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Whose God Wins? For divorcing parents, it’s not clear.  By Dahlia Lithwich

NEWSWEEK March 8, 2010  http://www.newsweek.com/id/234188

 

Joseph Reyes, an Afghanistan veteran and law student, converted to Judaism when he married Rebecca Shapiro in 2004. When they split up in 2008, Rebecca won primary custody of their daughter and Joseph got regular visitation. The Reyeses had allegedly agreed to raise their child Jewish, but Joseph, seeking to expose his 3-year-old to his Catholic faith, had her baptized last November. When Rebecca found out, she obtained a temporary restraining order prohibiting Joseph from “exposing Ela Reyes to any other religion other than the Jewish religion during his visitation.” But Joseph then took his daughter to Catholic mass on Jan. 17, with a local TV news crew in tow, prompting his ex-wife’s lawyers to demand he be held in criminal contempt—with a maximum punishment of six months in prison. Can a court decide what religion your child will be?

Joseph Reyes says no, and once he decided to fight for his religious liberty in the courts of cable television, complicated legal issues were reduced to black and white. Headlines shrieked that a father faced jail time for exposing his daughter to God. The case sounds very constitutional. But instead of legal analysis we’ve mostly gotten typically nasty divorce-court spitballs. For instance, Joseph now says he wasn’t really Jewish. He says he converted to Judaism “under duress” to mollify his in-laws, and that Rebecca is a bully. And he and his lawyer requested, and won, a new judge because the original judge, Edward Jordan, is Jewish. None of this has anything to do with the actual case, but it does get the blood pressure soaring.

Since Joseph doesn’t dispute that he violated the restraining order, the only important issue here is whether a family-court judge can order divorcing spouses to raise a child in just one religion. In her court pleadings, Rebecca Reyes argues that she has sole custody of Ela, that the couple agreed to raise the child Jewish and sent her to a Jewish preschool, and that exposure to another religion would “confuse” her.

Joseph, in his pleadings, says Ela was not harmed by her baptism, and that under Illinois law a noncustodial parent can attend religious services with his or her child unless there is “proof of harm to the child” or it “interferes with the custodial parent’s selection of the child’s religion.” Finally, Joseph says the restraining order violates his religious freedom. And that’s the stuff headlines are made of.

I polled family lawyers as to how often they had come across an order like Judge Jordan’s. Some said it’s uncommon; others disagreed. But one thing is clear: family courts interfere with constitutional freedoms all the time. A family-court judge infringes on your right to free speech when he bars you from speaking ill of your ex-husband in front on the kids. She can prevent you from interstate travel if you seek to move your child away from your ex. The Bill of Rights isn’t the last word in divorce proceedings, but when a court restrains fundamental constitutional freedoms, like speech, travel, or religion, it’s usually for an important reason: the best interest of your child. This is the interest we hear about least in the Reyes case, amid the fulminating over parental rights.

As Joseph Gitlin, a prominent Chicago family lawyer, points out, in Illinois the custodial parent is permitted, by statute, to “determine the child’s upbringing, including, but not limited to, his education, health care, and religious training.” This necessarily means the other parent will be shut out of such decisions. The tricky question in the Reyes case is whether religion is more a zero-sum proposition or a buffet table. How does exposing a child to two religions differ from exposing her to two languages or teaching her to play two instruments?

Missouri family lawyer Michael Albano warns that back when family-court judges could micromanage parental religious practices, lesbians, for instance, were denied custody and could not even associate with their partners. “Courts cannot police every situation,” he says, and that means “generally allowing both parents to expose the child to their religious beliefs.” When forced to, some state courts have struck down divorce decrees requiring a single religion for a child; others have upheld them. As Judge Jordan learned, attempting to balance one parent’s religious freedom against the other parent’s religious exceptionalism rarely works, because, as Joe Gitlin puts it, for most of us “there’s always only one way to heaven, and it’s mine.” But either way, every lawyer I spoke to agreed that there are plenty of good ways to modify custody arrangements. Violating those arrangements on live television isn’t one of them.

