One part of the excellent quotation Paul Cella gives below from Anthony Esolen goes like this:
“I needed a father, I always needed a father, and you turned your back on me, and told me what you knew was a lie, that a mother or two mothers or a mother and a boyfriend would do just as well. When it didn’t work out, you blamed everything but your own selfishness.“I needed a father, and you were too busy with your sexual innovations to notice it.”
In illustration whereof I present this story of despicable selfishness.
Two lesbian women in Florida wanted a baby. Since their union was by its very nature necessarily sterile, they couldn't have a baby together (of course). So one of them made a deal with her homosexual hairdresser to donate his sperm wherewith to generate a child. Then followed a custody battle after the biological father decided that he wanted paternal rights. The final decision, recently handed down by a Florida judge, is that the baby's birth certificate will list all three as parents, including among them the other lesbian woman who is simply the sexual partner of the child's biological mother.
As far as I'm aware (legal eagle readers can correct me if I'm wrong) this is the first time in America that three people have been listed as "parents" on a birth certificate.
One legal irony that I haven't seen anyone point out yet: The AP story calls the lesbian women "married," but the custody case is occurring in Florida, where the state constitutionally cannot recognize either homosexual "marriage" or civil unions. So what gives? Since the AP authors were too lazy to look up the status of homosexual couples in Florida, or else were deliberately concealing the fact that this "marriage" isn't recognized in the state where they live, this point isn't brought up in the news story. One guesses that they got "married" in some other state and then moved to Florida. If the Florida judge's decision is based on their "marriage" in another state, a type of "marriage" which is expressly not recognized in Florida state law, this by itself should cast doubt on the legality of his decision. But, now that the custody battle has been resolved, who has standing to object? Not the baby. She's not even two years old yet.
Another legal question arises from the fact that this apparently amounts to an adoption on the part of the lesbian partner of the biological mother. Was this adoption carried out in the normal way, though? Was there a home study? Was the woman who wanted to adopt made to jump through the usual hoops? Or was that process short-circuited by a custody battle and the judge's decision?
But let's not make any pretense about who the victim is, here. It's the little girl, whom they have named Emma. Her biological mother and her partner have made up their little familial charade, and various people, including Emma, have an assigned role to play in it. The lesbian couple actually got what they wanted out of this, even though the biological father is listed on the birth certificate. The judge has given the lesbian partner full parental rights but has given the biological father (the homosexual hairdresser) only visitation rights. Here is their smug summary:
"We're trying to do the right thing for Emma," Filippazzo said. "We want Emma to have it all, and we believe by doing it this way, including him in a birthday or Thanksgiving, it'll be a nice addition for her.""We believe the best interest for Emma is for him to have a role in her life, but not as a parent," she said. "The role is this is mommy's good friend who helped your moms have you because they wanted you so badly."
They want what is in Emma's best interests? That's a lie. They want Emma to have it all? That's a lie.
What they want is their social experiment, for which a baby is a necessary item of furniture. That the baby is to be denied a real father in the very nature of the case is of no moment to them whatsoever. The homosexual man who donated his sperm is also a prop in their experiment. He's a "friend" who will be a "nice addition" for Emma, to be included in "a birthday or Thanksgiving." Emma is fatherless by design. Yet they have the gall to say that they want her to have it all. This is deep selfishness, and the victims are not the "members of the gay community" but rather the children whom they rope into their project, even conceiving them unnaturally on purpose, and use to make their points. Nor will it end here. For all her young life, Emma will continue to be a prop, a member of a "gay family." She will be held hostage, so that those who do not wish to accept the insane and unnatural arrangement into which she has been drafted, those who will not treat that arrangement as normal, will be said to be unkind to Emma. Her biological mother and her biological mother's lesbian partner will hold Emma up in front of themselves as a shield to ward off criticism. This, too, is deep selfishness.
