Kids Are Kids, and Parents Are Parents, Even in Kentucky

My apologies for missing this story when it happened two weeks ago.

A one-time lesbian couple will be allowed to have shared custody of the child they raised before splitting up, the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

The high court approved the couple's joint custody agreement and ruled that one of the women, Arminta Jane Mullins, acted as a “de facto parent” with her partner, Phyllis Dianne Picklesimer.

The decision, which Justices Bill Cunningham, John Minton and Will T. Scott partially dissented from, reverses a Kentucky Court of Appeals ruling saying Mullins lacked standing to pursue joint custody of the child, now 5, because she was not a parent.

Picklesimer was artificially inseminated and gave birth to the boy in 2005. The couple filed a joint custody agreement in February 2006 in Garrard County and split up two months later.

Picklesimer denied Mullins to have contact with the boy that September, prompting Mullins to go to court to see the child.

Justice Wil Schroeder wrote for the court's majority that the women made multiple decisions about the child before and after he was born, with Mullins caring for him while the couple was together and for five months after they split.

As bills to use tax dollars to promote idiotic mythology on license plates and to force women seeking abortions to suffer rape-by-camera, along with other antediluvian measures, work their way through our pathetic excuse for a legislature, keep this ruling in mind.

Kentucky is not yet hopelessly, irredeemably backward.