 

That’s what happened in November to Rebecca Shapiro Reyes, a Chicago woman who has found herself at the center of a particularly ugly divorce battle. In a conflict widely reported in the Chicago and national media (including “20/20” appearances), Shapiro Reyes, an attorney, and Joseph Reyes, an Afghanistan war veteran and law student, are feuding over the religious upbringing of their daughter Ela.

Joseph, who claims to have become newly committed to Catholicism, now wants to expose Ela to both faiths. Not surprisingly, Rebecca, who has said being Jewish is a “humongous part of who I am,” is unhappy with this turn of events.

What’s particularly disturbing about this case is that, unlike in many interfaith marriages where no one broaches the topic of religion until after the children are born, Rebecca and Joseph appeared to have agreed on Judaism early on.

The two married in a Jewish ceremony and had a Jewish naming ceremony shortly after Ela’s birth. Later, Joseph converted to Judaism; he now says it was “under duress,” a charge Rebecca has denied.

The Reyes separated in 2008 and are still in the process of legally divorcing. For now, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, Rebecca has sole custody of Ela and Joseph takes her every other weekend. It was on one of those weekends this fall that Joseph had Ela baptized, e-mailing the photos to Rebecca. Shocked and hurt, Rebecca responded with a court order temporarily barring Joseph from exposing Ela to any religion other than Judaism. But in January Joseph called TV news crews and invited them to accompany him as he defied the order by bringing his daughter to Mass at Chicago’s Holy Name Cathedral. Rebecca’s lawyers pressed criminal charges for violating the order, and if convicted, Joseph faces up to six months in jail. The criminal charges may have been an overreaction. Indeed, they spurred Joseph and his PR team to shoot out a press release (repeated verbatim in the headlines of many news articles) saying “father faces jail time for taking daughter to church.”

Alarmingly, in depicting himself as a victim and in lashing out at his Jewish ex, Joseph seems hell-bent on fueling a religious war.

And in appealing for financial help, the site notes that Joseph and his family do not “have the means to take on the Shapiro’s [sic] and their millions.”

Not surprisingly, I’m siding with Rebecca, as ridiculous as it is to take sides in a conflict in which no one can really win. I’ve actually become a bit obsessed with the case, no doubt because it’s easy for me to identify with an intermarried, 30-something Jewish woman with a 3-year-old daughter.

My sympathy for Rebecca comes not just because I think it’s better for a child to be raised in one religion. It’s because Joseph seems not only anti-Semitic, but also immature and disingenuous.

Considering that he did not become Jewish until years after the wedding, his conversion-by-the-sword story is hard to believe. As is his claim that he never agreed to raise Ela Jewish. Whether they explicitly discussed this or not, it’s not hard to see why Rebecca would assume, especially after he converted, that this was the plan.

Indeed, in taking conversion classes, he surely learned that no mainstream Jewish leaders think you can be raised in both religions, nor do they believe, as Joseph argued on “20/20” that “Catholicism falls right under the umbrella of Judaism.”

Not to mention that exposing a child to Christianity is one thing, but having her baptized is quite another.

Anyone with a rudimentary awareness of Jewish history knows that for much of history Christians forced Jews to convert. Today, many Jews are rightly horrified when Mormons posthumously baptize Holocaust victims. The image of a Jewish child baptized without her mother’s permission is inflammatory and viscerally upsetting, even to the most liberal of Jews.

In some ways, the Reyes case represents the ultimate nightmare of many intermarried Jews. Some might see the case as a cautionary tale against intermarriage, particularly for people who want to raise Jewish children. Marry a gentile, they might say, and look what can happen!

It’s certainly true that, when couples divorce, the partners’ differences, whatever they are, come into sharp relief and often provoke tensions. All other things being equal, interfaith divorce, like interfaith marriage, is probably harder, and the Reyes case points to the need for open, serious communication early in a relationship to make sure expectations about religion are not just assumed, but that both partners understand exactly what they are agreeing to.

However, I’ve seen enough ugly divorces to know that, even without religious differences, there is plenty to fight about. Whether the conflict is money, custody or myriad other issues, the real problem is that when marriages dissolve, parents often become so angry that hurting their exes becomes the paramount goal.

Let’s hope the Reyes war subsides soon and that, however she is raised, little Ela finds peace and happiness.