Court Opinion

ID: 9709936
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 03:57:55.65071+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:52.869295
License: Public Domain

Mr. Chief Justice Klingbiel, dissenting: In my opinion the court’s construction of this statute is completely unwarranted, either by law or by common sense. By its terms it precludes only custody or control, not visitation rights, and by no stretch of the imagination can the two be equated. To say that a grant of visitation rights involves a grant of control is to ignore not only common definitions but long established judicial usage. In Burge v. Burge, 88 111. 164, a divorce case, this court had occasion to consider visitation rights. The opinion says, in part, that “It is urged that the decree giving the care, custody, control and education of the children to defendant in error is too broad, as it makes no provision for plaintiff in error to visit and see them. We do not see that this is error. We understand it to be his legal right to visit his children, at convenient and proper times, in a decent and respectful manner, and without using improper influences to dissatisfy them with their mother, or to influence them to go with him. He, of course, in, visiting them, must be governed by the rules of propriety, and has no right, in any manner, to abuse the right, and if he should, he might properly be debarred the privilege.” It was clearly held that though the mother had sole care, custody, “control” and education the father nevertheless was entitled to visit, the implication being unmistakable that a visit does not involve control. Judicial recognition of the difference in cases where custody of children is involved in divorce matters is. too well known to require further elaboration here. There is no call for different definitions in cases of children born out of wedlock. The majority opinion sets forth a definition of “control” which nowhere mentions visitation, and then proceeds with the non sequitur that a visitation right necessarily involves it. To “visit”, — a term which the opinion fails to define in spite of the fact that it is the very act involved here — means simply to go to see or pay a call upon. (Webster’s New Second International Dictionary, 2d ed., 1939.) If a right is granted to temporarily remove the child from time to time and thus to assume some duty to manage or oversee, it is no longer a mere right to visit. But that is a different matter. What the court is writing into the statute here is a prohibition of a father’s right merely to see or pay a call upon his child. Of all the matters which ought not be made the subject of generalized command for all cases, none is more important than the relationship of parent to child. Nowhere is this thought better expressed than in the opinion of the court in Commonwealth v. Rozanski; 206 Pa. Super. 397, 213 A. 2d 155, where it was said “To state as a matter of law that the visits of a putative father are always detrimental to the illegitimate child’s best interests is to exalt rule over reality. This approach ignores the growing recognition in our courts, and in courts throughout the nation, of the need to determine the welfare of each child in light of his own particular needs and circumstances.” Neither the language of our statute nor any sensible interpretation of “policy” justifies this court in depriving a putative father of the society of his child under any and all circumstances. Indeed, many instances can arise in which visits by the father would be in the best interests of the child and of humanity as well. The factors involved are too diverse to be reducible to some mechanical prohibition, and the question ought to be decided on the basis of the individual case. I would reverse the Appellate Court judgment in this case and affirm the decree of the circuit court.