In other news, Mennonite pastor Kenneth Miller has been jailed for at least a week for contempt of court because he refused to testify against others involved in helping Lisa Miller and her daughter Isabella to escape the country in 2009. It seems extremely unlikely that Miller will be induced to testify by his imprisonment. This jail time is separate from the federal jail time he faces, for which he is due to be sentenced in early March, for his own role in helping Lisa and Isabella. My earlier discussions of this case are here and here. Meanwhile, Nicaragua isn't exactly proving to be a place of refuge. Mennonites in Nicaragua who may know the whereabouts of Lisa and Isabella say that they have been interrogated and their church services videotaped, and former members of their group have been offered inducements to rejoin the group and act as spies to find out Lisa's and Isabella's whereabouts. The Mennonites say that they are willing to be persecuted even to the point of imprisonment or death rather than betray the mother and child.
Comments (17)
The Reuters/Yahoo Canada article about the Florida case omits a pertinent quote. The Miami Herald article has it: "We're creating entirely new concepts of families." See: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/02/06/3220216/judge-oks-plan-for-gay-man-lesbian.html
Posted by Anon | February 13, 2013 10:14 AM
Oh, they're quite proud of that. And the baby is a means to that end. Thanks for the additional link.
Posted by Lydia | February 13, 2013 10:28 AM
We should take bets on how long the biological relationship is going to matter at all legally. My money is on twenty years.
Posted by MarcAnthony | February 13, 2013 10:57 AM
Yeah, and Andy Stanley was really helping us out with this crisis when he jokingly talked about a "modern family" that included a man and his homosexual partner in a sermon illustration... not.
Posted by The Masked Elephant | February 13, 2013 1:28 PM
It's interesting to speculate what this absurd ruling's effect will be on laws surrounding paternity in
the state of Florida. Since that state doesn't recognize the same-sex simulation of marriage, it would
seem that the non-biological 'mother' in the case would have the legal status of a mistress to one of
the biological parents involved. If that is so, then doesn't it make it possible for a 'third wheel' involved
with any couple-- same-sex or heterosexual-- to sue to be included as a 'third parent'?
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that in Florida now any sexual partner to one of the two biological parents
having a child could cite this case as precedent in a suit to claim paternity to a child to whom he or she
otherwise has no connection. Am I imagining things here?
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It's sad that little Emma will be taught that a Father is a guy that just stops by when one is having a birthday or
is sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner. She will, of course, be taking that assumption about a father's role into
her adult life and future relationships. She is being cheated.
Posted by Clinton | February 13, 2013 2:00 PM
I will admit that I don't know how or if the legal concept of "precedent" applies to this type of ruling. My understanding is that family law conclusions of this kind are supposed to be very tightly tied to the alleged "best interests of the child" in the concrete case before the family judge.
One question I haven't gotten fully answered is in what sense and by what method the third party here obtained what amount to adoption rights over the child. Evidently the original intention was that the biological father would simply stay quietly out of the picture while the lesbian partner went through an ordinary adoption process. That wouldn't be quite the same thing as suing to claim paternity or maternity. A suit is an adversarial kind of process, whereas adoption is more like applying. My perception is that right now there is nothing stopping, say, a woman's boyfriend who has no biological relationship to her children from applying to adopt them, unless _she_ objects or unless their biological father objects. The lesbian partner's application would have been of this kind, for which I presume there is already precedent now that homosexuals are permitted to adopt.
What interrupted the smooth carrying out of that plan was that the biological father actually did push his paternal rights. I don't know if he was objecting to the adoption by the lesbian partner or simply demanding that, inter alia, he be treated as a full parent. What we got then was a custody battle which the judge "resolved" in this way.
I suppose it's quite possible that such a custody battle could arise where all the parties involved were heterosexual. What the courts would make of such a case remains up in the air. Presumably what kicked this off was that one biological parent was willing for the adoption to take place but the other was raising an objection.
Posted by Lydia | February 13, 2013 2:13 PM
MarcAnthony, I guess you are right. We can't see just how it will come about, not yet, but inevitably some court case will come along in the train of these idiotic rulings, and determine that the biological mother (both genetic and gestational) has no rights, or that the biological father to whom the mother was married and living with at the time has no rights. (Or has rights but those rights don't control anything). The child will be owned by the state more than being a family member.
All because judges and lawmakers are determined to give ever more over to the wackos of the "whatever I want, all the time" relativistic left for anything they decide to ask for. College admission even though you can't write a sentence? Sure. College paid for so you can spend 4 years drinking? Sure. Diploma for "women's studies" in which the only thing you learn is how to bash men and society as a whole? Sure. Money for doing nothing? Sure. Disability benefits for being a drug addict? Sure. Money for having children out of wedlock? Sure. Divorce for when you get bored? Sure.
