I guess I’ve developed a side hobby of writing about laws that exempt parents from prosecution after they’ve hurt or killed their kids by rejecting scientific medicine in favor of faith healing. But it really angers me, for it’s a tangible case of harm that’s not only caused by religious faith (or faith in woo), but is completely preventible. Without religion, hundreds of kids would not have died, many in horrible agony.
My post from Friday on Christy Perry, a Republican advocate of keeping Idaho’s religion-exemption laws (you can’t be prosecuted for anything in that state if you harm your child by relying solely on faith-healing), has been fully revamped, and is now published in The New Republic as “Faith-healer parents who let their child die should go to jail.”
You might go have a look just to give the site some attention. I feel strongly about this issue, and if you’re in Idaho please lobby your state legislator to support the rollback of the exemption laws in a bill that will come up this year.
Good piece. I don’t think I read your version here so I’m glad you posted the NR version. This quote struck me as telling; ““Children do die,” Perry told Al-Jazeera. “I’m not trying to sound callous, but [reformers] want to act as if death is an anomaly. But it’s not—it’s a way of life.”
Such a casual dismissal of the amazing progress we’ve made in biology and medicine in the last hundred years or so. A succint way of describing the scientific progress in the last hundred years (in medicine) may in fact be to say: now, children don’t die. [Untimely] death is now an anomaly, and is no longer a way of life.
I vaguely recall that SJ Gould once got asked whether he would’ve liked to have lived in the time of Darwin, to share in his discoveries. His answer supposedly went something like this: “are you kidding? Of course not! The child mortality rate was 33% and I have two kids.”
I wonder if the legislator would be quite so accepting if a surgeon denied her child anesthesia or painkillers because pain is “part of life.” I suppose she’d respond that in every case it’s the parents’ choice, and what she chooses should not be forced on others by the state. Everybody draws their lines somewhere, I guess: how their ilk justifies drawing the line on that side of medical care but on the other side of reproductive choice for mothers would be difficult to reconcile were it not so plainly based in the consistently inconsistent epistemology of Fundie hogwash.
Great Darwin-related quote, by the way.
Pestilence and famine — those are “part of life,” as well. Is Rep. Perry a yea vote for them, too?
indirectly, that is the case, though she might not see it that way. In a roll call vote on the matter, absent clear direction from the NRA or her Fundie handlers, she could well cast a courageous vote of “present.”
This is one of my top pet peeves. Rand Paul said in an interview recently “The government doesn’t own children. Parents own their children.” Children are chattel to these people???? That’s one of the core moral issues for me. Children own themselves, but need help until they are of age to consent.
The left sounds kookoo to these folks because if nothing else we hold that no person is chattel, nor are any of his or her bits and pieces. Scalia said recently that freedom of religion does not entail freedom “from” religion. I think he was speaking in the context of nativity scenes and public graduation prayers, but In light of this and the other posts on denying medical care to children, “freedom from religion” takes on an altogether darker significance. The 21st Century does not so far look like the era of peace and reason I grew up thinking it would be. Well, there’s always next century! Hopefully!
I don’t think you are consistent here. Children cannot in fact make these decisions. Someone else has to make them. That is what Paul means here by “owns.” (Note that he is making a negative comparison, he starts by denying that the state “owns” them. That is also how ownership is defined in Libertarian jargon: the right of disposition or determination.) But you are arguing that the state SHOULD and MUST make these decisions. As indeed it should and must. You are not asserting children own themselves.
Delphin:
I’d like to think that you are right, and Paul is simply asserting that someone other than the child must assert that child’s right to health if/when the child is incapable of doing so. But I fear that this is not the case, and that Paul is simply asserting chattel control of the parent – the right to let the child contract preventable illnesses because the parent disapproves of immunization, the right to let the child suffer from lack of medical treatment because the parent disapproves of it, etc.
Fortunately, we don’t disagree on the consequence – the state must step in when parents fail to act in the best interests of the child and not in the prejudices of the parent.
Not quite. I think a much more accurate way of stating it is: the parents, acting as guardians, make health decisions for the child. However the state puts some limits on the types of decisions that can be made. Which is perfectly consistent with how the state also treats adults: it lets us make many decisions regarding our own health, but does not allow us to do literally anything we want to do.
I think you are bolstering Paul’s point. Assisted suicide is still mostly illegal. That’s the state — pick your phrase — claiming ownership, being paternalistic.
Similar thing with drug laws. And other encroachments of the nanny state, like diet dictators.
So in general Paul does have a point: nanny stating is a problem. He just pushes it too far in cases like this.
But pretending, as Manoutoftime does, that liberals treat people with autonomy and libertarians don’t is deeply wrong.
A hundred years ago, wives in this country were the chattel of their husbands, and until fifty years before that, black folk in the States that became the Confederacy were the chattel of slave owners. If there is anything we have learned, it should be that humans can never be chattel, that people can never be subject to “ownership” by other people.
Parents have certain basic responsibilities toward their issue, and certain basic concomitant rights of control over their children, as needed to meet their parental responsibilities. But these responsibilities and rights in no way resemble the near-unbridled rights that an owner exercises over his or her chattel, which includes the right to dispose of the property.
I’d go further and say it is a mistake to think of one’s relationship to oneself as ownership as well. This is because if I own myself, can I sell myself to another? Seemingly yes, without special casing. If we on the other hand adopt a non-economic relation, we aren’t tempted.
(There are other benefits of similar character; this is just one related to the thread.)
This is one of the LEAST crazy things that go on in Idaho politics.
Well that’s certainly cheering… :/
I thought the First Amendment applied to the states too? A law exempting religiously inspired death from the criminal code would have made James Madison feel nauseated. Somebody should check up on Thomas Jefferson’s grave btw, I fear it’s in ruins due to all the turning, spinning and rolling of mr. Jefferson.
That group is essentially a death cult, the only difference being that they might not actively kill people, but they let those die who could easily be saved.
I wonder what bible passages they use to justify this. Did Leviticus say something about insulin?
Excellent article. Like ladyatheist above, this is one of my “pet peeves” too – the suffering because of religion of those who have no choice. This should not be happening anywhere, and is particularly ironic in a country that calls itself “The Land of the Free”. Making laws to take away the freedom to live of children and make them religious martyrs instead – is this the American exceptionalism we’re all supposed to emulate?
Sub
Well done, sir. I patiently await more within The Albatross. I do recall Shermer saying in The Moral Arc that Followers of Christ have a childhood mortality rate 26 times higher than the general population (page 174). And I can’t pass on this depressing and related link enough. http://childrenshealthcare.org/?page_id=24
Well, at least there is such an organization fighting this abuse.
(And yes, the data there are extremely depressing.)
Too true!
When she says “death is part of life” she is saying something even worse than JAC realizes. She is really saying that children die because God wills it, and it is wrong to try to thwart His will. Medicine is wrong *because it might work.*
Parents fail in their duty to protect their children in other ways too. For instance what should be done with the parents in this case, who handed their young daughters over to a child-raping cult leader to be “handmaidens”:
http://www.startribune.com/local/294512991.html
Should they get a free pass becuase religion?