From the Associated Press:
The state Supreme Court ruled Friday that Vermont courts, and not those in Virginia, have exclusive jurisdiction over a case involving two women battling for custody of a child they had while they were in a lesbian relationship.
The Virginia Court of Appeals had issued a stay on this until the Vermont Supreme Court ruled. What’s next? Well, Virginia Lawyer posted a great synposis over at NLS:
This case is about the application of the federal Uniform Child Custody Act and the Parental Kidnapping Act to a state court decision involving a civil union legally entered into in another state in our federal system.
These laws were passed to protect children from the family instability that comes into play when parents go forum shopping for custody decisions, resulting in a legal tug of war where the child is the primary victim.
Under these federal laws (which do supercede any state laws under the supremacy clause to the US Constitution), once jurisdiction has attached to a child custody case in a state court, another state’s court is prohibited from taking jurisdiction.
These laws make sense, and it also makes sense to apply them equally to all legal marriages (statutory and common law) and civil unions in which there are children.
The decision by the Vermont court doesn’t force Virginia to do anything. It requires the parents to be guided by the decisions of the court that first took jurisdiction of their dispute (both of these partners initially filed in Vermont, that’s why the Vermont court controls the outcome under federal law). One parent isn’t allowed to forum shop after the first court enters an order just because she didn’t like the outcome and thought another state’s courts might be more receptive to her arguments.
As to the argument that the Marshall/Newman amendment only codifies (discriminatory) laws already on the books, that’s just bunk!
HB 751 and its precursors apply only to same-sex relationships.
A common sense reading of the Marshall/Newman amendment reveals clearly that it makes substantial changes in current Virginia law visiting the discriminatory animus and ills of HB 751 on all unmarried couples, gay and straight (invalidating now lawful common law marriages from other states as the AG acknowledged at the NOVA TownHall last week; exposing all 66,000 unmarried domestic violence victims to loss of protective orders and the protections offered by mandatory arrest policies; offering the opportunity to litigate all agreements between unmarried couples to disgruntled family members who disagree with decisions the couple may have made re: property, guardianship of children, or health care/end of life decisions).
What the Marshall/Newman amendment does is subject the children of any unmarried or common law married straight couples to the kind of instability and in fighting illustrated here by two women with a lawful civil union, one of whom decided to forum shop for a court opinion she liked as a part of “winning” in the breakup of their relationship.
What a shame!
Here, here! Vote NO, Virginia!
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
Tell your brilliant source “virginia lawyer” that there isn’t any common law marriage in Virginia.
oh, darn…I’m all broken up about two lesbians who have artificial insemination and have a child and then break up and fight.
Yay for gay marriage and the ironically named “civil” unions result in! Look what we have to look forward to!
Insider:
You can only get married in Virginia in licensed ceremony, but Virginia has long continued to recognize as legal the common law marriages of people who entered into them in states where they continue to be legal.
Attorney General Bob Marshall acknowledged at the NOVA TownHall meeting last week that the amendment will change this and bar Virginia from continuing to recognize as valid, common law marriages from other states.
This will make Virginia a happy legal haven for anyone in such a marriage who wants to get divorced without having to go through legal divorce proceedings. All anyone will have to do is move to Virginia and their spouse won’t be able to contest the divorce or ask for a property distribution or alimony. I don’t think that this is what Virginians want, even those Virginians who support reserving statutory and religious marriage to heterosexual couples.
VirginiaLawyer
Keep trying. Do you actually think voters are going to vote against this so we can continue to recognize “civil unions” from Vermont?
Insider, you don’t seem to understand.
What AG Bob McDonnell said was that Virginia would no longer recognize the common law marriages that people enter into in other states.
This means that heterosexual couples (there is no such thing as a same-sex common law marriage) who believe that they have a legal marriage, could move to or even visit Virginia, and find that their marriage is suddenly null and void.
The ultimate no-fault divorce 🙂
So say a couple visits Virginia with their common law marriage and one of them gets severely injured, the other person does not have any rights in terms of treatment?
One aspect of the article that interests me is “Lisa Miller-Jenkins renounced her homosexuality.” I’m happy to see the mainstream press reporting that people do leave homosexuality – as opposed to those who argue that ex-homosexuals are a myth.