The court has ruled that Joseph Reyes will be allowed to take his 3-year-old daughter, Ela, to church according to the Chicago Sun-Times.  Rebecca Reyes, who has full custody of the child in their divorce proceedings, said the father was breaching an agreement they made that Ela would be raised in the Jewish faith.

The court also ruled that the father would have Christmas and Easter holidays with the child and the mother would have the Jewish holidays.

But Reyes still faces contempt sanctions for taking his daughter to church in violation of a previous court order.

Clark Rockefeller made headlines when he took his seven year old daughter in Boston on July 27 during his first supervised visitation with a social worker.  Rockefeller lost custody last December when the mother relocated to London for work.

Rockefeller turned himself in in Baltimore and now faces felony charges in Boston.

Some websites portray Rockefeller as a hero of fathers’ rights and are using his case to draw attention to problems with the family court system.

Dahlia Lithwick, writing at Slate.Com, recognizes these problems:

“Many good fathers will be downgraded from full-time dads to alternating-weekend-carpool dads. They will be asked to pay at least one-third of their salaries in child support for that privilege. Simple rules of modern life make it likely that an ex-wife will someday decide that a job or new husband demands a move to a faraway state. At which point the alternating-weekend-carpool dad is again demoted—to a Thanksgivings-if-you’re-lucky dad.”

But, she notes, that “lionizing Clark Rockefeller or other violent, lawless fathers will not promote fathers’ rights or fix the family-court system.”

She’s right.  The system is imperfect.  But until we come up with something better, it’s the best we’ve got.  As Rockefeller found out, taking the law into your own hands will not work.

Julian Mariscal is a father of four in the midst of a divorce and custody battle in Kennewick, Washington.

Apparently facing a court decision that mom should have custody and he would get visitation every other weekend, Mariscal says, “Four days a month, that’s not enough.”

To combat it, he’s organized a walk for dad’s like him, who believe they’ve been treated unfairly by a family court system that favors the mother. The walk starts at the Kennewick Courthouse at noon on Father’s Day.

“All I’m asking is that they give us the opportunity, us men, fathers to have equal rights, just make it 50/50,” he said according to KNDO TV.