Home › Forums › Family Matters › Enforcement of gittin in civil court custody cases in New York › Reply To: Enforcement of gittin in civil court custody cases in New York
Like it or not, the ruling makes sense. It does in effect make any Beis Din effort that tries to tie religious observance to terms of a Get useless, as a person can simply lie in the arbitration about it and there is no enforcement option afterwards. From a secular standpoint it makes no sense that a person should lose custody of their children because their beliefs changed. Consider an alternative, should courts be allowed to remove children from families that become more religious, on the specious basis that this is somehow harmful to children. If we don’t recognize that changing religious standards is harmful to children (seems like the whole Baal Teshuva movement, which much of the Orthodox community long supports, does not believe that changing religious standards causes major harm; somehow when it comes to divorce this concept suddenly matters), then the provisions to live a certain religious lifestyle simply boil down to, you can have custody if you believe in God “X”, which is clearly something the courts cannot be involved in and should have no legal standing in a US court.