Comments on Irish Custody Battle Should Make CWfA Heads Explode

"I’m thinking this custody dispute would present a real brain teaser for the men at CWfA." WRONG!!! You have to have a brain for a brain teaser to work.

"Do you leave the baby—or toddler—with his “excellent” lesbian parents" according to CWfA there are no such things. Clearly their Satanic powers must have blinded the judges. Of course what would you expect from a nation of heathen Catholics?

This is just a small part but why in the world are people always evaluated for things like this by psychiatrists . They are MDs and don't have to know squat about counseling. All they do is give drug B for condition A. They should be asking psychologists or social workers.

@2: It was my understanding that a psychiatrist, while a medical doctor, ALSO has experience with counseling. I mean, wouldn't they have had to do counseling internships and whatnot as well? Have you actually met a psychiatrist that has done no counseling? Just curious.

I just realized that the obsessed freak who stalks you with the redundant Iraq war recriminations can be none other than Tim Burgess.

Um, didn't he donate his sperm? If I donate a pair of sneakers to salvation army and then see some bum on the street wearing them, I can't just decide I want them back. (And yes I realize that a kid is slightly different than a pair of shoes, but still.)

However it turns out, you can bet your left nut that the dumb Irish fuck is gonna get stuck paying child support.

Stories like either of these are why I'm totally avoiding anything but traditional gay adoption by both myself and my husband.

Not sure here, but the Vermont situation is kind of crazy. So what if a mother gets a child via sperm donation and has a series of three five-year relationships with other men and women. And those men and women treat the child as their own child. Do they all have custody rights, including the sperm donor? Great way to fuck up a kid.

If you were legaly permitted to but didn't bother to adopt the kid, and can't keep it together with your lesbian partner, not too much sympathy here. Yeah, so unfair, fathers don't have to adopt their biological children--well I'll chalk that up to nature as much as our legal rules.

Well, it looks like the lesbian couple didn't have the donor sign over his parental rights, or whatever the equivalent is in Ireland. Pretty stupid, but if there was a verbal agreement that he wasn't going to play a role in the kid's life, I'd argue that he has a moral responsibility to back the fuck off.

@8,

But they were essentially married when the now ex-lesbian had her kid. In hetero marriages, any child born within that marriage is legally the husband's child, even if he's not the biological father.

Becoming a born again Christian is generally the tell-tale sign that something traumatic and extremely destabilizing has occurred in your life in the recent past. If I were a family court judge and "recently born again" came into a plaintiff's defense, I'd exercise caution in handing over custody of a child to that person.

i agree that the kid deserves to have visits with his bio dad. if the testimonials of adult adoptees and others estranged from birth from bio parents is any indication, he will start wanting it long before he reaches maturity.

Sorry, Dan. If you're neither the biological parent nor have bothered to go to the trouble to adopt, you don't have jack shit rights. Whether you're straight or gay, now or in the past. This is why adoption matters.

Dan, "DeFacto" sounds insulting because of the way people use it in regular conversation. Don't be offended. To a lawyer, like the judge who wrote that, it just means "in fact." He chose that word to distinguish it from "DeJure" which means "in law" or more appropriately "by law."

What he was saying was that despite the fact that the family might not be a family in law, it was one in fact. Using that word was just a way of implicitly comparing the factual situation with the legal situation.