Posted by Tony | February 13, 2013 10:27 PM
I don't know if he was objecting to the adoption by the lesbian partner or simply demanding that, inter alia, he be treated as a full parent.
Gerina's basis for his claim--his assumption (if the story is accurate) rather than an explicit commitment--seems incredibly weak for a judge to take seriously, particularly given Florida law. While the judge was at it, why didn't he just marry them all and include Caligula's horse as parent/husband #4?
Posted by Perseus | February 14, 2013 12:56 AM
Also, it would seem to imply that parental rights with respect to a child can be determined by private contract, which leads down the slippery slope of slavery. Which fits hand in glove with the lesbians' attitude that the child is a toy for them to play with. Didn't these women get a chance to play with dolls enough when they were kids?
Posted by Tony | February 14, 2013 5:25 AM
Here's a mildly interesting legal question: If the judge wanted to override Florida law and treat the biological father as a father rather than as a sperm donor, why make a ruling about including the lesbian partner's name on the birth certificate at all? It seems that he could have just ruled, as he did, that the biological father was to be treated as a parent for purposes of the birth certificate but was to have only visitation rights, not full parental rights, for purposes of child custody. He could have ruled that future adoption by the lesbian partner lay outside of the present inquiry, which was entirely concerned with a suit for paternity rights by the biological father. It seems that the judge could have said that any question of the child's being adopted by a person who was in no sense a biological parent would have to be considered separately by way of an application to adopt, a home study, and the other aspects of the usual process.
Actually, I have a pretty good guess why the judge didn't do that. He probably didn't do it because usually for a baby to be adopted by an otherwise unrelated person would still mean that the baby had two parents at most! But the judge wanted to make sure that the baby had three "parents," so he decided to take the whole adoption issue under consideration at the same time.
Posted by Lydia | February 14, 2013 8:47 AM
I would add: Next time an advocate of the allegedly conservative nature of common law starts telling me how incredibly carefully common law is bound to precedent and how cautious it is, therefore not really just "judge-made," I'm pointing him to this case. (I'm thinking of a discussion I once had quite some years ago with a friend who doesn't comment here.) The judge ignored statutory Florida law concerning sperm donors, functionally ignored Florida constitutional law concerning homosexual couples, and, obviously, ignored all previous custom in his ruling.
Posted by Lydia | February 14, 2013 9:03 AM
Thanks for the Miller update. Keep me posted if you run across new information.
Posted by Scott W. | February 14, 2013 10:04 AM
Lydia: "But let's not make any pretense about who the victim is, here. It's the little girl, whom they have named Emma."
Reminds me of this post that I just read today:
Dawn Stefanowicz explains her experience being raised by a gay parent
Posted by Truth Unites... and Divides | February 15, 2013 1:05 AM
TUAD, I recall from a FB friend that that particular link should have a "not family-friendly" warning on it, so without looking myself, I'm adding the warning here. I haven't read it. The warning I saw was strong enough that I decided I didn't need to see it.
Posted by Lydia | February 15, 2013 9:47 AM
Lydia: why do you lie about the motives of those you disagree with? Do you think lying is not forbidden?
Posted by Alex H | February 18, 2013 1:17 PM
Alex, if you're getting at something, I suggest you do it and cut out the holier-than-thou stuff. Pray tell, who here is lying about what?
Posted by MarcAnthony | February 18, 2013 1:59 PM
Alex H., I'm going to be brutal, here, because I don't have time to do anything but cut through the baloney:
If a pair of parents were sending their child out to be raped and filming it, and if they claimed, "We just want what's best for Judy," they would be transparently lying. If one wants to say something different, we do have a word for being so out of touch with reality that you think doing *manifestly horribly harmful* things to your children is the same thing as "wanting what's best" for them. That word is "insanity."
So if you like, you can hold that these three people who conceived this poor child in a disgustingly abnormal situation and chirpily set her up never to have a father are utterly insane. But I say rather that they are lying when they say they want what is what's best for her. I stand by that. At some level, I believe they know better. But they have their agenda and are using the child as a means to an end. That is despicable.
Posted by Lydia | February 18, 2013 3:20 PM