Since 2005, when Les Kinsolving first wrote a column about it, WorldNetDaily has regularly kept up with a lesbian child-custody case that became a right-wing cause celebre because the biological mother of the child, Lisa Miller — who, in the words of one WND article, “left the homosexual lifestyle and became a Christian” — repeatedly violated court orders to allow her former partner, Janet Jenkins, to visit the child. The two women had obtained a civil union in Vermont prior to breaking up.
The typical WND article on the case uncritically repeated the claims of Miller’s lawyer, the right-wing Liberty Counsel, claiming that Miller moved from Vermont to Virginia and that any court order issued relating to her civil union cannot be enforced in a state like Virginia that does not recognize civil unions or same-sex marriage from other states. WND has denigrated Jenkins as someone who has “neither a blood nor an adoptive relationship” with the girl and repeated unsubstantiated allegations that the girl “reported being compelled to bathe naked with Jenkins while visiting and came home speaking of suicide.” WND even highlighted a claim from Liberty Counsel that an attorney Jenkins hired withdrew “after he was indicted for obstructing justice and tampering with evidence regarding a murder that occurred in his home, where his college male friend was sodomized and killed,” even though it’s irrelevant to the case at hand.
Ultimately, the Vermont court awarded custody of the child to Jenkins as a way to ensure access to the child. WND reported on Liberty Counsel’s appeal of that ruling in a Dec. 11 article by Bob Unruh that again repeated the unsubstantiated smears of Jenkins.
WND has been curiously silent, however, about events since then. As Right Wing Watch has detailed, Miller and the girl have disappeared — opening her up to child abduction charges — and Liberty Counsel and its leader, Mathew Staver, don’t want to talk about it, to the point of deleting a Facebook group it ran dedicated to the case. ABC News has reported that Miller and the girl have apparently been missing since September.
That Dec. 11 article is the last thing WND has reported on the case. Apparently, if Liberty Counsel has nothing to say about it, WND doesn’t either.