Friday, September 4, 2026 · Independent editorial

Maine’s high court left a father in charge of one church

Maine’s highest court left in place an order that gives a father the say over his 12-year-old daughter’s involvement at Calvary Chapel in Westbrook. The mother, Emily Bickford, wanted to take her there. The court did not say Christianity is psychologically harmful. It said the child was harmed by messages that cast the father as an enemy of her faith. Breitbart’s account of the ruling is the source.

The order keeps Calvary Chapel under the father’s sole hand

Breitbart printed that the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruled on Tuesday against Emily Bickford who has been fighting an order preventing her from taking her child to a church in Westbrook and the child’s father is Matthew Bradeen and a district judge sided with Bradeen “ruling that some of the church’s teachings could be psychologically harmful to the girl” and the order allows Bradeen to solely decide on his daughter’s involvement with Calvary Chapel Church and when it comes to any other religious organization the parents share rights and must discuss decisions and that is not a footnote we invented and it is the custody architecture the page printed and a Christian does not need a new poll to hear a court leave a Bible church under one parent’s veto.

Liberty Counsel founder and chairman Mat Staver said at the November oral arguments that a Maine trial judge issued a shocking order and that Emily cannot take her own 12-year-old daughter to church and Staver said the judge gave the hostile father sole authority to prevent this young girl from reading the Bible saying the Lord’s Prayer or associating with any “religious philosophy” or Christian teaching and that is Staver’s account on the Breitbart page and the sentence is about a mother and a pew.

They called the church a cult and lowercased God

Staver said the child and her mother found “hope and healing” at the Bible-teaching church and the girl later told her father she wanted to be baptized and he allegedly went to court in order to stop it from happening and Staver said the father even hired a former Marxist professor to testify that Calvary Chapel is a “cult” and the judge accepted this outrageous claim and mocked Emily’s faith by writing “god” in lowercase throughout the ruling and condemned the church for praying over mother and child and that is not a JesusVoter flourish and it is the quote Breitbart carried and a church that cannot hear lowercase god in a judicial order is not a church that is paying attention.

According to the Standing for Freedom Center material Breitbart reprinted a district court judge who is a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union concluded the child experienced “psychological harm” through her attendance at the church and in its opinion Tuesday the Supreme Judicial Court said it found “the child was harmed by Bickford’s decisions to expose the child to messages that characterized Bradeen as an ‘enemy’ who seeks to ‘persecute’ the child and her faith and by Bickford’s unwillingness to prevent the child from receiving those messages or to take any other steps to reduce the risk of alienating her from Bradeen” and the high court added that far from declaring that the Christian religion is psychologically harmful the finding reflected that it is harmful for a child to hear negative and frightening messages about one parent and we are going to leave that sentence where the court put it because a Christian can notice alienation language without pretending a baptismal hope is the same thing as a custody tactic.

Liberty Counsel is planning to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case involving the parents and the child according to the WMTW reporting Breitbart used and that is the next docket and not a victory parade and we are not going to invent a grant of certiorari the page did not print.

American second means parental rights are supposed to include the right to raise a child in the faith of the home and Maine is still part of the United States and a custody order that hands one parent sole power over a named church while requiring joint research for every other religious activity is a public structure and not a private spat and a republic that shrugs when a Bible church is singled out will not stay free for long and the Kansas suit on the same MXM September 4 board is a real parental-rights fight and it is not this page’s job because one job per page and the job today is a mother and a pew in Westbrook.

Republican third means the GOP can tweet about family values and still not be the comforter of Emily Bickford and Trump’s DOJ can sue Kansas schools over secret gender transitions and still not be the church of the mother who cannot walk her daughter into Calvary Chapel and being a Christian in America is not the same job as being a Republican in America and if Liberty Counsel takes this to the U.S. Supreme Court that is a magistrate fight and the largest lens is still whether a Bible-teaching church is treated like a hazard.

Liberty Counsel says it plans to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case. That is a plan, not a grant of review. The high court left the father with the say over Calvary Chapel. It did not declare the Christian religion a psychological hazard.

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