2 thoughts on “Scenes on the Road to Marriage Equality

  1. A friend of mine needs help. This is not a joke, this is real and immediate. I don’t know what posting this will accomplish, but if anyone has ideas, throw them out please.
    Young Palestinian woman with three kids – all US citizens, living in Midwest. She divorced her Pali husband several years ago and has been living under state of siege ever since from him, his family, her family, their community, etc. He’s not a nice guy, don’t get semantic – raped her at 16 and whenever he felt like it, beat her for ten years, threw her down the stairs while she was 8 months pregnant. They have shared custody because it is a “no-fault” state, which means unless he rapes one of the girls, he cannot be denied custody.
    Someone within his family with a conscience called her to tell her that he obtained Jordanian passports for the kids, and next time he gets custody is planning to abduct them to Jordan. If she goes to Jordan, they will kill her. If she goes to West Bank they already bribed the PA to bury the body. His family has money and own big office buildings in Ramallah.
    Jordanian law is such that it will be impossible to get them back from Jordan without hiring mercenaries and paying a lot of people off. I’m not joking, this is completely serious. By that time her girls, 8 and 11 will be married off and raped – they already found them husbands – living in some Jordanian slum.
    She files police reports every two weeks that they are going to kill her and take the kids overseas. The cops say, call us when he is in your house with an axe in his hand. Divorce attorney is useless – they don’t exactly teach this in school.
    This is life and death, right now. Options?

  2. Er… this is by far the most unusual comment I’ve ever read here! OK…. here’s the little I know about navigating through family law cases: Under any shared custody arrangement both parents have to agree to get passports for the children — one parent alone cannot obtain them.
    Presumably that’s why someone would get foreign instead of American passports for them: American authorities would not grant them. (Well….unless there was fraud, and I’ve heard of one case like that too.) Here’s the webpage about childrens’ passports.
    If the kids are US citizens the US should have the ability to prevent them from going overseas. The names on those passports should be on national ticket/passport watchlist databases. Call ICE or CPB first. Maybe the FBI too (in the event that it could qualify as an international kidnapping of an American, which is something they take pretty seriously). State Department…. probably third or fourth. The State Department will need to know about the issue in case someone tries to leverage their foreign citizenship.
    It’s illegal to move American citizen children out of America without joint parental consent. No legal way out of that. If your friend is in the right and has documented information that backs her up she should have something to work with.

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