Posted on 01/01/2010 3:59:14 PM PST by Steelfish
Woman Defies Order To Give Child To Ex-Partner Parental abduction charges possible after she and daughter vanish
Lisa Miller [Pic in URL] and her 7-year-old daughter are missing after failing to show up at the home of Miller's ex-partner as part of a court-ordered custody agreement. A woman at the center of a complex dispute with her former lesbian partner defied a court order to give up custody of her 7-year-old daughter Friday, and police said she could face parental abduction charges.
A Vermont judge had ordered Lisa Miller to turn over daughter Isabella to Janet Jenkins at 1 p.m. Friday at the Falls Church, Va., home of Jenkins' parents. Miller did not show up with the girl, according to Fairfax County, Va., police and Jenkins' Vermont-based attorney.
"She's very disappointed, obviously," said Sarah Star, Jenkins' lawyer. "She's very concerned about Isabella and asks that if anybody sees Isabella, that they please contact the authorities."
The Jenkins family called police after Miller failed to show, and a detective from the department's child exploitation unit is investigating, said Officer Tawny Wright, a Fairfax County police spokeswoman.
If police believe a crime has been committed, they will obtain a criminal warrant charging Miller with parental abduction, and at that point officers would begin searching aggressively for the child, Wright said. For the time being, she said, the case remains a civil matter.
Miller and Jenkins were joined in a Vermont civil union in 2000. Isabella was born to Miller through artificial insemination in 2002. The couple broke up in 2003, and Miller moved to Virginia, renounced homosexuality and became an evangelical Christian.
When Vermont Family Court Judge William Cohen dissolved the couple's civil union, he awarded custody to Miller but granted liberal visitation rights to Jenkins.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
Since the child was born in a Civil Union rather than as a product of conception between a husband and wife the judge in this case is attempting to treat the child as a piece of chattle rather than as the child of its biological mother. In effect the court is attempting to enforce the provisions of a civil contract by treating the child as if she were nothing more than a piece of property to be divided at the dissolution of a business partnership.
If I recall correctly that kind of thing was abolished by the 13th amendment.
But then judges these days don’t seem to know that such a document even exists.
Vermont being among our most brain-dead states, it makes sense to believe their judges have no idea about the 13th amendment.
I see no hope for any appeal in this state, even though your comment is right on the money show an egregious error in law. And, even if they got the appeal, their judges are like-minded from the same cookie cutter.
The issue wouldn’t be law, it would be their determination to define “civil union” as a precise equivalent of “marriage” AND to force/underscore the idea that homosexuality is Vermont’s new family norm.
What a bunch of horse cr@pp. The biggest lie of the decade (that's right, Ø hadn't spoken yet this year.)
Isabella is a tool to these Al Gayda activists. And just like the radical muslim groups, would have no problem strapping a bomb onto their "children" to further their cause.
The VA courts ruled in Jenkins' (the ex- in VT)favor.
No. Liberal child molesting judges ruled in the perverts favor contrary to settled Commonwealth of Virginia law. All of those judges should be tarred and feathered, or hung (I'm not too picky)
“I have seen no real evidence that there was molestation.”
The child tried to kill herself, and was behaving erratically after the Vermont visitation.
IT’s a lot more complicated than that. The Virginia courts are not recognizing the civil union. They are recognizing the ruling of a civil child custody court. States recognize the child custody rulings of other states, otherwise you’d have divorced and never-married parents state-shopping to fight over the children.
Now, the civil union does “matter”, because it’s the Vermont civil union which conveyed the status of adoptive parent to the other woman. But the Virginia court did not base it’s ruling on the adoptive status — it simply affirmed that Virginia recognizes the legal rulings of child custody courts of other states.
I would think that Virginia could re-write it’s laws to prohibit our courts from recognizing the rulings of other states — but how would that law be written?
For example: Suppose a girl in Virginia gave her child up for adoption, and a married heterosexual couple adopted the child in Vermont. Then suppose that girl got married to the father, and together they changed their mind and fought the adoption in Virginia courts.
