Sharing the Bible's historic understanding of homosexuality, in a 22-year-old church pamphlet, got Finnish member of Parliament Päivi Räsänen criminally fined for "hate speech" and the pamphlet's publisher ordered to destroy the offending passages, prompting international alarm and attention from President Trump's religious liberty commission this summer. 

Though Räsänen's lawyers are appealing the Finnish Supreme Court's ruling to the European Court of Human Rights, the conviction is already limiting her movements, with the U.K. revoking Räsänen's travel authorization so that she couldn't speak in person at a religious liberty conference last month.

Maine's top court found a different way to mitigate the Bible's influence this week: deny it to children.

In a decision likely to end up before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court upheld a lower court order in a custody dispute that gives father Matthew Bradeen a veto over mother Emily Bickford's exposure of their daughter Ava "to the teachings of any religious philosophy or of the Bible in general."

District Judge Jennifer Nofsinger's Dec. 13, 2024 order also lets Bradeen nix Ava's attendance at "any services, gatherings, or events associated with Calvary Chapel," where Bickford attends; any "material, literature, video, or other messaging associated with" the church; and contact with any Calvary Chapel member other than her mother.

The father's expert witness on "cults," Janja Lalich, deemed the Portland branch of the global fellowship of independent churches, whose founder was portrayed by six-time Emmy winner Kelsey Grammer in the 2023 movie Jesus Revolution, a "cultic organization."

Though phrased as requiring the parents to work together for the girl's good, the order functionally gives Bradeen "sole authority" over Ava's exposure to heavenly matters, Bickford's lawyers at Liberty Counsel said, pledging to petition SCOTUS. 

"Since December 2014," when Ava was nearly two years old, "Bradeen has denied every request" by Bickford, it said. The mother was simply "taking her daughter to a church that holds mainstream biblical views," making "the court’s total prohibition on her religious decision-making authority [...] a direct infringement on her right to direct the religious upbringing of her child."

"This opinion goes against other state court decisions involving custody in the context of religious free exercise rights and ignores precedent from the U.S. Supreme Court," Liberty Counsel founder and Chairman Mat Staver said. 

"We are in the process of moving to the next step" of petitioning SCOTUS, Staver told Just the News on Friday. 

He said the ruling is an "outlier" compared to other state court decisions, as the Maine Supreme Judicial Court acknowledges, but it also contradicts the court's own precedent to reach an "unprecedented conclusion," that a fit parent has no First Amendment free exercise rights. "That's astounding," Staver said.

Lower standard for government when allocating rights 'between a child’s parents'

Liberty Counsel emphasized that Judge Nofsinger's order adopted Bradeen's practice of writing "god" in lowercase, which shows "obvious and unconstitutional" hostility toward Christianity – a lure for SCOTUS to accept the case. 

The lowercase "god" appears 19 times in the custody order, by the count of Just the News, 11 of those in a lengthy quote from a sermon by Bickford's pastor about the custody battle, which all refer to the Christian God rather than idols Christians regard as false gods. The implication is that Nofsinger refuses to even respect Christians' understanding of their own God.

When the high court overturned administrative and court rulings against Christian baker Jack Phillips for refusing to design a same-sex wedding cake in 2017, it was on the basis of official hostility toward his religious views, not that Phillips had a First Amendment exception to public accommodation laws on the basis of religion.

SCOTUS might also be surprised by the state supreme court's finding that strict scrutiny, the most difficult legal standard for governments to meet, "does not apply to an allocation of parental rights between a child’s parents," telling Judge Nofsinger she needed only to use the lower "best interest of the child" standard.

The ruling dismissed the relevance of SCOTUS precedents regarding "dispute[s] between the parents and the State" or a third party, such as the Amish schooling case Yoder. Contrary state court rulings "do not explain why a restriction on religious parental rights would trigger strict scrutiny" but not restrictions on "any other aspect of a parent’s fundamental rights."

Bradeen's lawyer, Michelle King, told The Maine Monitor she "anticipated all along" SCOTUS might accept the case, but called the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruling "well thought-out and reasoned."

Conservative critics disagreed. National Review writer Michael Brendan Dougherty quipped that the ruling "tries to give God a restraining order."

Red flag: evangelizing her father so he doesn't go to hell

Nofsinger's custody order took pains to emphasize she was "not taking a position on any religious principle" or substantively comparing "the religious values held by" each of Ava's parents, but rather analyzing "the effect of the messaging" to the girl from her mother's church, which "risks demonizing" her father and "psychologically damaging the child."

The order is bulging with critical descriptions of both Calvary Chapel as an international fellowship and the Portland congregation specifically, however. 

Because its pastor teaches "verse by verse, chapter by chapter," Ava has heard messages on "warfare, fallen angels, and eternal suffering" and a future seven-year tribulation under the antichrist. The girl repeatedly evangelizes her father because she is afraid he will be "left behind" and that he and Ava's half-sister won't go to heaven.

Lalich, the cult expert, said the Portland congregation's sermons are full of "hateful rhetoric - homophobia, disdain of science, and hatred of public schools," in Nofsinger's words. 

Based on the pastor's testimony in the custody dispute, the judge credited Lalich's conclusion that Calvary Chapel is a "prime example" of a "closed social system," led by a "charismatic and authoritarian leader who delivers the message of a transcendent belief system" that "promises some sort of salvation."

The church messages about her father suggest he's "going to burn and suffer for eternity, that he is persecuting her, that he seeks to 'dismantle' her faith" and that "he is the enemy whose 'tricks' and 'snares' must be avoided," Nofsinger said.

The Maine Supreme Judicial Court repeatedly defended Nofsinger as judging Bickford's messages toward her daughter about her father, rather than judging Christianity itself. The judge wasn't saying "the Christian religion is psychologically harmful," as Bickford argued.

It claimed that Nofsinger never called the Portland church either a "cult" or "closed social system," ignoring that she credited Lalich's description of the congregation as a closed social system and "cultic organization."

Bradeen is far more reasonable than the girl's mother, the state's high court found. Talking to Ava, "Bradeen is intentionally vague about his concerns with Bickford’s church, and he avoids making any suggestion that Bickford has done anything inappropriate or 'wrong,'" it said.