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February 6, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Lisa Miller, an ex-lesbian who made national headlines during her battle to protect her daughter from a custody transfer to her former sex partner, is now telling the story of her struggle through a book by one of her attorneys, Rina Lindevaldsen.
“Only One Mommy: A Woman’s Battle for Her Life, Her Daughter, and Her Freedom” (New Revolution Publishers, 2011), gives readers new insights into Miller’s inspiring odyssey from abused and neglected child, through the horrors of sexual and chemical addictions, to redemption through faith in Jesus Christ.
Miller’s final act of bravery was her decision to enter into hiding with her child, Isabella, to escape her former lesbian partner Janet Jenkins, who was successfully seeking to transfer custody of Miller’s daughter, Isabella, to herself. Although Miller remains in hiding, she speaks to readers through journals and letters left with her attorney, and through Lindevaldsen’s own narrative.
At the root of Miller’s nightmarish childhood were two elements: contraception and divorce. Miller’s early memories are filled with the bitter reminder that her mother, who was using birth control at the time she conceived Miller, had not wanted her.
“Whenever my mother was mad at me, she would pull out the oval peach colored pack of birth control pills that she had saved all those years to show me that only one week was missing, and that was the week she got pregnant,” Miller writes.
At age seven, Miller’s parents divorced, leaving herself and her brother alone with an increasingly mentally ill, distant, and cruel mother. Miller’s isolation and lack of affirmation from her parents led her to seek solace in unhealthy fixations on food, diet pills, and pornography. In order to relieve herself of emotional pain, she began to cut herself, which added to the scars that her body already held from her mother’s beatings
However, Miller was also the recipient of positive influences through friendships with leaders in her church and schoolteachers, who took an interest in her and provided her with adult role models. Her religious education would come back to her in her darkest days, providing a way out of her seemingly impossible situation.
After entering a troubled marriage, and finally making a suicide attempt that left her in intensive care for days, Miller received another major blow. During her recovery in a psychiatric ward in Virginia, a counselor informed her that she was a lesbian and must seek the sexual companionship of other women.
“As part of my treatment, in order to be released, I had to meet with my immediate family, including my husband, and tell them I was a ‘lesbian.’ I complied, and not surprisingly, my marriage ended. Even though I had left behind all of my childhood addictions at that time, sadly, I entered into the addiction of homosexuality,” writes Miller.
Lisa eventually entered into a relationship and a Vermont “civil union” with a recovering alcoholic named Janet Jenkins. During that time she was artificially inseminated, resulting in the birth of her daughter. She recalls that in the misery of her sexually immoral and conflictive relationship with Jenkins, she almost lost Isabella before she was born. It was then that she made a special petition to God, promising him that “if he saved my baby, I would leave the homosexual lifestyle.”
Isabella was born healthy, and although Miller did not keep her promise immediately, she recalled it as her relationship with Jenkins continued to deteriorate. “It was then that God brought to mind the covenant that I had made with him just months earlier. I knew enough from my religious background that one does not make covenants with God and not keep them without suffering negative consequences. When my daughter was 17 months old, I left the homosexual lifestyle and moved with my daughter back to my home state of Virginia, where she had been conceived and born.”
Judicial tyranny and the struggle to save Isabella from her lesbian “other mother”
After Lindevaldsen’s summary of Miller’s victory over homosexual vice and her other addictions, the attorney leads readers through the maze of legal arguments that have been used to justify giving parenthood rights, and ultimately guardianship, of Isabella to Jenkins. In the process she shows that no state is truly safe from the effects of homosexualist legislation in other jurisdictions.
Although Miller was artificially inseminated while in a civil union with Jenkins, Isabella was never adopted by her, and Jenkins’ name does not appear on Isabella’s birth certificate. Moreover, Miller and Jenkins were residents of Virginia when they entered into their Vermont “civil union,” and Virginia’s constitution explicitly denies all recognition to such unions.
In sum, while Jenkins appears to lack all standing to make a claim of “parenthood,” that did not prevent judges in Vermont and Virginia from twisting the law like a pretzel to ensure that Jenkins had access to Isabella.
Miller’s legal nightmare began when a Vermont judge decided to literally create a law where one did not exist. Vermont had no law giving parenthood rights to the spouse of a woman who is artificially inseminated - the spouse had to adopt the child. But despite the fact that civil unions were to be treated like marriages under Vermont law, Vermont Judge Richard Cohen decreed from the bench that Jenkins was Isabella’s “mother.”
Noting that “the court admitted that the legislature still hadn’t answered the question of how a child born by artificial insemination by an anonymous sperm donor would gain the legal status of a child to the spouse who was not biologically related to the child,” Lindevaldsen observes: “To its credit, the court at least admitted what it was doing—creating new law in order to reach its decision.”
However, despite all of the protections inserted into the Virginia constitution against the enforcement of civil union or homosexual “marriage” legislation from other states, prosecutors managed to make use of a federal law that was designed to stop one parent from denying custody to another: the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act (FKPA).
Although the law was created to prevent parents from fleeing to another jurisdiction to get a better custody settlement through another set of courts, it was used in Miller’s case to claim that Virginia could not cancel the custody order issued by the Vermont court. Lindevaldsen argues that this is false reasoning because the federal Defense of Marriage Act protects states from the obligation of giving “full faith and credit” to homosexual unions formalized in other states, and even under the FKPA, states don’t have to enforce the decisions of other states’ courts. Nonetheless, the Virginia courts ruled in favor of Jenkins, and agreed to apply the Vermont decision.
Lindevaldsen goes on to discuss the destructive effects of the homosexual lifestyle, and documents the damage to children and teens caused by the movement’s influence in the school system.
The author, who is a an associate dean and professor of law at Liberty University, told LifeSiteNews that Christians need to be aware of the Obama administration’s relentless pursuit of Miller and her daughter, and the implications of their decisions at the voting booth with regard to family issues.
“I think certainly the current administration has obviously made a commitment that this is a high priority for them, that they are going to track down a biological mother and attempt to take this child away from her biological mother and I certainly think that there is some political pressure that could be taken,” Lindevaldsen said.
“I think the word needs to get out. Christians need to know that these things are happening, the idea that a woman apparently had to flee the country to protect her child, shouldn’t be happening in America, and I don’t think enough Christians know about that and don’t realize that the people they vote for in an election year, who they vote for has direct consequences on things like this.”
She added that, in addition to their involvement in the national political process, Christians can work at the state level to ensure that other children are not victimized by ant-family legislation. Lindevaldsen says she has handled dozens of other cases that are similar to Miller’s.
“We need to pass laws at the state level making it very clear that courts do not have the discretion to do this, to declare a child to have two parents, because we need to avoid these situations happening in the future, because they are happening on a regular basis.”