If Virginia had a law that said that adoptions by women who weren’t the biological mother could be invalidated by the biological mother, then this couple could invalidate the Vermont adoption, and get their child back. But that would make it impossible to run adoptions — people won’t adopt if they live in fear of having the children taken away.
How would you write the law so that the lebian adoptive mother could have her rights revoked, but not the non-lesbian adoptive mother?
Virginia has some strict rules. We don’t have civil unions or gay marriage, we don’t allow gay couples to adopt.
The mother and the “pervert” were a gay couple in a binding civil union in Vermont.
It was an arrangement agreed to by both parties — and it is dishonest to ignore the mother’s culpability.
And in case that doesn’t sink in, the biological mother told the other woman to adopt her child — a move that they learned was unnecessary because the vermont civil union law automatically confers adoptive rights.
So the mother was looking to bind her child ot the other woman, regardless of how she feels now. She had the child with the other woman, and even in her complaints about how the other woman took no interest, you can read that she WANTED to have the child with the other woman.
If the other person wasn’t a female, I doubt we’d have all these arguments here, even though the law would be identical on the matter.
If you read the history of the case, you would find that the judge has already imposed fines several times in this case, finding the woman in contempt. She has had assets seized, lost her car.
Putting her in jail is not the "next step", because if you do that, you have to put the child with the other woman anyway, so swapping custody WAS the next rational step. Under the arrangements being discussed, the visitation rights would have still existed for the mother, she simply would have lost the custody which she was using to defy the court order.
Secondly, all Western law is based on God and nature. You've taken love of "the law" (which is almost always a good thing) put it above God and nature, turning the very concept of law on its head. Hence, when your respective states create a law that compels you each must mate with giraffes, I expect you both to comply.
If you are arguing that no child should be adopted by a non-biological parent, that would at least be based on God's law and nature. But we regularly allow non-biological adults to adopt children. And we allow single adults to adopt children (I don't like it, but that's what we do, and I guess having a single parent is better than none at all).
We also allow single women to have children, and we allow men to keep their children if the mothers die, even if the men were originally adoptive parents.
So we don't like the woman's lifestyle. I agree. I would also argue that we shouldn't let an adulterous woman adopt a child, or a non-christian woman. But those are moral standards that we do not regularly enforce in our adoption procedings.
In this case, the mother of the child entered a legal arrangement with another woman, binding her child to that other woman. She is not smarter, wiser, but she and unfortunately her child will live with the consequences of her actions.
Remember that if the woman got her way, the child would still be forced to live in a fatherless house, because the mother is single. That isn't all that good for a child either -- and if the mother marries, the child will still be without her BIOLOGICAL FATHER, which we also know is bad for the child.
That was the choice of this woman -- to deprive her child of her biological father, and any father at all.
The birth mother has said many of those things in interviews. I don’t know if she has said those things in court, and the other woman has a different story on many of those points, and has said so in court. I would note that they probably have a record of when Jenkins showed up at the doctor for insemination, not that getting inseminated is something I would think is a “bonding event”.
The question is, was Jenkins in the delivery room? Lisa doesnt’ say she wasn’t, so I assume she was. Jenkins says that the two of them decided to have the child, and Lisa was chosen to have the child because she was younger and wanted to do it.
Again, the stories are divergent, Jenkins said she regularly visited with the child, Lisa says Jenkins never visited. Although at some point Lisa says Jenkins had the child for a time in Vermont. I don’t know how we would know the full truth, but I trust that the judge in the case has a much better idea of the truth than we do, since he took testimony under oath and probably has statements from friends, relatives, and the doctors offices.
Lisa lost interest in the relationship I think the same time she found her faith. She is certainly a poster child for how, for women at least, homosexuality is not genetic.
I wonder if a judge could sue people posting in blogs for libel and defamation, or if they are “public figures” and have to put up with people slandering them.
