Emily Bickford knows the answer to a question no judge should have the power to settle: which parent gets to be right about God. Maine’s Supreme Judicial Court told her on Tuesday, in a case called Bickford v. Bradeen, that on the subject of her daughter’s faith, she isn’t it. Her ex, Matthew Bradeen, now holds final say over whether their daughter attends services at Calvary Chapel Greater Portland, reviews the church’s materials, or spends time with its members. Not because a court found Bickford unfit. Because a court found her outvoted.
The First Amendment bars the government from prohibiting the free exercise of religion. Courts have read a companion right into the 14th Amendment for a century: Parents direct their children’s upbringing, including their faith, without a judge auditing the theology. That’s not a courtesy the state extends. It’s a right the state is supposed to defend against itself. Maine’s high court didn’t dispute that Bickford holds this right. It ruled that the right doesn’t get strict scrutiny, constitutional law’s toughest test, when the dispute runs between two parents instead of between a parent and the state. Apply the “best interest of the child” standard instead — the same test a judge uses to pick a school district. But “best interest of the child” isn’t a constitutional test. It isn’t even a standard with fixed edges. It’s a mood in a robe, and Maine just ruled that a mood can override a fundamental right.
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Forty-six years ago, Maine’s own high court suggested otherwise. Osier v. Osier involved a Jehovah’s Witness mother and a son’s blood transfusion, and it held that judges could restrict a parent’s religious practice only after finding an “immediate and substantial threat” to the child. The Bickford court didn’t overrule Osier. It decided that language had never bound anyone in the first place, a discovery about as welcome as learning your smoke detector never had a battery.
The facts here matter, and pretending otherwise insults the reader. The trial record shows that during active litigation, Bickford took her daughter to a service where the pastor delivered a 6 1/2-minute prayer naming Bickford, Bradeen, and the child by name nearly 30 times, calling the lawsuit “an attack on God’s Word” and describing the outcome as depending on “where this judge stands with God.” The court also found Bickford had exposed her daughter to messaging that her father would “burn and suffer for eternity” and stood as “the enemy” of her salvation. Bickford didn’t remove her daughter from that service. She later called sitting through it “appropriate.” She also stopped vaccinating the child, including for COVID-19 and the flu, and wouldn’t respond to Bradeen about the HPV shot.
Bradeen isn’t a caricature of anti-religious hostility. He’s a father who learned about his own daughter’s baptism from a stranger.
But the remedy the court settled on wasn’t “a parent may not use a pastor as a weapon against a co-parent.” It was “the state’s best-interest statute now governs how much Scripture your child gets, so long as the judge doesn’t say ‘cult’ too many times.” Liberty Counsel, representing Bickford, calls the ruling a rejection of “a fit parent to raise her child consistent with her Christian faith” and says it will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case. Bradeen’s attorney, Michelle King, says the decision was correct “even in cases involving religion.” Both lawyers are describing the same sentence. That’s the trouble with a standard soft enough to comfort everyone who reads it.
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This isn’t one runaway Maine judge. State courts have split for years on whether a parent’s religious authority gets full constitutional protection or the softer best-interest review. Utah and Colorado require the former. New Hampshire, Nevada, Kentucky, and Kansas don’t. That split persists because family law has always belonged to the states, and states have every incentive to keep the discretion wide. “Best interest of the child” sounds unimpeachable right up until you ask whose God got weighed on the scale.
I’ve spent 30 years drafting agreements precisely because verbal understandings collapse under pressure. A constitutional right that only holds when nobody contests it isn’t a right. It’s a default setting, and defaults change the moment somebody with robes and a gavel decides your co-parent argued better. Bickford’s pastor may have handed Bradeen his best evidence. That still doesn’t make deciding whose faith gets the judge’s vote a job the Constitution assigned to family court. The next parent standing in that courtroom, and there will be one, deserves a standard sturdier than a coin flip wearing a black robe.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Pennsylvania; and Harvard Univeristy. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
