This month iMAPP (Institute for Marriage and Public Policy)  in conjunction with the Marriage Law Foundation, is announcing a new monthly e-publication, the “Marriage Law Digest.”

Edited by Bill Duncan, the Marriage Law Digest aims to provide readable summaries of key legal opinions affecting marriage and family life in the U.S., with links to the opinions themselves where possible.

Each month, the Marriage Law Digest will be available (free) online at www.marriagedebate.com. You can download this month’s edition here. If you don’t care to receive an e-mail notice when iMAPP’s Marriage Law Digest is published each month, please reply to joshua@imapp.org and indicate “unsubscribe” in the subject line.

But I think and hope you’ll find it as useful as I do each month.

Best,

Maggie Gallagher
Institute for Marriage and Public Policy (iMAPP)

The following is excerpted from a column by Matt Barber, “You’re Not My Mommy!” appearing in today’s WorldNetDaily: 

Jesus said, “But from the beginning of the creation, God ‘made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’; so then they are no longer two, but one flesh” (Mark 10: 6-8, NKJV).

Virginia resident Lisa Miller – now a born-again Christian – and her beautiful 5-year-old daughter, Isabella, find themselves immersed in a nightmarish custody battle. But this battle is unlike most others. The person trying to take Isabella away from her mother is entirely unrelated to the little girl and is essentially a total stranger. She’s lesbian Janet Jenkins, a woman with whom Lisa at one time had been homosexually involved.

By her own account, emotional problems brought on by a series of events – including abandonment by her father, abuse by her mentally ill mother and a decade-long struggle with alcoholism now overcome – eventually led Lisa Miller into the lesbian lifestyle. In 1999, Lisa began a homosexual relationship with Jenkins after coming out of a legitimate marriage that ended in divorce.

In 2000, soon after Vermont became the first state to legalize homosexual “civil unions,” Miller and Jenkins made a weekend trek from Virginia to Vermont to enter into such a “union.” They then headed back to Virginia where they lived together.

In 2001, Lisa was artificially inseminated after the two decided to raise a child in an unnatural, deliberately fatherless home environment as self-deluded “wife” and “wife” – mother and “mother.”

In August of 2002, Miller and little Isabella, now just a few months old, moved to Vermont with Jenkins. However, things were unstable, and according to Lisa Miller, Jenkins was physically and emotionally abusive. “It was a troubled relationship from the beginning,” Lisa told World Magazine in a recent interview. “The relationship did not improve, as Jenkins – working as a nightshift security guard – grew increasingly bitter and controlling,” reported World.

About a year later, when Isabella was less than a year and a half old, Lisa ended her lesbian relationship, took her daughter back home to Virginia and filed for dissolution of her homosexual “civil union” back in Vermont.

And that’s when the nightmare really began.

Although Jenkins had no parental connection to Isabella (she was neither an adoptive parent, nor biologically related) she filed papers in Vermont in 2003 to try to take Isabella from her mother. Even though the child was conceived, born and living in Virginia, the Vermont court nonetheless held that it had jurisdiction. The legal battle has continued since that time, and incredibly, the court recently ruled that Jenkins possessed parental rights over Lisa’s daughter. It granted Jenkins regular and very liberal visitation. Isabella is now required to make the several hundred mile roundtrip journey from Virginia to Vermont every other week to visit a total stranger (Jenkins) who, according to reports, outrageously forces the confused and traumatized little girl to call her “momma.”

Click HERE to read the rest of Barber’s column on WorldNetDaily

The following is reprinted with permission from the Howard Center’s “Family in America” newsletter (“New Research,” December 2006; emphasis added). The Howard Center is a wonderful organization, based in Rockford, Illinois, that is home to esteemed family scholar Allan Carlson — who founded the World Congress of Families, an annual event designed to build worldwide, intellectual support for the “natural family.” This year’s Congress convenes Friday in Warsaw, Poland; check out its website to read about the battle between old-line, anti-family European Unions forces and Eastern European nations like Poland that are fighting to preserve marriage and a “culture of life” (which does NOT include teaching homosexuality as normal to children). 

We encourage you to sign up for Howard Center’s e-publication and request a sample printed copy of the “Family in America” newsletter, which is loaded with important, scholarly research on family issues. (You can call Howard Center at 815-964-5819 or e-mail info@profam.org.)

Common sense dictates that unnatural homosexual unions are more volatile than traditional marriages, and the research backs that up. Here are the Demography study’s two key findings on “gay” unions in Norway and Sweden:

1. Few homosexuals choose to “marry” or register their union with the government;
2. Homosexual unions end in divorce much more often than heterosexual marriages.

Homosexual Unions: Rare and Fragile 

Progressive activists in the United States have argued strenuously in recent years that giving homosexuals the legal right to marry will improve life for homosexual couples and will consequently benefit society as a whole.  A new study of same-sex marriage in Scandinavia, however, casts serious doubt on such assertions.  For, as it turns out, relatively few homosexual couples avail themselves of this revolutionary right. And a surprisingly high percentage of those who do so end up in divorce court.

