Not sure of the validity of this but it appears to be real. Just passing it on...

http://www.change.org/petitions/federal-government-stop-taking-custody-away-from-parents-based-on-their-military-service

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Lew Kauffman-
Wood Turners Forum Host

Time traveler. Purveyor of the world's finest custom rolling pins!

This is a difficult version of events to credit.

It is hard to imagine a competent judge holding that military service in any way disqualifies a person as a parent.  Such a judge needs and probably would be reported to the state committee on judicial ethics because such a holding would be both unlawful and unethical.

What I can imagine( and have seen many times)  is a dispute over custody and one side presents a better argument than the other. In trial there is always a winner and a loser. 

Think of the soldier who ends up in divorce.   Maybe she gets the kids and has them on base, but eventually he or she is deployed  and suddenly the  kids don't have a parent. The  stateside parent  steps in and files for custody. What can the courts do? The deployment can be almost  endless these days what with the government never letting people go, and the children need some measure of stability. So the court does its best to do the "best interests of the child" analysis and ends up stuck with the stateside parent as the only option.

When ever a person in the military has to answer  an action in family court  the first thing that soldier must do is obtain the services of an attorney who is intimate with the SSRA and especially the  section 201 where it deals with the right of a stay of judgment.

The act allows that temporary judgment may be appropriate but that the stay is precisely so that the rights of soldiers and sailors are not trammeled and they fact of their military service used to disadvantage them in court.

And the court is prohibited from  doing this in behalf of the soldier all by itself. That would be taking sides. So you GOTTA have an attorney to do it for you.

If the soldier fails to get proper representation the whole thing can be revisited later on in an action that challenges the validity of the judgment  based on a violation of the  SSRA.  A lot of this would be a  species of a jurisdictional argument.

The focus of the petition is improperly  aimed. The Federal Government has nothing to do with this at all. Custody and divorce are not federal they are state law issues and are tried in state courts.  This is a state by state matter.  Appeal to the federal courts and even the SCOTUS can be had based on the constitutional question of the right to parenting as a fundamental and unalienable right after exhaustion of all remedies in the  state courts.