GET A PUPPY

There is a complicated Family Court case going on right now involving a tug-of-war over a three-year old girl, artificial insemination, a couple of lesbians, a homosexual couple  wanting to play parents  and it makes me want to scream: ‘Get a puppy’. This not some trophy you sit on the shelf and polish once a week. This is a three-year-old girl who already must be confused as the child of a single mother whose female lover has already gone.

It’s complex. I’ll try to accurately pass on the scenario: The two gay women were in a relationship for seven years. They broke up a year ago. In their time together they both had children to different fathers.  One had a baby with sperm donated by a homosexual friend. But it is not that child that is subject to a custody battle.

It’s the daughter of the other woman. And she has no biological connection to the gay guy at all.

But a federal magistrate has ruled that the two gay men were ‘persons connected with the care, welfare and development of the child’ and therefore  have a right to take the case to the Family Court.

This means a biological mother will have to fight for the custody of her own child.

It’s all come up because all four adults live in Queensland. The mother now wants to go back to her home state of New South Wales and take her daughter. She says the only reason she moved to Queensland was because a donor sperm baby was more difficult and more expensive in NSW.

To make things more complicated, when she was in the lesbian partnership, the mother admits that she and her partner were both ‘mothers’ to the two children and the two gay men were ‘father figures’. The four of them apparently went through a ‘naming ceremony’ where all four affirmed their commitment as parents. But that is not legally recognised.

All four  adults marched in the annual gay pride marches and  marched in the ‘family’ section. Friends  and family called them ‘Daddy’.

There’s a sad footnote to all this. While the four adults fight in the courts –with three of them resisting the mother’s right to take her daughter interstate – the little girl is living part-time with all four in three separate houses. Like a shuttlecock.

As I said: Get a puppy.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2009