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Howard Friedman: Child Custody Shift OK'd For Failure To Follow Religious Upbinging Agreement [LINK-ZUM]

In Herschfus v. Herschfus, (MI Ct. App., Dec. 27, 2007), a Michigan appellate court upheld a lower court's modification of a custody award. The court gave sole legal and physical custody of a divorced couple's child, Jacob, to the father, based in significant part on the mother's failure to comply with the agreement entered at the time of the divorce to raise Jacob in the Orthodox Jewish religion. It rejected the mother's First Amendment challenge, finding that "the trial court's ruling was constitutionally appropriate because it was based on Jacob's needs and not on a value judgment regarding the parties' practice of religion."

[From the highly recommended blog Religion Clause. In the United States of America, a child can be legally separated from his mother because she failed to get him to present as believing a specific state-mandated superstition. Compare this with the case of Edgardo Mortara, in which a child was legally separated from his mother because she failed to get him to present as believing a specific state-mandated superstition. Of course these are totally different cases, because Jacob lives in the secular United States and wasn't Jewish enough, while Edgardo lived in the theocracy of the Vatican See and was too Jewish. It's all a matter of presenting as believing the right superstition in the right nation. - Trevor Blake]

Labels: christianity, judaism, theocracy

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