Family Research Council president Tony Perkins hosted senior fellow Peter Sprigg on Washington Watch yesterday to discuss the sentencing of pastor Kenneth Miller for aiding Lisa Miller (no relation), who kidnapped her daughter, Isabella Miller-Jenkins. Perkins recently praised Kenneth Miller’s “courage” in aiding the kidnapping scheme.
Lisa Miller disobeyed a court decision that gave Isabella’s other mother, her former partner Janet Jenkins, visitation rights and, as a result, the courts eventually transferred custody to Jenkins. Miller then fled the country with Isabella to a Mennonite compound in Central America.
Sprigg told Perkins that Jenkins, who was in a civil union with Miller at the time of Isabella’s birth, should not be considered Isabella’s parent because she is not biologically related and therefore shouldn’t be protected by the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act. According to Sprigg, paternity and kidnapping laws should only apply to heterosexual couples.
In normal marriage between a man and a woman the presumption of paternity was a presumption of something that is almost always true. But the Vermont court, which has allowed these civil unions, granted them all the legal rights of marriage, has converted that into a presumption of parentage whereby you are presuming something that cannot be true, something that is biologically impossible. That just shows how in the same-sex marriage debate we are flipping logic on its head.
And another aspect of this is that the law that Lisa ran afoul of and that Kenneth Miller, this pastor, ran afoul of is something called the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act. It was designed again normally for the context of heterosexual marriages that break up, where there is a divorce and perhaps a custody battle between two parents who are both the biological parents — the biological mother and the biological father — who have divorced each other and it’s designed to prevent someone from taking a child and crossing state lines to another jurisdiction in order to get a more favorable court ruling. So the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act was designed to protect the rights of a biological parent so that they cannot have their rights violated by the other biological parent. But here you have the rights of the biological parent being violated by someone who is not the biological parent at all. So again, the original purposes of these laws are being turned on their head in this case.
