The problem with arguing the specifics of the case is that it will just cause more and more parents to worry about gay marriage.
Why would this story be any different if it were a heterosexual couple? Aside from the fact that you couldn't flee to another state to avoid a legal determination on what the best result should be?
If it were a heterosexual couple, the non-biological father who'd remarried and had very limited contact with the daughter would've been very, very unlikely to have been granted custody six years later unless the mother had been convicted of a serious crime.
The first warning flag in most married people's minds is that a parent who moves several states over to get away from an ex often indicates a very profound problem with the ex's behavior.
Why would this be different with a heterosexual couple?
I'll spare you quoting the rest of the post with the same question. What makes this unique just because it was a gay couple that originally had the child?
Very little, which is
why heterosexual couples will look at this case as a mess. If many years later the mother doesn't want to have anything to do with her remarried ex-husband who is
not the child's biological father, and talks about how he took a bath with the daughter when she was six or seven, and how the daughter is very disturbed after visiting him, most heterosexual couples would agree that he should hit the road and not come back, much less never be given full custody.
In most states the courts try very hard to let the mother retain custody, even when the husband is the biological father. If the husband is not the biological father, as when the child is from a mother's previous marriage, to get custody he would have to make a good case that the mother is unfit and perhaps represents a danger to the child, and that he has been intimately involved with the child's upbringing continuously (otherwise why would he possibly get custody, as opposed to perhaps the woman's
new husband, or her own mother?) In this case, heterosexuals can easily imagine Jenkins as the ex-husband and reason from there, which is why they'll side with Miller.
Marriage laws are heavily biased toward the mother, and most people accept that it should be that way. This is a case with two mothers, but people will still view it as "the real mother and the person she was with at the time." The case would be profoundly different if the couple had adopted a chld, because then the "real mother" versus "not the momma" aspect wouldn't jump out so easily.
And then you add in that the biological mother became a Mennonite, a group most people view very positively and protectively, as if they were a very cute, cuddly, endangered species, making most married people even
more sympathetic to Miller's side.
So, this would be a horrible case if it was a heterosexual marriage case (given the outcome), so it darn sure will make a bad case for gay-marriage. To many Christian parents, it's probably mentally similar to a woman who flees with her daughters so her reborn-Muslim husband with a high-dollar lawyer can't move them to Iran. They think "You go girl! Do what you have to do!"
You've got to have vastly better cases where almost all the negatives of this one are flipped the other way, where the ex-lesbian joined Scientology instead of the Mennonites and wants to give her daughter to Sea-Org, and is not the biological mother, didn't have custody, etc. Bring up one of those cases and all the heterosexual couples will side with the lesbian partner.
Speaking of bad examples, here in my town a few years ago, we had another famous gay partner case. Two rich gay men decided to have babies, so they hired a woman to bear them. She had quadruplets, and the local news was all atwitter with this big step for gay rights. The whole town thought "This will end badly. Two guys with no parenting experience can't cope with quadruplets." We just underestimated how badly. The womb for hire had to do almost all the care, the two guys still hung out in the bars and cheated on each other a couple times a week, then broke up and sued each other silly, flinging enough mud to bury New Orleans, and then moved to other states. The press quit talking about the story, and I doubt gays really want to bring it up because they also know that it's a very bad example that is best forgotten.
