Posted on 12/09/2017 9:15:48 AM PST by EdnaMode
The Mississippi Supreme Court heard arguments last week about whether a boy born to a lesbian couple should be legally considered the biological son of his mother's female partner.
Because of the nature of the child’s conception and the relationship of the adults in his life, the story is complicated.
The two women who were “married” chose to have a child that would be conceived in one of them via anonymous sperm donation.
The boy is now six years old. His mother’s “ex-spouse,” who helped raise the child from birth, sought to be recognized as a biological parent when the two women divorced.
“Kimberly Strickland Day, was impregnated through assisted reproduction technology whereby donor sperm was combined with her harvested egg and the embryo surgically implanted,” reports the Jackson, Mississippi Clarion Ledger. “The couple separated in 2013, and their divorce was finalized last year. A Mississippi court granted the first same-sex divorce in 2015.”
Christina ‘Chris’ Strickland, the ex-"spouse" with no biological ties to the child, wants to be listed as the legal parent of 6-year-old Zayden Strickland in order to share equal custody with Day, the biological parent.
The original lower court case revolved around Strickland’s request to not only be recognized as the boy’s parent, but to have his birth certificate altered to include her name as a “mother.”
After the child’s birth, neither Strickland nor Day took legal action to have the sperm donor's rights terminated. If those rights had been terminated, Strickland could have filed the paperwork to become the child’s adoptive parent. It seems that Strickland was satisfied during the tenure of the “marriage” to be viewed as a presumptive parent, with no actual legal parental rights secured.
The judge gave Day legal and physical custody of both children, while Strickland has only visitation rights.
Judge John Grant, who presided over that case, denied Christina Strickland’s request to be recognized as a parent of the child.
His ruling was unambiguous: “The court finds two women cannot conceive a child together.”
“The court doesn’t find its opinion to be a discriminatory statement, but a biological fact,” continued Judge Grant. “The natural father may never come into court. He may never be known and probably won’t be, but he is still a father; and that is a right that our Supreme Court has recognized for many, many years.”
Redefining parenthood
Strickland has now appealed Grant’s decision to the Mississippi Supreme Court.
“This case is not an equal protection case or a presumption of marriage case. It is an assisted reproduction case,” said Day's attorney, Prentiss Grant. “The main question here is simple: whether a couple, same-sex or opposite-sex, who conceives and has a child through assisted reproduction technology using donor sperm, donor egg, or a surrogate mother should be required to follow existing law and terminate the parental rights of the donor or surrogate. The answer is a resounding yes.”
Tyler O’Neil of PJ Media commented that a case such as this in an attempt by LGBT groups to redefine the “meaning of parenthood.”
“In attempting to change this law, LGBT groups are redefining the meaning of parenthood itself, rejecting a vision tied to the biological reality that children are conceived by a father's sperm and a mother's egg,” wrote O’Neil.
O’Neil asserts that the national LGBT rights group, Lambda Legal, which is providing legal counsel for Strickland, “attempted to hide this by reframing the argument.”
“The court ruled that Chris was not a legal parent to the child born during her marriage because the anonymous sperm donor's rights as a father supersede Chris' rights as his second parent,” O’Neil wrote.
“This statement captured the change in a nutshell: Lambda Legal wants Mississippi to strike down the gendered terms ‘mother’ and ‘father,’ replacing them with the idea of rights given to a ‘second parent,’” continued O’Neil. “This is a logical extension of removing the gender of two people in the same-sex marriage debate, but while many people are attracted to members of the same sex, no children are naturally conceived by a woman and a woman.”
LGBT groups want the state’s highest court to deny the validity of the lower court’s finding, that “two women cannot conceive a child together,” and that this is not “a discriminatory statement, but a biological fact.”
As Strickland, Day and their attorneys wait for the Mississippi Supreme Court’s Decision, the definition of parenthood hangs in the balance.
SCOTUS’s 2015 Obergefell decision made redefining parenthood possible
This Mississippi case is just one example of cases popping up on court dockets around the country, forcing jurists to plow new ground due to newly created hybrid legal personal relationships based on same-sex marriage and other newly-found gender identity “rights.”
In June, the United States Supreme Court ruled that “spouses” of the same gender should be allowed to appear on children’s birth certificates.
The court’s decision was predicated on the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges case that legalized same-sex “marriage” across the country.
