A county court has granted the request of an Illinois lesbian woman that she take custody of her two young children, who will now go to live with her and her homosexual lover, 1,800 miles away from her ex-husband with whom the children had been living.
Taro Iwata, who lives in Champaign, IL, reportedly plans to appeal the decision to take their two young children to live with ex-wife Karen Kelsky in Eugene, Oregon.
Iwata’s lawyer, Jason Craddock, says Champaign County Judge John Kennedy found that Kelsky, an associate professor of East Asian Languages and Culture and Anthropology at the University of Illinois and an activist on homosexual issues, would provide a preferable home for the children because the relationship between Kelsky and her partner, deemed equivalent to heterosexual marriage, would be beneficial to the children’s quality of life.
The children, according to Craddock, enjoy a significantly closer relationship with their father than with Kelsky.
"Even from a ‘coldly’ legal standpoint, this decision is subversive," said Craddock, according to the Illinois Family Institute.
"It flies squarely in the face of decades of removal jurisprudence in Illinois, as Illinois courts historically and consistently give great weight to the relationship enjoyed between children and their non-custodial parents, and typically allow removal only where the visitation time would either remain the same or increase after the move," he continued. "Also, Illinois courts have never allowed removal where a custodial parent desired to move to a place in order to move in with a paramour or when such a move would lower the family’s standard of living. …
"This decision clearly constitutes an activist decision, with Judge Kennedy going boldly where the Illinois legislature expressly declined to go before." The Illinois House of Representatives last year struck down a civil unions measure that would have extended some marriage privileges to homosexual couples.
Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute called the decision "lurid."
"Perhaps most troubling of all is that [Kennedy] has arrogantly decided that subordinating the relationship of father and children to the profoundly disordered relationship of mother and homosexual partner serves the best interests of the children," wrote Higgins. "It’s a wonder that Kennedy can sleep at night."
Contact information:
Hon. John R. Kennedy
Courtroom F
Champaign county circuit court
101 East Main Street
Urbana, IL 61801-2703
(217) 384-3867
