Shielding child whose mother is Catholic from father's Wiccan lifestyle?

[Vance R. Koven]

Shouldn't the issue be framed as whether the judge is granting greater
solicitude to religious aspects of the child's upbringing than to
non-religious ones of comparable influence? If the father had suddenly
developed an extreme interest in, say, raucous rock concerts (weird people,
drums, dancing), contrary to the household ambiance when the parents were
married, would an order such as this seem so exceptional?

I think in a lot of these cases, where post-divorce one parent undergoes a
lifestyle transformation (in either direction--harking back to the original
case of the father who became ultra-Orthodox or the mother who recanted
orthodoxy), the court is saving the parent from him- or herself by limiting
the child's exposure while the child could develop a strong aversion to the
wayward parent. Older children, of course, are well-versed in rolling their
eyeballs at their parents' idiosyncrasies (though I wonder if that too is a
feint).

Vance

On Jan 23, 2008 7:14 PM, Ed Brayton <stcynic at crystalauto.com> wrote:

> The more I dig into cases similar to this the more I think that judges
> should not be allowed to consider religion at all. It's just too ripe for
> abuse, too open for a judge to be prejudiced against one party to the case
> because of their religion or (more commonly) their lack of it. I am
> astonished at the fact that appeals courts have refused to overturn such
> rulings even when they've been outrageously wrong.
>
> Ed Brayton
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: religionlaw-bounces at lists.ucla.edu
> [mailto:religionlaw-bounces at lists.ucla.edu] On Behalf Of Volokh, Eugene
> Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 4:22 PM
> To: Law & Religion issues for Law Academics
> Subject: Shielding child whose mother is Catholic from father's Wiccan
> lifestyle?
>
>        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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-- 
Vance R. Koven
Boston, MA USA
vrkoven at world.std.com
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