was created by "brainwashing" from her outside Christian friends. Jamal urges writing to the head of Franklin County Children's Services, Eric Fenner, to protest Rifqa's increasing isolation.
The second, I just got an update about from the Pearcey Report. Some of you may have heard of the case of Lisa Miller. Lisa used to be a lesbian and entered into a civil union in Vermont. She was artificially inseminated and gave birth to a daughter, Isabella, now seven years old. Lisa renounced her lesbianism when Isabella was very little (my recollection is that she was about a year old), returned to her Christian faith, got a legal "divorce" (or whatever one calls it) from her civil union lover, and fled to Virginia, whose laws expressly do not recognize any form of same-sex union, including civil unions. However, Vermont declared custody over this as a child custody case after the model of a divorce case and ordered that Isabella be sent to spend days at a time with the former lover, who, of course, is no relation to the child at all, not even (for that matter) an adoptive parent. Lisa complied with some of these orders, but they were very traumatic for Isabella, who said both that she wanted to die after one such visit and that she was forced to bathe naked with the former lesbian lover. So Lisa disobeyed some of the court orders for visitation. The judge threatened her and eventually carried out his threat to punish her by ordering full custody of Isabella to the lesbian lover. This traumatic seizure of Isabella by the state of Vermont for a lesbian completely unrelated to Isabella, whom Isabella does not know and does not want to live with, was to be carried out by the first of the year, 2010.
Lisa and Isabella have disappeared. Their whereabouts are unknown; they are in hiding. The former lover, Janet Jenkins, is attempting to have the police trace them and turn Isabella over to her.
May God protect them.
By the way, the next time someone suggests to you that civil unions ain't so bad and it's just the word "marriage" we should be protecting, point them to this case.
People like to call states like Vermont "People's Republic." But even the commies didn't do stuff like this. We need a different name for what ails them.
ReplyDeleteOn which theme (concerning names for things, like civil unions and marriage, or what's in a word) I've got another link to an old post on the subject if you want me to send it.
I've been shaking my head at the resistance you've been getting at W4 on this. You would think Lisa/Jenkins episode would illustrate the absurdity of it all and inspire people to fold instead of doubling down on a losing hand. It's more evidence that with progressives that it is not about equality but destruction.
ReplyDeleteWhat's really sad is my old blog acquaintance Perseus, who is not a liberal but thinks he has to submit to anything in the name of the "rule of law." It's not like civil disobedience doesn't have a long and respectable history, starting with refusals to pour a libation to Caesar!
ReplyDeleteAs for the homosexual activists, for sure, they are ideologues, but they believe they can force the issue with the conservatives by just intoning "it's the law" over and over again. They truly believe that right can be created out of nowhere here, and that since they are in power they can create right and wrong. It's a terrifying thing to so, but we're going to see a lot more of it.
I really hope the various conservative fools who said civil unions were an issue we should abandon are watching this case. *Not a single person* in that thread has so much as *tried* to say that the judge was wrong because it's a civil union and not a marriage. On the contrary, it is assumed by all parties--including me, who knew what was up with civil unions all along--that the whole purpose was to make something legally identical to marriage. Which, of course, is how the horrible injustice to the child and her mother arises.
I hope you keep us updated on the case. I have a guess that progressives are going to go full bore on this one because they are committed to the proposition that homosexuality is natural and fixed, and when you discover that you are, that is who you are. Lisa bucks this and progressives are not going to tolerate any backsliders.
ReplyDeleteScott W.
I certainly will post updates when I hear them. It's hard to find a one-stop place for updates, but the Protect Isabella Coalition page (which I just found through LifeSite News) will hopefully post updates.
ReplyDeleteThe homosexual activists are going full-bore on this both for the reason you give and, relatedly, to prove to the world that all legal ramifications of the things they have already pushed through will be pushed to the max. I notice that they do this even when the aspects they cite were totally informal without being legally formalized. So, for example, people in my thread refer to Lisa Miller as having "treated Jenkins as a parent" by having for a brief time accepted child support money from her in an entirely informal way. To them, this constitutes a lifetime commitment to treat her as Isabella's mother, world without end, even though it was never formalized in a custodial agreement.
And of course the crazy application of common law (based, of course, on heterosexual assumptions) making a child born during a marriage a child of the marriage, is now being co-opted in standard viral fashion to make out that Isabella is Jenkins's legal daughter. They want to grind our faces in the legal implications of what they have already accomplished.
Here is a somewhat similar case:
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/jan/10010811.html
In this case, the lesbian woman actually is the children's mother. She left her husband, their father, and has moved in with a lesbian lover almost two thousand miles away. The article, however, details the ways in which the decision flies in the face of previous Illinois jurisprudence. I don't have access to the judge's decision. The story says that his reasoning is that the lesbian mother's relationship to her lover would be "beneficial to the children." It's unclear whether the lesbian mother's relationship with her lover even has any legal status at all. Oregon has "domestic partnerships." I don't know if their relationship is formalized.
It appears that the judge is likening this to a case where one partner has remarried and hence would provide a more stable home for the children, because it is a "two-parent" home. (When the other spouse has not remarried.) But I am just guessing there. Of course, that could be very foolish reasoning even in heterosexual cases, as stepfathers are not exactly uniformly good for children of a previous marriage!
Increasingly, I see judges trying to force treatment of _informal_ homosexual relationships as though these were marriages. This was the case where photographer Elaine Hugonin was fined for refusing to do a marriage photography package for an entirely _informal ceremony_ in New Mexico between two lesbians. New Mexico does not give any legal recognition at all to same-sex unions, but the judges have decreed that it violates state laws against "discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation" for Hugonin to refuse to take the pictures!
I posted this at Erin Manning's blog, and she posted an entry on it here
ReplyDeleteThanks, Scott. It's horrible. It is our future unless the homosexual agenda is stopped. It's sobering to realize to what extent the judge can cite the Vermont law as being on his side in this. _Not_ that I am saying that he is "obligated" by the law to do what he has done. Family law judges have latitude to take the best interests of the child into account, and there were compromises he could have pursued but never did. (For example, supervised, couple-hour, not overnight visits at a neutral, public location between the girl and this other woman, if he thinks it's so crucial that the girl know her. This is sometimes ordered for children with grandparents when there is a falling out between the parents and grandparents and the grandparents take it to court. Ridiculous in this case? Sure, but less insane than what he has pushed and possibly something Miller could have agreed to ethically to avoid his pushing something worse.) But the deliberate set-up in Vermont of a state intended to be legally *exactly like marriage in all but name* gave him an open door to do what he did. Which is frightening.
ReplyDeleteMinor Update: It seems the Protect Isabella Coalition site has disappeare, and Right-Wing Watch noted it in a semi-celebratory manner.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Scott. That's bad news. I wonder if LifeSite news has any word on the matter or on the reason for the site's disappearance.
ReplyDeleteI used LifeSite's search function, which didn't turn up anything. So I submitted it to their news tips contact.
ReplyDelete