Quote:
Originally Posted by john ingram
And living in the same county as someone else should not grant you the right to dictate how someone else raises their child. Where is the line drawn?
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You seem to be arguing from the position that the right of parents to raise their children in any way they wish should be absolute. My position is that not only should it not be absolute, but there are already legal restrictions on parental rights and those restrictions are
not based on religion even if their existence affects those practising certain faiths more than it affects others.
I'm just as legally restricted from allowing my children to marry before age 18, having my female children circumcised, denying my children an education, and having multiple spouses as any other Australian - and I'm unequivocably atheist. I am also restrained from failing to provide adequate care for my children (well, not now, because the youngest is about to turn 18).
To take it a step further, I'm legally required to ensure that all children in my vehicle are wearing age appropriate restraints and that no-one in my vehicle smokes if there are children under 16 in the vehicle. I also cannot serve alcohol to under 18s. The law doesn't just regulate my responsibility towards my own children, it regulates my responsibility towards the children of others as well. And my religious, political or philosophical beliefs do not - and in my opinion
should not - exempt me from complying with those laws.
It really is quite interesting to see how two different nations with essentially the same establishment clause interpret its meaning. We also have quite different attitudes about the rights of parents in general (you can quite literally leave home here in your early teens without any need for formal "emancipation" from your parents, and there's a definite transfer of legal power from parent to child which starts happening around puberty).
My contention is that if you allow parental power to be absolute, then you effectively make children the property of their parents in the same way that slaves were the property of their masters - and that is a highly undesirable legal status to inflict on anyone, let alone the vulnerable, IMHO. I really
don't see any moral difference between a child dying as a result of the actions of the parents and a child dying as the result of their intentional inaction, and I don't believe that there should be a difference in legal culpability between abuse and neglect.
A question for you. Peter Singer postulated a world in which parents would have the right to terminate the lives of their disabled children for a period of several years following birth. Do you really see any difference between Singer's proposal and giving parents the right to decide on the basis of their
faith whether their child lives or dies? While I accept that there may be situations where causing active or passive harm to others may be the lesser evil, I reject absolutely the notion that religion/faith alone is ever sufficient reason for doing so.
For the record, I do not believe that religious beliefs are inherently more worthy of tolerance than political or philosophical beliefs, so I'm using the word "faith" in a fairly broad context here.
FWIW, I believe that the UK decision several years ago to compel the separation of conjoined twins was wrong, not because of the parents' faith but because the likelihood of either twin surviving the separation was so low. It was essentially experimental medicine and I don't believe that the courts should be able to compel that.