Same-Sex Couples Win More Than Visitation Rights in Custody Battles

Tiffany Owens | WORLD News Service | Updated: Mar 04, 2013

Same-Sex Couples Win More Than Visitation Rights in Custody Battles

(WNS) -- In February, the Kansas Supreme Court gave partial custody of two children to a woman who isn’t their biological mother.

It’s one of many custody battles in which courts have ruled in favor of the “right” of same-sex couples to have children, instead of the right for children to have both a mother and father. Although advocates for traditional marriage have focused attention on next month’s U.S. Supreme Court cases involving same-sex “marriage,” the often unpublicized family court rulings have given such unions de facto legal recognition.

As part of their long-term same-sex relationship, Kelly Goudschaal and Marci Frazier had two children via artificial insemination. They signed a co-parenting contract, but that agreement came under fire once the couple separated.

Frazier appealed in court for parenting rights, but Goudschaal opposed the motion, arguing that Frazier was an “unrelated third party.” Ultimately, the court ruled against Goudschaal and awarded both women parenting rights, although Frazier had no biological ties to the children.

Custody cases involving same-sex couples are clogging courts all over the nation, pitting the desires of same-sex couples against true well-being of the children. Earlier this month, a Florida judge awarded a sperm donor parenting rights, essentially giving a 3-year-old girl three parents: one biological father, one biological mother, and one adoptive mother.

John Stenberger, president of Florida Family Council pointed out a troubling inconsistency. Usually, in heterosexual situations involving family matters, the ruling criteria is always whatever is best for the children. Not here.  

“Whenever you have homosexuals or anyone with an aberrant sexual preference, the desire of the adult is always placed over what’s best for the child,” he said. “This is a Pandora’s box of problems.”

Ironically, the judge in the Goudschaal and Frazier case claimed to award dual-parenting because it was in the child’s best interest.

“Severing an attachment relationship formed under that contract would … risk emotional and psychological harm,” the judge wrote.

The problem with this type of ruling is that it equates same-sex “marriage” and child-rearing to heterosexual marriage and child-rearing. Robert Oscar Lopez pointed out the philosophical problem with that equivocation in an op-ed in the American Thinker.

“Children raised by the parents who conceived them enter life as free human beings, endowed with a paternal and maternal lineage,” he wrote. “Children raised by same-sex couples enter life as property acquired through money. … Is anyone interested in defending children's rights to a father and a mother?”

c. 2013 WORLD News Service. Used with permission.

Publication date: March 4, 2013



Same-Sex Couples Win More Than Visitation Rights in Custody Battles