Because same-sex “marriage” is now the law of the land, the court reasoned that states must “provide same-sex couples ‘the constellation of benefits that the States have linked to marriage.’” In particular, since the Obergefell ruling specifically identified birth and death certificates as two of those rights, states can no longer deny same-sex couples any rights related to birth certificates that are granted to opposite-sex couples.
Egg-zackly. They say they're champions of science until it runs afoul of their exasperating, unfounded dogmas.
That’s what Cat Cora did. Or Cathy Cora. She’s from Mississippi.
Once the judges decide that two lesbians can be biological parents of a boy, despite the fact that neither of them has a Y chromosome to actually confer male gender, I want them to consider the speed of light.
Space exploration would be really cool, except that we are forever imprisoned in this solar system by the unbreakable speed limit imposed by the speed of light. If the judges would just declare that the speed of light is not a legal limit and that humans can go as fast as they want, the universe would be open to us. Star Trek could be reality.
The answer here No a flat out “no” and is simple biology.
Female = egg
Male = Sperm
Thus: egg + sperm = life
Therefore: egg + egg = zero.
“These people are trying to create a problem that doesn’t exist. “
They are crazy people. The one thing crazy people can’t put up with is people who see a different reality than they see. They will force those others to see the same reality. This is how they make their own reality real. If they fail, then the fantasy world they are trying to live in breaks down. It would be like finding out instead of standing on rock you are standing on Jello and in danger of falling. When you fall it is the same as dying. So, you will work hard on convincing the world that you are standing on rock.
I was at a dinner party where a few gay guys were attending when their marriage bill was defeated in Florida. One of them went absolutely apeshit crazy. He threatened to go out instantly and commit violence against some people who were visibly on the other side of the issue. (Thank goodness they weren’t there.) The only way to deal with people like that is to get them out of your life. I never attended another party or even spoke to the other people I had met there.
Unfortunately, once the courts are involved we don’t have an option just to avoid these people. They are using the enforcement arm of society to make people bake their cakes and give them corroborating paperwork like marriage licenses. The scary thing is, they can’t declare victory and just be satisfied with a few wins. They must keep on until they have remade the world into the image they fantasize is real.
There are two children involved, an earlier adopted son and the invitro boy. The biological mom has married a man, as of 2013 when the two women separated and she & her husband are raising the boys. The other women was not on the adoption papers either so she has no legal standing and is suing to obtain visitation rights and part custody.
http://wjtv.com/2015/12/03/same-sex-court-battle-over-marriage-children/
That kid will be a mess!
Where’s king Solomon when you need him
Don't worry, this will all go out the window as soon as the parents need child support.
And if that happens, I'm all in favor of forcing the traitor to support his kid.
Oh what tangled webs we weave.
And it is the poor kid who will suffer. In more ways than one.
——I made the mistake of going to the site——
Wow...you aren’t kidding...
Both look like they will be in prison at same point...
Poor kid will be sending father’s day cards to a turkey baster.
Arkansas just approved the banning of “father” and “mother” on a child’s birth certificate. How screwed up can a nation be? This screwed up.
It seems to me that a simple DNA test of the child and both of the women would answer the question quite simply. The DNA of the child and the birth mother would be close, while that of the non-birth mother not be, with maybe a few random markers being similar due to general ethnicity factors. End of “biological” discussion. And, since she never signed on as an “adoptive” parent, it’s “too bad, so sad” for her!
The only complication I can see is if the “anonymous” sperm donor was a close relative (brother, father, like that) of the woman who didn’t bear the child. Such a happenstance would place the non-birth mother’s DNA closer, given the familial closeness.
We all know, of course, who will be the winners in this case: each of the women’s lawyers. Everyone else involved are clear losers, mentally and/or financially.
I'm only a teen, but I get it...
Actually, the court will get a chance to recognize truth or deny it. They won’t decide anything.
Seriously? They need a judge to figure this out??
I DO mean, technologies which substitute a laboratory or clinical procedure for sexual intercourse as the means to achieve the inception of new life.
This is reason #984376 why such technologies -- for instance, artificial insemination or IVF --- are wrong: for anyone, male or female, gay or straight.
Okay, this has gone past weird and straight to icky. And in Mississippi. I would have expected this headline about California or New York.
What's next, ruling that the Mississippi government owns all the gravity "natural resource" in the state, so the legislature can charge a usage fee for it?
-PJ
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