by Deacon Keith Fournier –Catholic Online

This tragic custody case sets up a conflict of laws issue as a part of a homosexual advocacy agenda.

Lisa Miller lived in Virginia. She had a troubled childhood. Her mother suffered from mental illness and there was abuse in the home. She was deeply affected by a traumatic divorce between her parents. She had a series of substance addictions which began at the age of seven. She sought escape in an ill advised marriage. That relationship ended in divorce. It was that painful experience which finally thrust her into a deep depression with accompanying suicidal thoughts. It was during that period that she was hospitalized for “therapy.”

It was during “therapy” that Lisa claims she was first exposed to the prospect of being a lesbian. In a candid interview with LifeSite news in October of 2008 she told a sad and troubling story of what amounts to recruitment into what many are pushing as an alternative lifestyle. She maintained that she was encouraged in counseling sessions to try lesbian relationships. This happened not just once, but twice; both times within the context of “therapy” as she tried to free herself from the pain and wounds of a difficult life.

After a continuing sad spiral of events which ended with the death of her mother she met Janet Jenkins, who was living a lesbian lifestyle. Janet befriended her. Lisa maintains that she also seduced her into a lesbian relationship. That relationship became abusive and was filled with trauma. However, even after leaving Janet in the late nineties, Lisa went back. She followed the pattern often demonstrated by a victim of abuse.

The two traveled to Vermont in order to obtain a Vermont same-sex civil union license after Vermont passed the law in 2000. They immediately returned to Virginia. The relationship, troubled from the start, did not change. As is becoming increasingly common in same sex relationships, the two determined they should have a child together.

Of course, that is not a physical possibility and it never will be. So Lisa sought the services of a “fertility specialist” in Virginia.

This medical “professional” inseminated her with sperm from an anonymous donor. He followed the growing approach of treating children as a commodity and their creation as an act of medical manufacturing. So Isabella was born in Virginia as the “product” of the misuse of fertility technology, with no father whom she will ever know. However, Isabella is a wonderful child. Lisa Miller now clearly understands that she is also a gift from God for whom she bears a serious responsibility.

Four months after Isabella was born, Lisa, Janet and Isabella relocated to Vermont. While in Vermont, as a result of serious soul searching, Lisa became a Christian. She had a genuine Christian conversion. As a result of this conversion, she began to see all of her life differently as the pieces began to come together. According to Lisa, Janet became increasingly abusive. So, to protect herself and her daughter she left the living situation. She also left the lesbian lifestyle.

She began to change her life and received helpful counseling from people without an agenda. They assisted her in coming to understand her painful past and the effect it had upon her behaviors, her choices, and her addictions. Lisa became increasingly concerned for her daughter and returned to her home state of Virginia to make a new life. Janet remained in Vermont where she remains in an active lesbian lifestyle. Isabella was 17 months old at the time. She did not even know Janet.

Lisa later sought to dissolve the civil union in Vermont because it was the only place she could dissolve it. Virginia’s statutory law and State constitution affirm what the Natural Law reveals; marriage is between one man and one woman. Virginia does not recognize “same-sex” marriage or homosexual civil unions. Janet, who is neither the biological nor adoptive parent of Isabella then sought to obtain custody of Lisa’s daughter.

This tragic case sets up what is called a conflict of laws issue, pitting the law of one State against another. This specter hangs over many such homosexual relationships as the patchwork of court enforced schemes of calling them a “marriage” unfolds. It is a deliberate result of the strategy of cultural revolutionaries in the Homosexual Equivalency movement who are setting up what they hope will be their vehicle for enforcing their cultural revolution Nationally through the Courts.

The Homosexual Equivalency movement seeks to force legal recognition of homosexual relationships as the equivalent of a marriage. In so doing, they end up opposing marriage. Oh, they are verbal engineers, using Orwellian language, calling for “marriage equality” and the “freedom to marry”. It is simply a verbal slight of hand similar to the use of the word “choice” by those early abortion advocates. Such wordsmithing simply constitutes verbal engineering. It is an effort to cover over the truth.

These activists are advancing their Cultural Revolution not by vote of the people but by judicial and legislative fiat in a kind of new alchemy. They are using Courts and, as in Washington, D.C., City Councils who refuse to let the people vote on the issue by referendum. These new Caesars call a relationship which is constitutively incapable of accomplishing the ends of marriage to be a marriage.

They have developed a verbal strategy and a legal strategy. Their goal is to use the Police Power of the State in order to force a new social and legal order whether we all want it or not. A part of that strategy, used increasingly by homosexual legal advocacy groups such as Lambda Legal who involved themselves in this case, is to set up a constitutional law claim – like the one which the Lisa Miller case creates – hoping to change the law through their legal activism.

