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THis is a complex case, one that isn’t suited to the sound-bite treatment it is given in our forums.

Obviously, we know that the homosexual lifestyle is harmful, so the child would be best placed with her mother, and not forced to see the other woman and her lesbian partner.

However, society has not deemed that the homosexual lifestyle is harmful to the child, so no judge is going to deny access to the homosexual partner based on “interest of the child”, any more than they would cut off a man’s visitation rights if the man left his wife because he announced he was homosexual.

And of course, the other woman has no biological attachment to the child, while the mother in Virginia does. But they were in a legal civil partnership when they decided to have the child, and the other woman adopted the child. Suppose it was reversed, would we argue that the virginia mother could be denied access to the child she had adopted, simply because the other woman gave birth?

Well, of course, because we know that biological attachment is critically important (sometimes I get yelled at for saying that, by freepers who had to adopt children, but it’s just a fact of life, that is borne out when adopted children go out of their way to discover who their biological parents are). But again, the law does not give absolute deference to biological imperative, especially when legal adoption has taken place, as in this case.

So really, it comes down to this: The couple’s “divorce” from their civil union included giving the natural mother custody, with full visitation rights to the other woman.

But the natural mother, because she realised that her homosexuality was wrong, chose to disobey the legal order for visitation. And how could she not? She couldn’t get the court to change the visitation rules, since the court would never rule to ignore a legal adoption, or to find that homosexuality was something the child had to be protected from.

But the courts have their hands tied. The other mother has legal visitation rights, which the birth mother who has custody has “illegally” cut off. So the court is switching custody, on the promise of the Vt. woman that she will maintain the same visitation rules as were previously in force.

Which could mean that in the end, the child spends exactly the same amount of time with each mother now as she was supposed to before.

Of course, this is all a travesty, but it was caused by the birth mother when she entered into a homosexual union, and decided to have a child with the other woman.

Under the “biological imperative”, we would ignore the other woman, but then the sperm donor would have equal claim to the child, something that people who use sperm donors would be opposed to.

Virginia has strict rules — we don’t support civil unions, we don’t allow homosexual adoptions. But we do have to abide by the laws of other states when citizens freely enter into contracts. We certainly don’t want other states to abrogate custody orders from our courts.