Lisa Miller

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.5 • 934 Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2020

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

To close our season, the story of Lisa Miller, an American woman who gave birth to a child coparented with her partner Janet Jenkins, and then left Janet, became a self-proclaimed ex-lesbian, sued for single custody of their daughter, and when the courts decided against her, abducted their child and fled the country with the assistance of well-connected far-right pastors in 2009. Lisa and their daughter, Isabella, are still missing.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Badgays, a podcast all about evil and complicated queer people in history.
0:20.7	My name is Hugh Lemmy. I'm a writer and author. And I'm Ben Miller, a podcast all about evil and complicated queer people in history.
0:21.7	My name's Hugh Lemmy.
0:22.5	I'm a writer and author.
0:27.3	And I'm Ben Miller, a writer, researcher, and member of the board of the Shulis Museum in Berlin.
0:32.0	And last week we talked about the charming, turned, charmless man, Morrissey.
0:33.4	Who are you talking about this week, Ben?
0:41.7	Well, before I introduce our subject this week, I want to talk about something that we haven't spoken a lot about on this show, and that is parenting.
0:48.7	In the U.S. legal context, parenting and parental rights have long been a central cause of the gay rights movement.
0:54.7	And we've talked a lot of stuff on this show about the project of gay rights as such, but it is important to think about the many people who gay rights protections have protected, and the homophobic, never mind
1:00.0	misogynistic and patriarchal horrors of family law in the United States, that the project
1:04.6	of gay rights has to some extent attempted to ameliorate. So in the United States, a legal
1:10.4	parent is the person who is recognized by law as a child's parent.
1:13.6	They have the legal right to custody of that child, to make decisions about that child's health, education, and well-being.
1:20.6	Legal parents are obligated to support children financially.
1:23.6	In many states, people who are not legal parents do not have any decision-making
1:28.4	authority in those areas, even if they live with a child and function as the parent. They can't
1:33.6	do things like consent to medical care, approve school field trips, have rights to custody or
1:38.7	visitation if something happens to the legal parent or to their relationship with the legal
1:42.4	parent. They cannot get health insurance for their child through their employer, things like that.
1:48.0	And in the absence of a will, of course, they cannot pass property or benefits on to a child.
1:53.3	So when a legally married couple has a child, they are both automatically presumed to be the legal
	...

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