I didn’t realize, till I read further, that the child was born in VA.
homosexuality is not genetic
- - - - - -
No it isn’t. My father “came out” when I was about 4. By the time I was in HS, several of my friends father’s (and a couple of mothers) also came out.
This was when AIDS was just making headlines, and a few of us had parents who were HIV positive. At the time, there was a lot of question about how it was transmitted, how long “incubation” was and the like. There was also a lot of misinformation.
About the same time, people started saying homosexuality was genetic, that people were born that way. My friends and I (and several others) started a semi official support group on campus to deal with these issues and questions. “If my dad is gay, does that mean I could be too?”, “Could my dad have been HIV positive when I was born?”, “Can HIV be contracted by causal contact?”, “Do I need to be tested?”. These questions seem silly now, but they weren’t in the mid 1980’s.
Being able to talk about it did help. And there was no “forced” acceptance of our parent’s choices. Interestingly, a couple of years later the “support group” was banned from campus for being “intolerant”.
States doesn’t recognize other state custody orders all the time. I have a friend who had Florida ignore his custody order from Virginia and then when he got the kids from Florida, Virginia was still charging him child support and would not recognize the Florida order for a while. However, I see what you are saying, the Virginia Court didn’t have the right argument in front of it. What Miller should have done was transfer the custody to Virginia first and did what she needed to do. Most of the time, the location of the child is where you can file anytime. I don’t have a pacer account, so I haven’t seen the judgement that was handed down.
Part of the problem in this case is that it appears when they first “divorced”, there was no issue with child custody. The natural mother was granted full custody, and the other woman was given visitation, and while the two parties disagree about the frequency visitations actually took place, it appears they were both in agreement on the visitation arrangement, which they jointly entered in a Vermont court.
Note that the natural mother couldn’t do this in Virginia, since Virginia did not recognize the civil union. Since she had entered the civil union in Vermont, she had to divorce in Vermont, and when they did so, that entered a child custody agreement in Vermont, which both parents agreed to.
So when Lisa decided she didn’t want to allow Jenkins any more visitation rights, she was going to have to challenge an arrangement she had approved in Vermont, which is probably why things went as they did in Virginia.
I had hoped that Virginia law would trump Vermont’s. I still believe it COULD have done so. But having read reports about the cases and judgments, I have trouble finding anything wrong with either of the two court rulings.
Which is why I find it offensive that so many here are slandering the judges in the case by calling them “child molesters”.
She did comply with visitation until her daughter started coming back and having nightmares and telling stories of being forced to bath with the other woman. After that the Mother tried to have visitation supervised or stopped and lost on both counts. What was she supposed to do allow the abuse of her kid and keep turning her over?
Oh, wait.....that was a different judge........
Leni
There may not need to be new laws, at least not in those jurisdictions where the statutues allow a family court judge to hear cases while sitting "as a judge in equity."
As you may know, there's great variation among the jurisdictions as to whether, how and when judges may function under the rules of equity. Moreover, four U. S. states (MS, TN, DE & NJ) still have separate courts of equity -- the "chancery" courts.
So I guess the best advice to Miller would be:
Get thee to Mississippi!
And try to settle in a county where the local Chancellor has strong pro-family, anti-homosexual views!
Actions have consequences. She made a deal with the Devil and now she has to pay. Her only way out is to pay off the partner or pay someone to “negotiate” a settlement.
I had a friend who got into a messy divorce and his gold-bricking wife planned to take him for everything. They had an amicable settlement when she started getting visits from strangers who informed her of the facts of the case.
And here we run into the irrefutable facts of biology. A woman is not a man and cannot fulfill that role no matter what the law says.
Since VA does not recognize same sex "unions" there was no such union (since the mother and child live in VA.)
>> She made a deal with the Devil and now she has to pay <<
No, she’s not the one who REALLY will pay. Moreover, if she’s sincere in her newly found Christianity, I believe God will forgive her. In the meantime, it’s the child who truly will suffer, who really will pay the most — and for the longest time — due in the final analysis to unjust decisions by the judges involved.
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