Tag Archives: Government

News

MUST-READ: Sweden jails parents for spanking and seizes their children

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From Life Site News. (H/T Mary)

Full article:

A Swedish district court has sentenced a couple to nine months each in prison and fined them the equivalent of US $10,650 after they admitted to spanking three of their four children as a normal part of their parenting methods. Corporal punishment of children by parents was made illegal in Sweden in 1979, an early step in what a U.S. parental rights lawyer called the nearly total take-over of parenting by the state in Sweden.

Court documents, quoted by Sveriges Television, said that the parents, who have not been named in the press, “explained that they had used, what they themselves described as spanking, physical punishment as part of their methods for raising the children.”

There is no indication of abuse by the parents in the released documents, with the court noting that the parents “had a loving and caring relationship with their children.”

Nevertheless, the parents have been sent to prison and fined 25,000 kronor for each of the “affected children.” The children have been remanded to state-sponsored foster care since early this summer, and Mike Donnelly, Director of International Relations for the US-based Home School Legal Defence Association (HSLDA), told LifeSiteNews.com that it is “extremely unlikely” that the children will ever be returned to their family home.

Donnelly said that the case is typical of the stories of many families with traditional values in Sweden: “In the area of family rights in Sweden things really aren’t going well there.”

While the HSLDA does not hold an official position on the use of corporal punishment, Donnelly said it is clearly up to parents to determine whether corporal punishment is an appropriate form of discipline.

“Parenting has been outsourced, or simply directly taken over by the state in Sweden,” Donnelly said. “And these parents have been jailed for doing what in America would be perfectly normal.”

Ninety percent of Swedish children are in publicly funded day care from extremely early ages, as young as a year or 18 months, he said. It is the position of the state that parents are overruled by the state in areas of child rearing, he said.

Donnelly said, however, that the best interests of the child are not the state’s highest priority: “So lets take these kids who have had a loving and caring relationship with their parents and send them to foster care, and throw their parents into jail for nine months.”

Donnelly cited the now notorious case of Domenic Johansson, the boy who was snatched by state officials because his parents were homeschooling him, an act that is also illegal in Sweden.

“The bottom line is, don’t go to Sweden. Don’t move there, if you want to have a normal family.”

Well, what do we learn from this story?

Sweden is the most secular country on the planet. They think that the world is an accident and that there is no way that people ought to be – since there is no Designer to hold us accountable to any objective standard of morality. Also, there is no such thing as human rights, such as the right to parent your children as you see fit. The state determines what counts as a right. And you don’t have any rights to your children – they belong to the state. If there is no God, then there is no objective morality, and thus parents have any authority to tell children how they ought to be, or to make moral judgments against them.

Given the  amount of regulation of the family by the state in Sweden, it makes no sense at all to start a family there. But other countries seem to want to follow along where Sweden is leading. Anyone who votes Democrat in the United States (or Liberal/NDP in Canada, or Labor/Liberal Democrat in the UK, or Labor/Green in Australia, etc.) is moving us towards where Sweden is now. Canada’s Liberal party actually has tried to pass a national day care system, and Hillary Clinton favors taxpayer-funded pre-Kindergarden. There is just something in the worldview of the secular left that wants to control the lives of others – a fascistic impulse that has no respect for the privacy of the family.

I should probably mention the word feminism, here. Sweden is also the most feminist country in the world, with laws requiring that boards of directors be 40% female. They do not want women to marry, they do not want women raising children. That is the state’s job, in Sweden. And most of the women in Sweden voted for it. They would rather have the state raise their children than raise the children themselves. They would rather have the state take 60% of their husband’s income and spend it on socialized day care than spend that money on their own family. Then they have the nerve to complain that men don’t want to make commitments. It’s ridiculous. The very laws that feminists vote for are the laws that destroy marriage, family and parenting. No one in his right mind should marry a feminist*.

(*Third-wave feminist)

Commentary

Michael Medved explains why Republicans should not drop social issues

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From AOL News.

Excerpt:

Third, the dividing line between economic and social issues remains far less crisp and definitive than generally assumed. Take for example the Democratic determination to provide widespread coverage for abortion as a key component of ObamaCare. Social conservatives fought this provision as a matter of pro-life principle, while economic conservatives opposed it as an expensive new entitlement — providing government funding for an elective procedure that remains, at best, deeply controversial.

Or consider current efforts by leading conservatives to trim federal funding to National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “Culture Warriors” dislike these programs because they support a politically correct, shamelessly leftist perspective, while fiscal conservatives despise them because they offer a prime example of bureaucratic bloat — a federal intrusion into an area (television and radio broadcasting) where the private sector does a mostly adequate job and even manages to turn a profit.

Most of today’s major economic issues in fact feature some significant social component, and nearly all socio-cultural disputes involve an economic dimension, influencing the spending crisis and the overall growth of government. When it comes to current battles over the meaning of gay rights, for instance, there’s no question that remaking society to treat gay and straight relationships as indistinguishable will impose a significant burden on taxpayers. If gay partners receive the same Social Security and Medicare benefits as married couples, a system already stretched to the breaking point will bear additional expenses running into the billions. This reform may or may not follow the dictates of fundamental fairness, but it is hardly without cost; you can’t provide equal benefits for a whole new class of beneficiaries without creating obvious problems in the system’s balance sheets.