At all stages of litigation the Vermont court ruled that Lisa is the fit, biological mother of Isabella. The record shows that Isabella is an “A” student in school, a happy, well adjusted and loving child. However, while litigation regarding the sole parental rights of Lisa was pending in Virginia, the Vermont court also ruled that Janet had parental rights and ordered visitation. So, because of a Vermont Court Order, and when Isabella was 5 ½ years old, she first met Janet. This meeting occurred during two or three visitation time periods.

After each visitation Isabella had severe reactions including nightmares and bed wetting. She expressed fears that her mother Lisa was going to be taken from her. Isabella even tried to harm herself. Sources allege that during the Court ordered visits Janet told Isabella that she had two mommies – to which Isabella protested – and read her that notorious homosexual advocacy children’s book entitled “Heather Has Two Mommies.” Janet lived with another lesbian. She is alleged to have told the child that she was going to take her from her mother Lisa.

Lisa could not stand to see what was happening to her daughter Isabella. She stopped fully complying with the visitation order. She urged the court to consider allowing only limited supervised visitation, and only in her presence. Janet refused. Lisa suffered deeply. She could not stand to see her daughter in such torment while the Virginia case was winding its way through the courts.

Since Isabella was 17 months old, the period of time when Lisa left the relationship and the troubled living situation, Janet has never called Isabella, emailed or texted her. She has never sent her a letter, birthday card, Christmas card or any kind of card. She has never attended her church to see her in the church Christmas play. In fact the indications are that Janet has expressed her belief that it is harmful to raise a child as a Christian.

The Vermont Judge ruled on January 1, 2010 that Janet should have custody of Isabella and within 90 days come up with a visitation schedule for Lisa to see her biological daughter. That meant that Isabella would not have been able to see her mother Lisa for at least that long, if there were no Court continuances due to legal motions. Lisa then disappeared with Isabella. She is now a fugitive. In fact, a missing persons report has now been issued. No one, including her counsel, knows their whereabouts.

Lisa Miller is a mother who could no longer stand to see her child force fed what she contended was poison. She felt that after each visit the harm that was being inflicted on her daughter was increasing. The record indicates that even though Lisa asked the Vermont Judge to listen to evidence of the violent reactions of Isabella after each of these few visitations, the Judge refused. He treated this case like an ordinary domestic breakup between a husband and a wife. After all, that is what happens when a State treats such living relationships in a manner equivalent to marriage.

This case presents an opportunity to ask some deeply important questions. The approach taken by the Judge in Vermont comports with what homosexual equivalency advocates seek. This is our future if they have their way. They want the State to treat homosexual partnerships as the equivalent of marriage, thereby denying real marriage and the family founded upon it, the favored legal place it has long held as the first society. They are, in fact, a Marriage Opposition Movement. Does undermining true marriage serve the common good?

Homosexual relationships are different. They are often harmful to the participants. They are harmful to the children. For example, they cause severe confusion to children. Isabella was introduced by order of a Court to a stranger whom she did not know. That stranger insisted she was her mother. Isabella knew her Mom and her name is Lisa, not Janet.

The Lisa Miller Case presents an example of the misuse of Fertility Technology. Science is to serve the person, the family and the common good. Otherwise, as history bears out, it can unleash some very detrimental results. In addition to being immoral, this particular misuse has now also became fodder for the strategy of the new Cultural Revolutionaries in their legal strategy to advance their agenda.

The Lisa Miller case reveals the dangers of judicial tyranny. The Judicial branch used to be called the “least dangerous branch”. Courts were arbiters not super legislatures which could make law. Now, unelected Judges are used as tools for effecting social change. This approach fails to respect the separation of powers doctrine and threatens our Republic.

However, it is even worse in the case of a Court created “right” such as the alleged “right” to kill children in the womb. Court insistence that we treat homosexual relationships as equivalent to marriage is another example of calling something a “right” which is not! In these instances Judges often clothe themselves in self serving claims that they are enforcing the “rule of law” while they are violating the Natural Law which is its very source.

Finally, the Lisa Miller case raises serious questions concerning the Nature of Law itself. Is an unjust law a law? Is the law simply what a Court says it is? Or, is there a Higher Law, a Natural Law to which positive or civil law must render an account?

Who has first legal authority in the lives of our children? Have we come to the hour when children are becoming “mere creatures of the State”? Is Lisa Miller the first of a growing number of mothers, or even fathers, who will form a new underground railroad in this brave new world being foisted upon us by the new cultural revolutionaries of the homosexual equivalency movement?

The Lisa Miller Case brings together the misuse of fertility technology, the new Cultural Revolution, the threat of Judicial Tyranny and the assault on the authority of the Family in a case of monumental societal implications. It sounds a clear warning which must be heard before it is too late.