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Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Indiana Decisions - STAR editorial on last week's visitation rights ruling

The Indianapolis Star editorializes this morning on last week's Court of Appeals ruling: In Re: A.B. v. S.B, stating:

Strike out the mention of King's sexual orientation or how her child was conceived -- with the help of her brother -- and it could have been about anyone involved in any kind of nontraditional family: A man looking for visitation rights to a boy who isn't his son by blood, but whom he helped raise while living with the child's mother. Or a woman who gained visitation rights informally to her daughter as part of an "open adoption."

Such arrangements have grown in recent decades. Yet states such as Indiana haven't updated their law books to deal with the consequences, either because such matters have been settled out of court or, as in the case of gay marriage, are highly controversial.

Which means judges still have to make sense of this chaos, especially when children are involved. Not only do they have to look at legal precedents, but also at each situation individually. Appellate judges in the King case rightly determined that King's "bonded, dependent, parent-child relationship," along with a state Supreme Court's ruling in another nontraditional case, more than established her parental rights.

The case touches only peripherally on the subject of gay marriage, and by no means begins to settle the argument. That in time will be up to the courts, the legislature and, ultimately, in all likelihood the voters.

For now, however, the court was asked to settle a messy, real-world situation that defied easy answers. By allowing a mother to reunite with a child, the appeals court made the right decision.

See this earlier ILB entry here; access a pdf version of the Court's decision (via the ILB) here.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on November 30, 2004 06:41 AM
Posted to Indiana Decisions