[…]The only real alternative to government as a source of assistance, authority and a functioning civil society remains the “little platoons” described by Edmund Burke — families and communities shaped by attitudes that count as both economically and culturally conservative.

Michael Medved is kind of a Republican-In-Name-Only, like another famous radio show host Hugh Hewitt, but he’s right about this at least. I like Dennis Prager and Mark Levin better when I am listening to the radio.

News

New study shows that children of divorce twice as likely to have a stroke

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Science Daily reports on a recent peer-reviewed Canadian study that links an increased risk of stroke to divorce. (H/T Ruth Blog)

Excerpt:

“We were very surprised that the association between parental divorce and stroke remained so strong even after we had adjusted for smoking, obesity, exercise and alcohol consumption,” said [study leader Esme] Fuller-Thomson.

[…]Of the 13,134 total study respondents, 10.4 percent had experienced parental divorce during their childhood, and 1.9 percent reported that they had been diagnosed with a stroke at some point in their lives. When adjusting for age, race and gender, the odds of stroke were approximately 2.2 times higher for those who had experienced parental divorce.

When other risk factors — including socioeconomic status, health behaviors, mental health, and other adverse childhood experiences — were controlled in a logistic regression analysis, the odds ratio of stroke for those who had experienced parental divorce remained significantly elevated.

I also noticed that Stephen Baskerville has a new article on no-fault divorce up in the (ugh! blech!) American Conservative.

Excerpt:

First: Marriage exists primarily to cement the father to the family. This fact is politically incorrect but undeniable. The breakdown of marriage produces widespread fatherlessness, not motherlessness. As Margaret Mead pointed out long ago—yes, leftist Margaret Mead was correct about this—motherhood is a biological certainty whereas fatherhood is socially constructed. The father is the weakest link in the family bond, and without the institution of marriage he is easily discarded.

[…]The notion that marriage exists for love or “to express and safeguard an emotional union of adults,” as one proponent puts it, is cant. Many loving and emotional human relationships do not involve marriage. Even the conservative argument that marriage exists to rear children is too imprecise: marriage creates fatherhood. No marriage, no fathers.

[…]Here is the second unpleasant truth: homosexuals did not destroy marriage, heterosexuals did. The demand for same-sex marriage is a symptom, not a cause, of the deterioration of marriage. By far the most direct threat to the family is heterosexual divorce. “Commentators miss the point when they oppose homosexual marriage on the grounds that it would undermine traditional understandings of marriage,” writes family scholar Bryce Christensen. “It is only because traditional understandings of marriage have already been severely undermined that homosexuals are now laying claim to it.”

[..]Thus the third inconvenient fact: divorce is a political problem. It is not a private matter, and it does not come from impersonal forces of moral and cultural decay. It is driven by complex and lucrative government machinery operating in our names and funded by our taxes. It is imposed upon unwilling people, whose children, homes, and property may be confiscated. It generates the social ills that rationalize almost all domestic government spending. And it is promoted ideologically by the same sexual radicals who now champion same-sex marriage. Homosexuals may be correct that heterosexuals destroyed marriage, but the heterosexuals were their fellow sexual ideologues.

Conservatives have completely misunderstood the significance of the divorce revolution. While they lament mass divorce, they refuse to confront its politics. Maggie Gallagher attributes this silence to “political cowardice”: “Opposing gay marriage or gays in the military is for Republicans an easy, juicy, risk-free issue,” she wrote in 1996. “The message [is] that at all costs we should keep divorce off the political agenda.”

No American politician of national stature has seriously challenged unilateral divorce. “Democrats did not want to anger their large constituency among women who saw easy divorce as a hard-won freedom and prerogative,” writes Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. “Republicans did not want to alienate their upscale constituents or their libertarian wing, both of whom tended to favor easy divorce, nor did they want to call attention to the divorces among their own leadership.”

If we social conservatives care about children, then we need to be opposed to no-fault divorce. We need to be more careful about who we choose to marry, and not choose mates because of “chemistry” or “hotness” or because our friends approve of them based on arbitrary cultural standards gleaned from Lady Gaga and Dancing With The Stars. There are defined roles for the participants to a marriage, and there is a design for marriage, and there are specific tasks that need to get done. Marriage is a job, and it requires skills to execute difficult tasks that are morally obligatory. It’s not about immature selfish adults pursuing happiness at the expense of their children. It’s not about feelings. It’s not about sentimentality. It’s not about fun.

Divorce causes damage to the health and well-being of children, resulting in behaviors that will give us less liberty (greater intervention of government) and higher taxes (for social welfare programs) later on. There are consequences to selfishness and irresponsibility in relationships. Other people do not exist to entertain you. Relationships are not a form of recreational activity. At least they should not be for Christians. For Christians, the goal of relationships is to get the other person to have a closer relationship with God and to be equipped to serve God better. If children are the result, then the same obligation applies to them. That is the purpose of relationships in Christianity.