To analyze the demographics of homosexual [“marriages,”] a team of German and Norwegian scholars recently examined data collected in Norway and Sweden since these bellwether countries discarded centuries of legal tradition by authorizing homosexual unions (in 1993 in Norway and in 1995 in Sweden).  Both countries have thus now enacted laws granting homosexuals “the legal right to registered partnerships, a civil status that [the researchers believe], in practice does not deviate much from the concept of marriage.”  The legal equivalence of homosexual unions to heterosexual marriage indeed largely explains why the researchers use “the terms registered partnerships and same-sex marriage interchangeably.”   Similarly, the researchers “use the term divorce to refer to [homosexual] partnership dissolution because the divorce procedures of the marriage act [in both countries] apply to registered [homosexual] [“marriages”] as well.”

As the German and Norwegian scholars survey the available data for homosexual unions, they cannot avoid one obvious reality: “the incidence of same-sex [‘marriage’] in Norway and Sweden is not particularly impressive.”  Between 1993 and 2001, while Norway recorded 196,000 heterosexual marriages, the country witnessed the legal registration of only 1,293 homosexual partnerships.  Similarly, while Sweden recorded 280,000 heterosexual marriages between 1995-2002, the country saw the formation of only 1,526 registered homosexual partnerships.  The researchers accordingly calculate “a ratio of around 7 same-sex [‘marriages’] to every 1,000 new opposite-sex marriages” in Norway and a comparable “ratio of 5 new partnerships to every 1,000 new opposite-sex marriages” in Sweden.  The researchers remark that the numbers of same-sex [“marriages”] have run “considerably lower” than might have been expected by those relying on recent surveys of sexual behavior.  These surveys have indicated that “well over 1%” of women and between 1 and 3% of men have had a same-sex partner during the last year, with between 4 and 9% of men and approximately 4% of women reporting that they have had a same-sex partner at some time during their lives.  (The authors of the new study are too well informed to rehash the now discredited absurdity—promulgated by Alfred Kinsey—that fully ten percent of the adult male population is homosexual.) [Note: see Judith Reisman’s website for more good information on Kinsey and his fraudulent research.–Peter L.]

The data for same-sex unions in Norway and Sweden indicate, however, not only that such unions are relatively rare, but also that they are remarkably fragile, ending in divorce significantly more often than do the heterosexual marriages of peers.  The statistics indeed reveal “that the divorce risk for partnerships of men is 50% higher than the corresponding risk for heterosexual marriages and that the divorce risk for partnerships of women is about double (2.67) that for men (1.50).”  

UPDATE — Also see Newsday story published Feb 25, 2007.

Excerpted from Millions At Stake In Gay Adult Adoption Case, published Jan 15, 2007, by the pro-homosexuality 365Gay:

…In 1991 Olive F. Watson used [a Maine adult adoption] law to adopt her partner of 14 years, Patricia A. Spado. Even though the couple lived in Connecticut Watson owned a summer home in Maine.

Watson was the daughter of former IBM executive Thomas J. Watson Jr., who was the CEO of the company from 1956 to 1971…

When Watson adopted Spado there were no same-sex partnership agreements in the country and Watson believed it would provide Spado with security if anything happened to her.

But a year later the couple broke up.

When Thomas Watson’s widow died in 2004 his fortune went into a trust and her 18 grandchildren became eligible to receive income from two trusts until they turned 35, at which time they would receive the principal outright.

Several months later a lawyer representing Spado notified the trust that there was a 19th grandchild, Spado, and that she also was entitled to a share of the trust.

Continue reading at 365Gay…

Excerpted from Lesbian Couple Married in Massachusetts Seeks Divorce in Rhode Island, by Josh Montez, published Dec 11, 2006, by Family News in Focus:

Since RI doesn’t recognize gay marriages, gay divorce seems pointless. Could it be the couple wants another way to legitimize same-sex unions?

The divorce-seeking lesbian couple is working their way through the Rhode Island court system. A family court refused the case, referring it on to the State Supreme Court. Kris Mineau with the Massachusetts Family Institute believes this is a ploy to get the legal system to recognize gay marriage, through divorce.

“Isn’t that bizarre? They’ll seize at any opportunity, whereas in New Jersey and Maryland, they are seeking to marry, and suing through the courts. Here they’re seeking to divorce and suing through the courts.”

Attorneys for the gay couple say they aren’t asking Rhode Island to recognize same-sex marriage, just same-sex divorce. But Peter LaBarbera with Americans for Truth doesn’t buy that argument.

“I think if you recognize same-sex divorce, you’re recognizing same-sex marriage. It’s amazing how political the activists are. The problem here is we’re dealing with a very political movement and Americans on the side of decency and truth just aren’t as political as the gay activists.”

LaBarbera says this is more than a gay couple trying to make headlines; it’s an attempt to change the law.

“The modus operandi of the homosexual activists is to use anything possible, even divorce, to win approval of their lifestyle. That’s what the main agenda is. They are desperate for approval of their lifestyle and even if it means recognizing gay divorce as opposed to gay marriage, they’ll do that.”

The Rhode Island Supreme Court has yet to decide if it will take the case.