NEW ORLEANS, April 13, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – An appeals court has ruled against two homosexual men who were attempting to force the state of Louisiana to change the birth certificate of the child they adopted to list two “fathers.”
The couple, hailing from New York, had adopted a child born in Louisiana in 2006 and both wanted to be listed as the child’s father; they filed suit against Louisiana State Registrar Darlene W. Smith when the latter said it wasn’t possible.
The men argued that the refusal, or the state law on which the refusal relied, amounted to a violation of the Full Faith and Credit (FFC) Clause of the U.S. Constitution because the state ignored a decree obtained in New York that allowed them to adopt. The FFC Clause has been a linchpin for homosexual activists seeking to export recognition of same-sex “marriage” to other states.
Although a 5th Circuit Court panel ruled in favor of the couple in February 2010, the case failed to survive when considered by the full court, which issued its ruling Tuesday. The judges ruled that the couple’s use of the FFC Clause violated the traditional interpretation of that clause.
“This train of reasoning is superficially appealing, but it cannot be squared with the Supreme Court’s consistent jurisprudential treatment of the full faith and credit clause or with the lower federal courts’ equally consistent approach,” stated the majority opinion.
Five of the judges, led by Justice Jacques Weiner, issued a 38-page dissenting opinion claiming the majority made several mistakes “in its determination to sweep this high-profile and admittedly controversial case out the federal door,” claiming that the Full Faith and Credit Clause “creates a federal right that is actionable against state actors.”
Justice Thomas Reavley offered a response to the dissent, which he called “disappointing” and “disturbing.” “My dissenting colleagues go beyond our due to fault the Louisiana official for her construction of the Louisiana statute,” he wrote.
Liberty Counsel chairman Mathew Staver called the ruling “an incredible victory” against activists’ attempts to force legal recognition of homosexual relationships on states in a press release Wednesday. “The Full Faith and Credit Clause can no longer be used as a club to beat states into submission to the activist homosexual agenda,” he said.
The release pointed out that the ruling was critical because “it affirms the distinction between ‘recognizing’ the existence of an out-of-state order versus ‘enforcing’ the out-of-state order on a state in which it conflicts with the state’s law.”
Liberty Counsel also noted, “This is the precise issue that was litigated in the Lisa Miller case, which the Virginia courts would not acknowledge.”
Ex-lesbian mom Lisa Miller and her daughter Isabella who was conceived via artificial insemination went into hiding at the end of 2009 after a court ordered her to transfer custody of the 7-year-old to her former lover Janet Jenkins. A Vermont judge had attempted to force Miller, who had moved to Virginia with Isabella, to allow visitations with Jenkins despite a lack of biological relationship and the absence of any law granting parental rights to civil union partners.
Miller refused because Isabella appeared to be traumatized after visits with Jenkins.