put the kid up for adoption...
Posted on 05/22/2009 9:05:47 AM PDT by Maelstorm
Lakeland, FL – Yesterday, Florida’s Second District Court of Appeals issued a ruling that gives parental rights to Lara Embry, a lesbian who adopted a child in Washington with her former partner, Kimberly Ryan. Ryan, the biological mother of the nine-year-old child, has left the homosexual lifestyle and is engaged to be married to a man. Liberty Counsel now represents Ryan in the case of Embry v. Ryan and plans to file an appeal at the Florida Supreme Court.
Embry and Ryan were formerly residents of the state of Washington, where they registered as domestic partners with the city of Seattle. Ryan conceived via artificial insemination and gave birth to her daughter in 2000. Embry was listed as the child’s second parent. Embry and Ryan moved to Florida in 2002 and dissolved their relationship in 2004. Embry and Ryan informally engaged in a rotating custody and visitation arrangement for approximately two years.
In October 2007 Ryan notified Embry that she was concerned about her daughter’s well-being and would no longer be participating in a rotating custody and visitation arrangement. Embry sought to obtain parental rights over Ryan’s biological child by filing in Florida a Petition for Declaratory Relief and a Petition to Determine Parental Responsibility, Contact and Support and Other Relief.
The trial court determined that neither the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the United States Constitution nor Florida precedent required that Florida courts grant parental rights to a former same-sex partner, in violation of Florida law, on the basis that a Washington court had issued an adoption decree listing Embry as the second parent of Ryan’s daughter. The Court of Appeals has now reversed that ruling. The Florida Supreme Court will now be asked to review the case and reverse the ruling.
The Florida law that bans homosexuals from adopting is backed up by sound reasons to prefer that children be permanently adopted by homes that will provide the opportunity for a mom and a dad. Homosexual adoption, by its very nature, deprives children of ever having the opportunity of being reared by both a mother and a father. A homosexual home automatically excludes one gender, either the mom or the dad. Most states ban homosexual adoption through legislation, regulation, or court precedent. Only a handful of states actually permit homosexual adoption.
Mathew D. Staver, Founder of Liberty Counsel and Dean of Liberty University School of Law, commented: “Children need moms and dads. Placing children in same-sex households deprives children of having both a mom and a dad. The people of Florida reaffirmed the importance of dual-gender families by amending the state constitution to protect the traditional definition of marriage. The insanity of this court ruling creates a bizarre triangle, with the child caught between two ‘moms’ and one dad.”
Yes we are. This is why it must be stopped. It is like a disease and we all end up paying for it.
Embry...Embry....Embyr...Ahhh!
EMBRYO!!!
I get it now....
I’m only 32 but I can remember a time when the courts would have said, “But your a lesbian, why would you think we’d give you this child?” Our society is just shot. It’s pathetic that this case would even make it to trial. I don’t see why we think God should bless America.
what best serves the child interest? the issue that needs to be considered is whether there is some sort of bond the child has to this other person, the rupture of which might cause emotional harm to the child..........or whether the child’s best’s interest would to protect her from this other adult.........you have to put best interests of the child first, adults be damned..they are the ones that created this mess
The last part of your post is hard to reconcile for some, but it is unfortunately true.
Really - why should God bless America? We act live and behave as though we despise Him. While there may still be many good people in America, collectively, a a whole we're devolving (or have devolved) into something frighteningly perditious.
Arriving to the point where homosexuals can legally steal a child from her natural mother (who would have a father figure in the house) is just a small drop in the large wicked bucket.
How is this different than the following scenario:
1. Woman has child out of wedlock.
2. Woman gets married to man.
3. Man adopts child.
4. Woman divorces man.
5. Woman remarries (a new man.)
6. Woman say “I don’t want first husband to see the child because I’ve left him, moved on, and started a new life by with another husband.”
7. First husband fights for rights to see child he adopted.
This is, unfortunatly, not that uncommon a scenario in America today. The core problem in the story is less about sexual orientation, and more about the fact that we have a society that doesn’t support (an often works against) stable, long term marriages.
