5th try to protect child custody for troops - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

5th try to protect child custody for troops

An Ohio congressman is hoping the fifth time is a charm in his efforts to give special child custody protection to service members.

Four times, the House of Representatives has passed legislation sponsored by Rep. Michael Turner, R-Ohio, to prevent past, present or future deployments from being used against a service member as the basis for determining or changing child custody arrangements.

Four times, Turner has run into opposition from the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Defense Department, and his legislation has been rejected.

Turner is back. On Wednesday, the military personnel subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee agreed to include his legislation in the 2011 defense authorization bill. He expects it will pass the committee, again, without any dissent and will also easily pass the House.

It remains unclear if anything has changed in the Senate or Defense Department that will end years of opposition.

Turner said his legislation is “straightforward” in trying to protect service members from losing custody of a child solely because of their military service. Fifteen states have laws that provide varying degrees of protection, he said, but there is no single standard, and nothing prevents an ex-spouse from jurisdiction-shopping to file for a change in custody in one of the states without any protections for a service member.

“This seems like something we would all want to do,” Turner said, noting that military parents have come home from deployments to find child custody arrangements were changed while they were away without any notice. And there are cases where just the possibility of deployment has resulted in the loss of custody, he said.

“It is hard to understand why getting this protection is so hard,” he said.

The Pentagon and Senate Armed Services Committee have objected to the legislation because they say there are too few cases to warrant a change in federal law. There have also been objections from states’-rights supporters, who believe the federal government has no business getting involved in child custody issues that are determined by state and local courts. There also are objections from the legal community, which argues that child custody is not the same as other legal and financial protections covered by the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, because the primary purpose in child custody rulings is to look out for the best interests of a child, not a parent.

Turner had hoped that Defense Secretary Robert Gates would help reach a compromise after Gates promised at a hearing earlier this year to study the issue and get back to the lawmaker. “I never heard anything from him,” Turner said.

Under Turner’s legislation, protection against permanent changes in child custody arrangements would apply only to deployments related to a contingency operation. That means anyone on a routine deployment would not be covered. Temporary child custody orders would be allowed if a court thought the needs of a child required a change.

DISCUSS: Child custody