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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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Great post. I know this isn't really the point of it, but do you know what happened with Lana's child(ren)? Do she and her ex-husband share custody?

I know they shared custody initially, but the job she eventually landed was in another state, and I don't have any information on how their custody arrangement evolved from there.

It seems hard to imagine that the kids didn’t eventually choose to stay with dad. She was, after all, literally crazy.

Maybe.

Alternately, Transhausen by Proxy.

All things under the sun are possible, even horrible things that make you weep at the tragedy of it.

Thé kids would’ve been too old for that, wouldn’t they? Trans kids weren’t a thing until very recently, and it sounds like the kids weren’t exactly babies at their divorce.

I love the series of branch-swinging-assumptions we're making here.

Mentally ill parents are incredibly unpleasant. Teenagers will choose ‘rules’ over ‘just fucking awful’. The addition of constant fighting between lesbian parents wouldn’t have helped, either. Young adults usually want their parents to be stable and functional, too, which a train wreck like the mom turned out to be won’t do that(this having been 10 years ago means those kids are almost certainly old enough to make their own decisions).

Unless she worked something out with the father, it's doubtful she'd get primary custody after moving to another state. About ten years ago a friend of mine decided to dump his wife after she caught him running around on her. At the time of the divorce, they were both teachers in the same school system who made similar money and lived a couple miles away from each other in the same district in North Carolina, so it was a pretty simple case of shared custody with minimal child support. Around the time the divorce was finalized, he quit his job in North Carolina and accepted a position as an assistant principal at a school in West Virginia. That is, until his attorney found out and informed him that if he moved out of state the custody agreement would disappear.

That much he expected; what he didn't expect his attorney to tell him is that if she ended up with primary custody after him moving out of state, there would be no downside to her moving out of state. His ex was originally from northern Minnesota, and he knew she'd move the kids back home with her if there were no repercussions. He got incredibly lucky and was able to take a different teaching position at the school he had just left, despite his old position having been replaced, and was eventually able to find a principal job down there. That being said, he's still an asshole who got what was coming to him after running around on a perfectly fine wife who desperately tried to keep the marriage together. I can't believe I went to his second wedding.

... a friend of mine ... That being said, he's still an asshole who got what was coming to him after running around on a perfectly fine wife who desperately tried to keep the marriage together. I can't believe I went to his second wedding.

You can't believe a second woman was willing to marry him or that you were willing to attend? How/why are you friends with him?

The second. I used to work for the Boy Scouts and he would come up during summers and run the business end of things at camp. He was originally from Pittsburgh and came up regularly to visit his parents so we'd all hang out. There's a whole extended friend group of people who worked there at one point or another, and a lot of us still see each other regularly. I haven't seen him in years, because the Principal job keeps him in NC year round and his parents hate his new wife and her parents hate him. But anyway, as I said in my above novel of a post, I don't get involved in other people's drama. I was friends with him and not his ex-wife, and though I agree he's the one who fucked up and she deserved better, I'm not taking sides. He's never done anything to me personally that pissed me off enough to cut him off completely, and if he called me right now to go out for beers I'd go. That being said, I was in North Carolina a few years back with an extra ticket to the ACC Championship game and I didn't call him to see if he wanted it, so there's that.