From Friday's Globe and Mail

The first impulse is to say "impossible" when you realize Canada's Charter of Rights is being used to argue for giving children more than two parents. If we give legal protection to a three-parent unit, why not one of four, six or eight members?

Is this a way to deal with the heartache of divorced parents who'd just love their new spouse to finally be a legal parent? Perhaps this is just the ticket to argue your mother-in-law can have the role in raising the kids she's always wanted.

Or maybe the "Three Parent Case," argued this week before an Ontario court is just about removing the stigma and fears that gay parents and their children will be discriminated against because their biology always means a third party must be involved in creating their children.

Parenting currently stands on equality grounds since no matter what type of relationship you're in, your child can only have two legal parents. Socially, the child can have a village for its care, but legally our values are more restrictive. If you're a heterosexual couple who needed reproductive technology to conceive, the surrogate or sperm or egg donor is not also a legal parent. If you adopt a child, some third party has given up their right to parent that child. If you're divorced and have a new family, the children you care for can only have two declared parents, and if you're a gay couple, two mothers or two fathers can both be legal parents.

But a smart trio from London, Ont., is arguing that's discriminatory because it forces two lesbians to choose whether they both, or one of them and the child's father, would be the legal parents. A.A., and C.C., a lawyer and a professor, have been in a conjugal relation for 16 years and in 1999 decided a male professor friend of theirs, known to the court as B.B., could help C.C. get pregnant and now their five-year-old son, D.D. is the groundbreaking case that could change family law as Canada knows it.

The lesbians decided not to exclude B.B., the biological father from D.D.'s life, having him in for dinner every Thursday night, and having D.D. spend every other weekend at the father's home. A.A.'s lawyer, Peter Jervis, framed his argument in terms of adult rights, saying adoption isn't acceptable because the desire to have the father be a parent would be lost.

We're not told what D.D. thinks of all this, other than to know he's thriving and deeply cared for by this trio, who supported his interests with testimony from a 13- year-old child of lesbian parents who told of the embarrassment, worry and fear of not being able to call both her mothers "mother" in public processes of health care, and citizenship. Another London resident, Dawn Stefanowicz, raised by a mother and gay father who, since her infancy, had three of his male partners join her family unit, watched the case with worry, saying "from my own experience, as adult children, we don't want this, it's treating children like a commodity."

So goes the complicated challenges the Ontario Court of Appeal must now deliberate over.

Why have court arguments against this redefinition of parentage come from Christian activist groups? The Alliance for Marriage and Family was the sole intervenor to caution the court that this issue is of such gravity that only Ontario's parliament can best determine its outcome, and changing such legalities for a child should only be done by a legislative process debating public good and the best interests of children.

This is not a battle about what the church is against but rather, what it is for: a child-centred approach to changing the number of parents a child can have under the Children's Law Reform Act. Family is the primary portal for soul-shaping and vast numbers go to God for things that the human family cannot touch. When Christians sponsor a legal team to be in court on such a case it is not done because, as the Applicant stated, we "just don't get it," it is because experience tells us the soul of children is so vulnerable, the nature of family so volatile, that any discussions on parentage should not be left only to the legal grounds of what is possible under the Charter of Rights.

I do believe D.D. is deeply cared for by his trio of parents, but since not everyone has the life-long harmony that A.A., B.B. and C.C. exhibit, it's only fair to bring wider insights on human nature into this debate.

Lorna Dueck is the host of Listen Up TV, a spiritual perspective on current events seen Sundays on Global TV, and weekly on CTS, Salt and Light TV, and Christian Channel TV.