Lisa Miller is Not Rosa Parks

As the days turn to weeks with no sign of Lisa Miller, or seven year old Isabella Miller-Jenkins, more and more people emerge to opine about the fugitive's location. Her attorneys at Liberty Counsel don't know where she is. Her friends at Americans for Truth About Homosexuality don't know where she is. Concerned Women for America, oddly, is hoping that one day Lisa can "return to her home state," sparking rumors that someone knows her whereabouts.

The two, apparently, have vanished, with Lisa ignoring any and all legal mandates along the way. And in doing so, she has become what the evangelical right is lauding as the newest, freshest, most ungay face of civil disobedience.

I'm sorry, could someone please explain that to me?

Linda Wall, a friend of Miller, puts it this way: “Was it Harriet Tubman who risked her life for the underground railroad for the black community? Maybe I am committed to this for the children I might be that one voice." Okay, that sentence is grammatical gibberish. Anyone else?

Debbie Thurman, who runs an ex-gay ministry, and has written extensively about the righteousness of Lisa's flight, explains: "Lisa Miller is a mother who would give up her life to save her child. Of that there is no doubt. She apparently has chosen to forfeit a large measure of her liberty, personal property and pursuit of happiness in assuring that child her God-ordained future, much as a group of patriots pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor more than two centuries ago to establish this nation."

Say what?! Lisa Miller and Harriet Tubman in the same sentence?! Lisa Miller likened to the founding fathers?! No, sorry folks, Lisa Miller is nothing but a common criminal, plain and simple. Not only is she unlawfully maintaining custody of her daughter, she is actively defying the court orders mandating she turn Isabella over to her other mother, Janet Jenkins. What she is doing is a crime, plain and simple. No matter how you try to spin it, she is no great civil disobedient.

Civil disorder comes in many forms, all of which have the same goal: to expose failure of a government system, inequity of law and tyranny of person through non-violent means. It means actively disengaging in a way that calls attention to the short-comings of a law, or system of laws. It means risking arrest to make a statement.

Certainly what it doesn't include is hiding behind the laws of one state and then poof!, disappearing when things don't go your way. And what terrible law is Lisa Miller protesting? The law that guarantees children are looked after by two legal parents during the time of their minority, no matter the marital status? Also, I'm pretty sure the rules of civil disobedience don't include forcibly removing a seven year old from society.

In all of this idolizing and canonizing, the Friends of Lisa Miller have conveniently ignored a crucial fact: Lisa Miller isn't in hiding because the government has been systematically disenfranchising straight, white, religious women in favor of lesbian ex-partners. Lisa Miller got a divorce, didn't like the outcome of a custody battle and took Isabella, one of almost 350,000 children kidnapped by a parent every year, into hiding.

The crappy thing about divorce when children are involved is that it requires the parents, who no longer want to be in each other's lives, to maintain some sort of amicable relationship as they share the responsibility of raising kids. And, as I've hypothesized before, Lisa Miller is pretty sick about maintaining any ties to her lesbian heathen past. And since she couldn't make Janet Jenkins go away, she jumped ship. She's not running because she wants to save the world from gay ex-spouses, she's running because she doesn't want to deal with her own.

Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Gandhi, the Dalai Lama -- these are the brave activists who focused the political dialogue about equality and human rights, and who changed the landscape for the better. Lisa Miller isn't one of them. She's nothing more than the new poster child for parental child abductors.

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