How often does a non-paternal adult get custody of a child in a divorce when both birth parents are still alive?
Adoptions were originally set up so that there was a kind of "social invisibility" of the adoption to anyone other than the parents. In other words, efforts were made to match parents and children so that the children would appear to society to be the "natural issue" of their adoptive parents, even if they weren't born of them. That's why, for many years, white couples could only adopt white babies and black couples could only adopt black babies. So that no one but the adoptive parents knew that the children were adopted, unless they chose to tell the child when the child was ready to hear it.
But with homosexuals, the "natural issue" of two same sex parents is "NO ISSUE". A man & a man can't produce their own natural children, and a woman & a woman can't produce their own natural children. So that in cases like these, it's obvious to everyone from day one that the child is adopted or produced via insemination. The kid has to know that too early, before he or she may be ready to hear it. Further, it gets really complicated in the courts when the kid is now made into a political football and not only do his/her friends know it, the world knows it and expects him or her to have opinions about it.
If we think heterosexual divorces are ugly, just wait till the courts start dealing with large numbers of homosexual couples. Right now, it's a handful, with one & two cases like this. It's likely to get far worse.
And before we start going on about how the lesbian should lose custody, we also have to take into account that she is still one of the only two parents that this child has ever known. There is a bond there whether we like it or not.
If Ryan would have been artificially inseminated while living with a man and now married someone else... the first guy would be history as far as visitation is concerned. He might be forced to pay child support for 21 years, no matter what... but I really believe that the courts would give the kid to the birth mother and drop the non biological father in a heartbeat.
Putting the weird triangle relationship aside, where does the biological father fit in? I bet this will be the big question in the child’s early adult life. Was the father a sperm bank doner? Was it a one night stand? Will the child know about genetic risks. The biological mother is the one that created this mess because of selfish desires.
It is as it should be. The courts are creating very messy custody battles by not being clear on somethings and not just where lesbians are concerned.
Come on give it up. Children have emotional ties to many different people throughout their lives. I had a best friend who moved away and it caused me emotional distress. We are creating a culture of idiots who can’t let go. I will always support the rights and freedoms of a biological parent who has not been found unfit to control the destiny of her and her children. The courts are causing undue harm in these cases by trying to split the difference. These type of adoptions should never be legal in the first place they are a mockery of what a family should be.
Liberty Counsel just doesn’t lose cases. They will prevail on appeal to the FL SC or the USSC.
I think the real problem here is that Florida, which for a number of years now has had a Republican controlled legislature and a GOP governor, has still put liberals in top judicial positions throughout the state.
Knowing the Florida Supreme Court....Ryan and Liberty Counsel have a decided disadvantage....the Florida Supreme Court is very left...and that has not changed with Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist in the Governor’s mansion. Never forget Gore v Bush 2000 fiasco...the court pretty much is still the same make-up
This is nothing new. During the Terri Schiavo case, few people were reporting (and willing to accept) that many of the people who were working against...and ruling against...the Schindler family were Republicans....the judge who made the final decision to kill Terri....the GOP state legislators who pushed legislation that made it easier to kill Terri...were Republicans.
Florida may be a state dominated by the GOP....but they surely are not conservative. This is a major problem...and why you see Florida continually moving left
We have the same problem here in VA. We have too many weak conservatives in localities. Usually it is the big spending kind not the socially liberal kind.
put the kid up for adoption...
The ‘birth father’ was a sperm donor, so no dice there... however, the other birth parent is still alive and married to a person of the opposite sex, which means that there will hopefully be a somewhat stable environment for the child.
Also, this isn’t about ‘custody’, this is about ‘parental rights’ which include custodial rights, but also visitation rights, rights to act as the child’s legal parent/guardian figure, and the ability to claim them on your taxes among other things.
And, it happens all the time in this country - as someone else posted, scenarios like this are quite common with a mother and child where the mother marries a man, husband adopts the child and gets the same rights as a biological father would have, then the mother leaves her husband for another man and a similar battle, but with a man vs. a married couple rather than a woman vs. a married couple, ensues.
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