Here We Go: SBC Leaders Russell Moore, R. Albert Mohler Jr., Grieve New York Court’s Expansion of Parenthood

The decision by New York’s highest court to expand custody and visitation rights to “de facto parents” serves as evidence same-sex marriage advocates desire to overthrow humanity’s oldest institution and as part of “a major turning point in human history,” Southern Baptist leaders said.

The New York State Court of Appeals ruled Aug. 30 a person who is neither the biological parent nor adoptive parent/guardian of a child may seek custody and visitation rights, The New York Times reported.

The court, which overturned its own 25-year-old opinion, found its previous limitation of “parent” to a relationship based on biology or adoption “has become unworkable when applied to increasingly varied familial relationships” — relationships that apparently refer primarily to same-sex unions.

Ruling in a legal dispute between lesbians who were formerly an engaged couple, the Court of Appeals said, “[W]here a partner shows by clear and convincing evidence that the parties agree to conceive a child and to raise the child together, the nonbiological, nonadoptive partner has standing to seek visitation and custody,” according to The Times.

Describing the decision as “a tragedy,” Southern Baptist ethicist Russell Moore said in written comments for Baptist Press, “Advocates of marriage redefinition told us repeatedly that they wished merely to expand the family, not to undo the oldest institution in our common humanity. This ruling shows otherwise. And, as usual, children will pay the highest price.

“Children need the stability and rootedness that comes from having a father and mother, adopted or biological,” said Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.

R. Albert Mohler Jr, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said it is difficult “to imagine a story more important than this” from a Christian worldview perspective.

“This is a major turning point in human history, not just this one court case of New York, but the larger turn that we are now experiencing in Western cultures towards the redefinition of human sexuality, of gender, of personal identity and inevitably, of course, marriage and the family, including parenthood,” Mohler said in his Thursday (Sept. 1) podcast, according to a transcript of “The Briefing.”

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SOURCE: Baptist Press
Tom Strode