When Lisa and John got married, it turned out that John was infertile. He couldn't father a baby. So, out of love the couple looked for another option. Through artificial insemination the happy couple was able to conceive a child - Isabella.
But the marriage - like so many - didn't last. Lisa wasn't happy with John, and by the time Isabella was 17 months old Lisa took Isabella and walked out. She moved from Vermont to Virginia, legally ended the marriage, and filed for child support from John.
But Vermont ruled that in addition to child support, John was also granted visitation rights for Isabella.
This really didn't sit well with Lisa - she didn't want John to have visitation rights. But she didn't have the means to fight it either. So she did something unusual. Lisa joined a religious cult, and asked them to protect her. In exchange for legal representation, Lisa would give the cult the right to exploit her however they saw fit.
This religious group worked very hard to keep John away from Isabella, and was successful for almost 5 years. But the law has finally caught up with Lisa - and she's facing possible federal charges over the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act. If convicted, John could gain sole custody of Isabella, of the daughter that isn't biologically his, but is his by love. The daughter that this evil cult worked so hard to keep separate from John.
If I ended the story right there - and you knew nothing more - how would you feel about it? Would your sympathies lie with John, or with his ex-wife Lisa?
After all, it's not as if Isabella is John's biological daughter. He doesn't have any right to her, does he? Or maybe you think that because John and Lisa were married that John should automatically have rights as a father?
But that's not the real story - it didn't happen quite that way.
There never was a "John". The father's name is Janet. Janet Jenkins is Isabella's second mother, and Janet and Lisa were joined by a legal civil union in the state of Vermont.
Most of the rest of the story is true. When Lisa couldn't get child support while denying visitation to Janet, she turned to a particularly nasty form of religion for help. In exchange for legal representation from Liberty Counsel, Lisa has been acting as a poster-child for the Christian Ex-Gay movement. She tells people that Christianity cured her of being homosexual.It is an arrangement of convenience, a type of prostitution.
I hope Isabella is healthy and thriving. I wish her nothing but the best. And some day I hope she gets at least regular visits with her second mother.
4 comments:
Take away the cult part and they are going through all the same issues as any other married/divorced couple.
Yes, except that the Church is calling Janet a "legal stranger".
It's not bad enough that Lisa is being held up as a "cured homosexual" for the ex-gay movement - what is bad is that the church is playing dirty tricks to keep Isabella away from Janet.
If the same exact thing were happening in a heterosexual marriage, you could bet that religious leaders would claim that "Isabella is John's child through the sanctity of marriage."
What the church says and what the laws says are different things, at least in this case.
I had a friend who went through something similar. The loser father wanted custody of their child and went to the Promise Keepers who had fraking lawyers in the group to help "men" with such things. He still lost (again) but what a costly and stressful mess it was.
"What the church says and what the laws says are different things, at least in this case."
Ah, and thus begins the great debate between separation of church and state. Does the courts step in and make things (at least what seems to me) right? Or do the courts allow the cult to continue their practice and destroy this relationship between a parent and child?
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