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>[Athiests who reveal themselves] risk losing their children, especially in New York State, where custody is often given to the more religious parent. Interest

>[Athiests who reveal themselves] risk losing their children, especially in New York State, where custody is often given to the more religious parent. Interesting, I wonder why that would be? Is it because American courts are biased towards religious people in general? But in that case, wouldn't a liberal state like New York be less biased? Could it possibly be because of bias of courts in New York towards the Jewish community?

ars 11y ago
It's an inaccurate statement. More accurately the courts award custody to the parent that did not change in religiosity. In this case it's the more religious parent, but it can be the reverse in other cases.
- mercurial 11y ago
  > More accurately the courts award custody to the parent that did not change in religiosity. Why?
  - patmcc 11y ago
    Stability is generally rewarded - sudden drastic changes to a primary parent's living situation, religion, employment, etc. is not seen as great for children. Also, sudden shifts in behaviour can happen because of serious mental illness (not saying that's true here), which courts would understandably be worried about. If a family was mostly happy, healthy, and stable, and one parent decided to leave the family and make drastic changes (to a new religion/community/city/whatever), the safe thing would probably be to leave the kids with the piece of the family that hasn't drastically changed. Most of the time, anyway.
bjourne 11y ago
In courts all around the (Western) word custody courts are heavily biased towards the mother. It would be very surprising if religiousness where a more important factor in New York State. I think the article is plain wrong on that point and that the religious level of the parents doesn't make any difference at all.
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  They could be correlated. On the whole, women are more religious than men, so we should expect that if custody is biased towards the mother, custody is biased towards the religious.

ars 11y ago

It's an inaccurate statement. More accurately the courts award custody to the parent that did not change in religiosity. In this case it's the more religious parent, but it can be the reverse in other cases.

mercurial 11y ago
> More accurately the courts award custody to the parent that did not change in religiosity. Why?
- patmcc 11y ago
  Stability is generally rewarded - sudden drastic changes to a primary parent's living situation, religion, employment, etc. is not seen as great for children. Also, sudden shifts in behaviour can happen because of serious mental illness (not saying that's true here), which courts would understandably be worried about. If a family was mostly happy, healthy, and stable, and one parent decided to leave the family and make drastic changes (to a new religion/community/city/whatever), the safe thing would probably be to leave the kids with the piece of the family that hasn't drastically changed. Most of the time, anyway.

bjourne 11y ago

In courts all around the (Western) word custody courts are heavily biased towards the mother. It would be very surprising if religiousness where a more important factor in New York State. I think the article is plain wrong on that point and that the religious level of the parents doesn't make any difference at all.

sliverstorm 11y ago
They could be correlated. On the whole, women are more religious than men, so we should expect that if custody is biased towards the mother, custody is biased towards the religious.