Shielding child whose mother is Catholic from father's Wiccan lifestyle?
Volokh, Eugene
VOLOKH at law.ucla.edu
Wed Jan 23 13:22:08 PST 2008
A recent New York state appellate court decision upheld a father's petition for overnight visitation, but stressed that this was done only because the father and his fiancee "agreed to refrain from exposing the child to any ceremony connected to their religious practices," and because the Family Court could mandate, in the visitation order, "protections against her exposure to any aspect of the lifestyle of the father and his fiancée which could confuse the child's faith formation."
I tracked down the trial court decision, and it turns out the father's and his fiancée's "lifestyle" and "religious practices" were Wiccan. The trial court concluded that the child (age 10 at the time of the appellate court's decision) "is too young to understand that different lifestyles or religions are not necessarily worse than what she is accustomed to; they are merely different. For her, at her age, different equates to frightening. So when her father and her father's fiancé[e] take her to a bonfire to celebrate a Solstice, and she hears drums beating and observes people dancing, she becomes upset and scared." There was no further discussion in the trial court order of any more serious harm to the child, though of course there's always the change that some evidence was introduced at trial but wasn't relied on in the order.
Given this, should it be permissible for a court to protect the child from becoming "upset and scared" by ordering that a parent not "expos[e the child] to any aspect of [the parent's] lifestyle ... which could confuse the child's faith formation"?
Eugene
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