The first paragraph of this 1975 article reads, "A jury of 10 men and two women decided today that the 9-year-old son of a self-described lesbian should be taken from his mother and placed in the custody of his father."The article quotes Mary Jo Risher's older son as describing her lesbian relationship as "a source of embarassment to him."[1]

This 1993 article features the case of Sharon Bottoms in Richmond Virginia. The article opens, "In an unusual custody battle, a circuit court here tonight upheld a lower court's decision to take a 2-year-old boy away from his mother and give him to her mother for rearing.

'The mother's conduct is illegal and immoral and renders her an unfit parent,' Judge Duford M. Parsons Jr. of Henrico Court said in endorsing the earlier decision of the county's juvenile court."[2]

This 1994 article continues to focus on Sharon Bottom's custody case: "'The social science evidence showed that a person's sexual orientation does not strongly correlate with that person's fitness as a parent,' Judge Sam W. Coleman 3d wrote for the court, which reunited Sharon Bottoms, 24, of Richmond, with her son Tyler Dostou, 2." The article features an enlarged quote stating "A mother's care outweighs sodomy laws, a judge rules."[3]

As this 1996 article shows, custody battles continued, this one in Florida where a judge gave custody of a 12-year-old girl to her father, even though he was a convicted of murdering his first wife.[4]

The opening paragraph of this 1980 article reads, "Even Rosemary Dempsey acknowledges that the recent court decision allowing her to keep her two children does not in itself set a legal precedent. But the decision, along with similar ones across the country, is part of a pattern in which more and more judges are awarding custody of children to homosexual mothers."[5]