Here is a story that is by now depressingly familiar.
Two Mormon parents who own a nutritional supplement company are accused of letting their toddler son die from meningitis because they tried to treat him with home remedies instead of medicine.
David and Collet Stephan have pleaded not guilty to charges that they failed to provide the necessities of life to their 19-month-old son Ezekiel, reported CBC News.
Prosecutors in Alberta, Canada, say the couple did not call an ambulance until the boy stopped breathing and instead fed him supplements with an eye dropper and lay down with him.
I also keep coming across story after story of children accidentally killing themselves or other children because they got access to loaded guns that were lying around. I do not link to them because the stories are so depressing and because, while so sad and so frequent, they are basically the same. Only the details differ.
If adults want to do stupid and dangerous things and risk their own lives, that is their business. But they have no right to deny children, even their own, the right to live a full life.
Absolutely. The protection of children outweighs any claim of “freedom of religion “.
It seems to me that the more religious you are the more divorced from reality you become, and more likely to fall for various forms of quackery. These two parents should be charged with child neglect.
Here in northern California, Marin County is ground-zero for the anti-vaccine movement. It is an area with very high incomes, high education levels, and fairly low religiosity. Furthermore, of those stories I have read of very religious people killing their kids with prayer instead of medicine, they seem to belong to really fringe churches usually. ISTM that it is not religion per se that drives this, but rather parents who insist that their own beliefs are best even when science and the rest of society disagrees with those beliefs. It’s the same kind of thing as when atheist computer engineers try to tell biologists they are doing biology wrong.
I still don’t understand why people who leave loaded firearms within reach of minors don’t get prosecuted for it.
Instead, these all seem to be treated like “tragic accidents” instead of the negligence they are.
California has laws against leaving firearms where unsupervised minors can gain access to them, I don’t understand why other jurisdictions don’t.
Careful. You just made a forced birther quotable quote.
Children do not have the autonomy nor are capable of making life and death decisions. They are legally under the protection of their parents. Parents who fail to live up to this legal obligation -- especially when done intentionally -- should be held legally responsible. Religion does not excuse murder nor exempt them from responsibility for killing people. Killing a child by denying medical care is as violent an act as beating them to death and should be punished the same way.
I assume this comment is aimed at Mano’s “If adults want to do stupid and dangerous things and risk their own lives, that is their business. But they have no right to deny children, even their own, the right to live a full life.”? But this is only a ‘forced birther quotable quote’ if we first assume that it includes the unborn, which is the hallmark of that crowd, not ours.
… and then there’s this;
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/03/09/florida_gun_mom_apparently_shot_by_4_year_old.html
The whole Mormon faith pushes its followers to *not* think critically or logically about anything--if they did, they’d find their obviously-made-up religion laughable and leave. That’s why so many of them get involved obviously-scam vitamins and juices and essential oil multi-level marketing pyramid schemes. That’s why Orrin Hatch, of Utah, fought so hard to quash any kind of truth-in-advertising when it comes to the supplements industry. They prey on each other with this baloney and they prey on other stupid people.