Until the Utah Supreme Court stepped forward on February 16th with its merciful breath of sanity, the best Cheryl Barlow had to hope for was a kind of "Sophie’s Choice."

According to incredible rulings of the state’s lower courts, she could either let her five-year-old daughter stay overnight alone with a woman who causes the child severe emotional distress and exposes her to attitudes and behavior that violate Barlow’s core faith beliefs … or go to jail.

That any caring mother should be placed in such a dilemma tells us just how serious things have become for conscientious moms and dads in a judicial system often more preoccupied with political correctness than parental rights.

Barlow was five months pregnant (by artificial insemination) with her daughter when she and her then-girlfriend, Keri Jones, obtained a civil union in Vermont. Both women were residents of Utah, which doesn’t recognize civil unions, and the state offered Jones no legal right to parental status of any kind, with regard to Barlow’s child.

Less than two years later, Barlow learned that her partner was engaged in an affair with another woman, and elected to dissolve their relationship. Soon afterwards, she became a Christian, renounced her former lesbian behavior, and, moved her child out of the lesbian environment and eventually to another state.

Jones, however, suddenly showed an aggressive new interest in cultivating a parenting relationship with Barlow’s child. She sued, and – in an unprecedented act of judicial activism and disregard for both Utah and United States Supreme Court decisions – a district court judge awarded her parental standing and visitation rights roughly equal to what a biological father would receive.

“The child’s best interest is not served by enforced visitation with a woman who, according to the U.S. Constitution, state law, and state public policy, has no legal claim for parental standing,” says Frank Mylar, an Alliance Defense Fund allied attorney who is representing Barlow. “It's unconscionable to take parental rights away from a loving mom to appease the demands of a legal stranger.

The "unconscionable" came pretty easily to the lower court judges, who assigned a Commissioners and a guardian ad litem to represent the child’s interests and evaluate all information relative to the custody situation. Bad enough to trample the constitutional presumption that a fit parent should decide what is best for her child; even worse, both the guardian and Commissioner brought a heavy personal bias to their responsibilities. They chose to ignore not only Barlow’s wishes for her own daughter, but the findings of a child psychologist (who reported that interacting with Jones caused serious emotional upheaval for the child).

Why? Continued...