Unwelcome Rulings - So much for activist judges. There were two legal setbacks for gay rights in court decisions this week, but bad underlying facts suggest that neither will be groundbreaking.

A Virginia court in the Shenandoah Valley town of Winchester (yes, like the rifle) has held that it has jurisdiction over a custody battle from a dissolved Vermont civil union. The messy facts of the case include an alledged "former lesbian" who fled with her biological child to her family's hometown, where she has sought legal aid from anti-gay religious groups. The case is being decried by gay activists as the first judicial use of the new Affirmation of Marriage Act. Judge Prosser rejected the normal principle that states defer to each other's child custody rulings, citing strong public policy against legal rights for same-sex couples. As a result, gay groups are saying Virginia's SuperDOMA will make the Commonwealth "the Las Vegas of gay divorce."

The case -- still in its early-stage proceedings -- wasn't so cut and dried to begin with. The couple had tenuous contacts with Vermont: they resided in Loudon County at the time the child was conceived and born and only moved to New England for a brief period. While they got a Vermont judge to rule in the case, it seems like they were trying to import foreign law into their home jurisdiction. Moreover, I found interesting -- if true -- the allegation that "Vermont's civil union law doesn't address parentage." Without researching it, my guess is that while the CU law makes the relationship equivalent to straight marriage for all statutory purposes, the Vermont legislature left open whether it also applies to every common law marriage right. Add one more argument for why marriage equality is so important.

Also in recent court news, the military's appellate court rejected constitutional challenges to the military's sodomy statute. In a narrow ruling, the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces threw out the case of a former Air Force sergeant, finding that the liberty interests protected by Lawrence v. Texas did not cover supposedly consensual relations between superiors and subordinates in the same military command.