ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund have filed a friend-of-the-court brief with Maryland’s highest court on behalf of the Family Research Council to defend a mother’s parenting rights against a non-parent’s claim to a little girl.
“Unless there’s proven abuse or neglect, the wishes of a child’s legal parent should always take precedence over anyone else,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Chris Stovall. “The mom in this case is a fit parent, and the lower court got it wrong when they granted visitation over her objections to someone who is not legally or biologically related to the child.”
The non-parent seeking visitation to an eight-year-old girl is a woman referred to in the case as “Margaret K.,” who was formerly in a lesbian relationship with “Janice M.” Janice had adopted the little girl from India when the child was a year old and was the child’s only adoptive parent. When Margaret and Janice ended their relationship, Margaret sued, claiming that a court should grant her de facto parent status and allow her to have regular visitation with Janice’s daughter.
A trial court reaffirmed Janice’s custody of the child but also granted Margaret visitation by naming her a de facto parent. In that ruling, the trial court stated that when outside parties demanding visitation meet the de facto parent test, “there is then no presumption in favor of the biological parent, or here, the adoptive parent.” The court also stated, “That’s not to say that [Janice M.] is not fit. I think both of these people…would be fit to be custodians” of the little girl.
“The question here is whether the legal parent is fit to raise her child--a fact which the trial court found and the appellate court affirmed--not how many other people out there might also be ‘fit’ and can demand access to this little girl,” said Stovall. “The legal parent of the child has a fundamental right to raise her daughter and make decisions about whom her daughter sees and when.”
“The ‘psychological parenting’ concept threatens not just people involved in former lesbian relationships, but all biological and adoptive parents. Under this constitutionally unsound doctrine, once a parent involves a third party in her child’s life for a significant period of time, she can inadvertently lose the right to decide later that the association is no longer in the child’s best interests,” Stovall explained.
A copy of the friend-of-the-court brief filed Wednesday in the Maryland Court of Appeals in the case
Janice M. v. Margaret K. can be read at
www.telladf.org/UserDocs/JaniceMAmicus.pdf.
ADF is a legal alliance defending the right to hear and speak the Truth through strategy, training, funding, and litigation.
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