In Canada, Christian couples are qualified to pay mandatory taxes to the secular government, but they’re not qualified raise children. That’s the government’s job, apparently.

Check out this story from the Toronto Sun.

Excerpt:

‘Twas a few days before Christmas when all through a Hamilton courtroom of the hallowed Superior Court of Ontario, the lawyers were arguing about – Santa Claus.

And the Easter bunny as well.

To his credit, Justice Andrew Goodman kept a straight face throughout the hearing as the lawyer for the Hamilton CAS struggled to explain why the agency suddenly yanked two little girls from their happy foster home just because their devout Christian foster parents wouldn’t lie and tell them Santa and the Easter Bunny were real.

The children — aged four and three at the time — faced the imminent danger that the “magic” of the holidays might be destroyed if they were left with Derek and Frances Baars, argued lawyer Jim Wood.

“They’re entitled to believe that while they’re sleeping, Santa Claus is coming to put the presents under the tree,” he insisted. “The risk is there. The children needed to be removed.”

The Baars were upfront when they signed on: They don’t celebrate Halloween and, as their glowing SAFE Homestudy Report clearly states, they “do not endorse Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny as they do not wish to lie to children.”

They were approved as foster parents in December 2015 and the sisters moved into their home a week before Christmas.

The Baars bought them gifts and celebrated the holiday — but carefully avoided the Santa question. Their birth mother even sent a note thanking them for giving her girls such a nice Christmas.

[…]Their CAS worker was hopping mad by their hearsay, told them it was an essential part of Canadian culture and issued an ultimatum: Tell the girls the Easter Bunny was real or their foster home would be closed.

And so it was. They were abruptly fired as foster parents and the mystified little girls were pulled from their home the next day.

It was an emergency! The children needed to be removed from the home right away by the benevolent taxpayer-funded social workers.

More:

Despite the dire shortage of foster parents in the region, the Baars were no longer acceptable to the Hamilton CAS. They’d even offered to care only for infants or kids for whom Santa and the Easter Bunny weren’t important, but were turned down.

The children need to be removed, because the parents are obviously dangerous. It’s dangerous to tell children that Santa Claus isn’t real, because it’s better to lie to them, and then have that mistrust poison the relationship between child and parents.

My personal view on this is exactly what the Christian couple decided. Make Christmas and Easter fun days, but focus on the theological issues involved in each day: the Incarnation and the Resurrection. You don’t want to get into a situation where you poison the relationship with your children by lying to them – telling them lies that make them feel good, and then having them find out later from their same-age peers the truth. It undermines you, and elevates their peers as trustworthy truth-tellers.

I just have to point out one more fact about this province of Ontario in Canada, and their views on raising children. Remember that the Deputy Minister of Education in Ontario designed a sex-education curriculum that was mandatory for all the children in Ontario. He was later convicted of child pornography. And Ontario also passed a law allowing the state to seize children from parents who disagree with the province’s LGBT agenda. So clearly, this is not the place to get married and have children, if you expect to raise your children according to a sensible Judeo-Christian worldview.

Maybe voting in a big secular government isn’t such a great thing. I know that when I give money to private sector businesses in free exchanges of value, they would not come to my house looking for children to seize. They just take their money, and I get something useful that I wanted that matches MY values. When you grow government, you end up paying them regardless of how they perform, and then when they are big enough, they turn around and starting pushing you around. You’ll never have that problem when you keep government focused on its Constitutional responsibilities. Unfortunately, the people of Canada have apparently forgotten all about how to organize a government so that it respects liberty.