However, if anyone with legal knowledge gets this far down, I would like to know how the father could have legal standing to initiate the lawsuit if the mother has "full custody." If she has full custody, doesn't that mean that he has no right to act on the child's behalf in a court of law?
As for the rest, I think it takes a pretty disturbed mind to gang up on on the mother with this evidence before us of the father's foul manipulative use of his 8 year-old daughter to further his ideological goals. He has made her into a pawn in what is most definitely an attack on the religion in which she is being reared - that's one step from an abuser's state of mind: "The kid is a thing, that I can use as I see fit."
About the mother, we know only (a) that eight years or so ago she had sex outside marriage and got pregnant; (b) she is now an active church member and is bringing up her daughter in the Christian faith; (c) the way in which her daughter was used for anti-Christian purposes grieved her enough that she took the step of making a public statement, even though she surely knew that this would put the fact that she is an unmarried mother in newspapers all across the country and expose her to the mean-spiritedness of the self-righteous everywhere.
With that knowledge base, I would think that rushing to assume that she's a slut who has no business teaching in a decent Sunday school would risk bearing false witness against my neighbor a little too closely to be comfortable.