April 02, 2007

Who cares about legal or human rights? It's about what's "compassionate"...

The myth of idyllic homosexual families with is being deflated bit by bit with each similar story of bitter post-love battle that makes it into the media. Recently I wrote about one such case, where the bioloigical mom was fighting against her ex-lesbian partner (biologically unrelated to the child) regarding visitation rights. Now another similar case has surfaced.

Sara Wheeler is a lesbian woman who in 2000 was in a cohabiting relationship with Melody Wheeler. At that time, Sara conceived her own son through artificial insemination with donor sperm. Two years later, Melody legally adopted the boy with Sara's consent.

Some years later, Sara and Melody split up, and Sara filed to have Melody's adoption invalidated.

Based on the law and legal reasoning alone, the right decision would indeed be to invalidate the adoption, since it appears to have failed the legal criteria from the very start. The reasons for this were clearly stated by Justice Carley of the GA Supreme COurt on February 26 ,2007, in a dissent in which he criticized the 4-3 decision of that court to refuse to hear Sara's case (his dissent was joined by two other justices on the Court). Read his dissent here.

However, when faced with the powerful gay lobby, who cares about the language and letter of the law? This is about political correctness. One openly gay state rep thus said of Carley's dissent that it "sounded very anti-gay and very anti-gay-family". It doesn't matter that Carley is right. What matters is that he shouldn't even try to be right. He should just give in, because to enforce the law is to be mean to gay parents. Indeed, that seems to have been the judgement of the majority of the GA Supreme Court.

And there we are. Anyone who wants to be a parent can be a parent, even to children that have no biological connection to them, and regardless of the law or the basic rights of the biological parents or children.

By the way, I am not "blaming" Melody for this situation. Sara and Melody are both equally to blame for this tangled mess. This mess comes directly from the mentality that parenting and biology aren't connected - and this is something they both believed. They decided to use donor sperm, as if the biological father meant nothing to their child. Since they so easily erased one biological parent from their child's life, then why should the other biological parent get any special treatment? Sara cooked her own soup in this case.

2 comments:

MomEtc. said...

"The myth of idyllic homosexual families".....

UNTRUE. I know PLENTY of very happy gay families.

Phillip Wheeler said...

I am Sara's brother and the whole entire reason she filed to have the adoption overturned is because Melody wanted more than just visitation and to be part of the child's life...she wanted too and tried too take the child completely away from Sara! Subsequently after Sara had her son Melody wanted to have a baby and I donated my sperm so that Melody could have a child of her own and she did. When she and Sara broke up she would not let me see or have anything to do with my child. She tried everything in her power to keep me from being a parent to my biological child who knew me as his father. She wanted rights to a child she was not related to but in turn tried to keep me from having rights to my biological child.