Turn Off Your Homophobia Electric Cattle Prods

A small defeat for Lesbianism: Mother gets the right to be a mother

Post lifted from Stop the ACLU

Howard Bashman reports:

“The Utah Supreme Court today affirmed the parental rights of Cheryl Barlow, the mother of a 5-year-old child, granting Barlow’s request to reverse a lower court decision that had granted parental standing to her former partner, a lesbian political activist.” So begins a press release that Alliance Defense Fund issued today.

Today’s ruling of the Supreme Court of Utah in Jones v. Barlow can be accessed here.
It’s ridiculous that we’re even discussing (at state supreme court level no less!) whether a parent has the right to direct the upbringing of her own child without interference and disruption from a legal stranger. What we have in this case is a mother doing what she thinks is in the best interest of her own little girl. On the other side, we have a hardcore political activist creating chaos into the lives of that little girl and her mother, not in the best interest of the child, but seemingly in order to advance a radical political agenda. Of course, openly using children as political props is not uncommon among some.

The court savaged the idea that the homosexual extremists and lower court were attempting to advance that non-parents have veto power over true parents.

This temporary status is reinforced by the fact that the surrogate parent may arbitrarily cast the relationship aside at any time and thus terminate all parent-like obligations and rights. 67A C.J.S. Parent and Child 348 (2002); Taylor v. Taylor, 364 P.2d 444, 445 (Wash. 1961). It would be a perverse doctrine of law that left a legal parent unable to enforce support obligations against a surrogate parent's will because of the temporary status of the in loco parentis relationship but allowed a surrogate parent to extend her parent-like rights against the legal parent's objections for as long as she saw fit. Under such a distorted legal regime, the parent like rights and responsibilities are permanent and abiding for as long as the surrogate parent wants them to be, yet transitory and fleeting when the legal parent seeks to enforce a parental obligation against the surrogate parent. Such an inequitable result, which would prioritize the rights of the surrogate parent over the needs of the child, demonstrates that the in loco parentis doctrine does not contemplate a perpetual grant of rights and is, in fact, ill-suited to convey such rights.

One of the arguments put forth in cases like this is that the non-parent “dressed the child, wiped his nose and took him to the zoo,” etc. This is for emotional impact only and has no legal meaning. By that argument, any day care worker, especially these days when many women are leaving their 12-week old babies in day care from 8-5 every day, to make parental claims.

The court did the right thing by restoring calm in the life of a little girl and common sense about the role and the rights of parents.