Civitas

For exactly a year ago today, the very same appeal court judge involved in yesterday’s decision, Lord Justice Thorpe, awarded to the former lesbian partner of the girls’ mother ‘joint residence’ in respect of the two girls and shared parental responsibility for them, against the wishes of their biological mother and previous sole and primary carer who had previously enjoyed sole residency with respect to them.

At that time, the girls’ mother had apparently been prepared for her former lover to be given the status of an extended family member and indeed her former partner was granted contact rights by the county court whose denial of the former lover’s application for joint residence was over-turned in last year’s appeal court ruling.

Now, the same appeal court has gone one better on what it decided last year, by removing from the girls’ biological mother joint residence and granting primary care of the girls to their mother’s former lesbian partner.

One could begin to understand what might have been behind the appeal court’s decision had the girls’ real mother been hopelessly incompetent as a mother, but it turns out she is not, being a schoolteacher who had acquired a new partner to replace her former one.

What transpired between the two appeal court decisions to cause it yesterday to attenuate still further the two girls’ contact with their real mother is her having moved in the interim with her new partner to Cornwall, secretly taking her daughters with her. This was in defiance of a court order issued so that the girls’ mother’s former lover still be able to exercise her rights of joint-residency with respect to them. Apparently, the mother’s former lover had then applied to the High Court for sole residency and was granted it in February of this year and it was against this decision that the mother was appealing yesterday.

What is remarkable about yesterday’s appeal court decision to uphold the decision in February to grant sole residency to the former lover of the girls’ mother is how much at variance are the grounds it gave for it with those offered by it last year in support of its decision then to award joint residence to the former lover of the girls’ mother.

Speaking yesterday in explanation of the appeal court’s decision, Lord Justice Thorpe said: ‘The family may be created by mutual agreement and with much careful planning. Both partners seek the experience of child-bearing and child-rearing in one capacity or other’. He then went on to explain that, like the the High Court Family judge who in February of this year awarded to their mother’s former-lover primary care of the girls, he lacked confidence that, were they to stay with their mother in Cornwall, they would be able to enjoy the ‘essential close relationship’ with their mother’s former partner’s family'.

When granting joint residency to the former lover of the mother of the two girls last year, Lord Justice Thorpe said he was ‘in no doubt at all that the children require firm measures to safeguard them from diminution or loss of a vital side of family life’.

Can Lord Justice Thorpe seriously suppose that, by removing the two girls entirely from the care of their real biological mother, his court was really safeguarding them from a diminution or loss of a vital side of family life?

There is only one consideration in the case which I can see could conceivably have been thought to justify yesterday’s appeal court decision, although it went un-stated, if indeed it weighed at all with the court in arriving at it. This is that the mother’s former lover has a boy of her own, now aged 17. Perhaps, in deciding as it did, yesterday’s appeal court was concerned to ensure that the girls remained in contact with him so that they had a male presence in their formative years, in the belief that this would offer them the most proximate domiciliary conditions to the normal one in which children of both sexes grow up in the close company of adults of both sexes.

Somehow, though, I doubt whether any such commonsensical considerations would have counted for much with today’s post-modern Family Court judges who seem to relish the disintegration of the traditional nuclear family and seem to want to do all in their power to hasten its path into the lumber room of history.

Even had a desire on the part of the judges for the girls to grow up in male as well as female company been behind their decision yesterday, it seems a high price to pay to enable them to do so to withdraw them from the care of their real mother altogether.

Truly, a bizarre and astonishing decision, and one which only goes to under-write the value and importance of traditional family arrangements as well as the manifest dangers and risks posed to the welfare of children attendant upon all other familial arrangements.