Tag Archives: Jail

News

MUST-READ: Sweden jails father of child who was seized for being home-schooled

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Teacher Union Protesting Parental Rights
Teacher Union Demanding Bigger Government

From an Alliance Defense Fund press release.

Excerpt:

After seizing a child from his parents and holding him in custody with virtually no visitation for 1 1/2 years because he was home-schooled, the Swedish government has now jailed the boy’s father for taking his son home from a supervised visitation when he wasn’t supposed to last week. Social services officials also told the 9-year-old boy’s mother that if she doesn’t stop crying at the limited visitations, which last for one hour every five to six weeks, they will further reduce the frequency of visits with her son.

After Swedish courts upheld the government’s right to seize Domenic Johansson, son of Christer and Annie Johansson, attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund and the Home School Legal Defense Association filed an application with the European Court of Human Rights asking it to hear the case, Johansson v. Sweden. Swedish authorities will not permit the family to be represented within the country by an ADF-allied attorney and have instead required them to accept a government-appointed public defender.

“The government shouldn’t abduct and imprison children simply because it doesn’t like homeschooling. That’s exactly what happened here,” said ADF Legal Counsel Roger Kiska, who is based in Europe. “Despite the ill-advised decision on the part of Mr. Johansson, the only menace here is a government drunk with its own power.  This sad circumstance is what happens when an over-powerful government pushes a parent to the point of desperation, so social services should not pretend to be surprised.”

“The parents complied with everything expected of them, and yet the government has continued to keep their son under lock and key,” Kiska added. “Americans beware: This is coming to your doorstep if you are not vigilant about your government.”

Swedish authorities forcibly removed Domenic from his parents in June 2009 from a plane they had boarded to move to Annie’s home country of India.  The officials did not have a warrant nor did they charge the Johanssons with any crime.  The officials seized the child because they believe home schooling is an inappropriate way to raise a child and insist the government should raise Domenic instead, even though home-schooling was legal in Sweden at the time he was taken into custody.

The Democrat party, and all secular leftist parties, are opposed to the idea of parents raising their own children because it offends their sense of “equality”. The left desires equality of outcomes for all citizens regardless of how they act. And that means that all children should receive state care and instruction during daylight hourse, virtually from the time they are born until the time when they become employed (hopefully by the government). The left is especially terrified of homeschooling, because in that arrangement, the parents, (and especially the father), are able to teach the child to have the beliefs that the parents prefer. The left is allied with teacher unions who have educated themselves to the point where they believe that parents are not their partners in educating children, but instead are enemies.

Homeschooling versus fascism

A common thread in fascist regimes is the effort to separate children from parents at a young age, so that adult teachers can impose the state’s values on the children when they are least able to resist them. That is why, accoring to the Guardian, the National Socialist party abolished homeschooling in fascist Germany in 1938. (A review of Goldberg’s book by Canadian author Denyse O’Leary is here). My favorite quote from Goldberg’s book is about the role of government-run schools in a fascist state:

Hence a phalanx of progressive reformers saw the home as the front line in the war to transform men into compliant social organs. Often the answer was to get the children out of the home as soon as possible. An archipelago of agencies, commissions, and bureaus sprang up overnight to take the place of the anti-organic, contra-evolutionary influences of the family. The home could no longer be seen as an island, separate and sovereign from the rest of society. John Dewey helped create kindergartens in American for precisely this purpose — to help shape the apples before they fell from the tree — while at the other end of the educational process stood reformers like Wilson, who summarized the progressive attitude perfectly when, as president of Princeton, he told an audience, “Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life … [but] to make them as unlike their fathers as possible.”

The United States is also heading in this direction. In Democrat-run California, Human Events reported that homeschooling was effectively banned by an activist court. Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza recently explained why the left is so intent on keeping control of the schools here. He notes that secular people do not form families and do not have children, because it is too much of a constraint on their autonomy. Instead, D’Souza writes, secularists simply seize control of the children of religious parents, and pass their values on to the children in the mandatory government-run schools.

Christians and the secular left

Some people, even some Christians, vote for Democrats because they don’t want to have to pay for the things they want by working themselves, but would prefer to pay for the the things they want by having their harder-working neighbors pay for the things they want. Parents who vote for leftists are really just delivering their children into the hands of an ever growing secular humanist educational bureaucracy that will have no respect – no respect – for the traditional family. And this is even worse for Christians, because the traditional family is the nursery for Christian beliefs. When a child has to please his peers and his public school indoctrinators more than his parents, Christianity is finished.

This is something that the church is largely ignorant of, and indifferent to, because they are more focused on providing feelings of happiness to their customers. The church does this by neglecting the truthfulness of Christianity as a knowledge tradition and emphasizing Christianity as an amusing musical show. Apologetics is replaced by entertainment.

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News

Pro-life protesters arrested and detained in UK

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Story here in the UK Telegraph. (H/T Suzanne)

Excerpt:

Andy Stephenson, 35, and Kathryn Sloane, 19, both committed Christians, were detained after a peaceful protest outside a publicly-funded abortion clinic.

The Crown Prosecution Service will decide next month whether to press charges against the pair for causing ‘harassment, alarm or distress’ under the Public Order Act.

[…]The pair were arrested last month as they held a banner aloft outside Wistons abortion clinic in Brighton.

Police were called by a member of staff concerned that patients entering the clinic felt traumatised and upset.

Officers asked Mr Stephenson and Miss Sloane to take down a 7ft by 5ft placard depicting an aborted eight-week-old embryo – which they duly did but only to replace it with another banner showing a 10-week-old foetus.

The pair were arrested and taken to Brighton police station where they were held until three in the morning.

Mr Stephenson, a father-of-two and a carpenter, from Worthing in East Sussex, said: “We went to the clinic because we know what women are going in there for and it seems the obvious place to hold a protest.

“We had no desire to be arrested but we sincerely believe this is a legal form of demonstration.

“We were arrested around midday. We were taken to the local police station where we were treated like common criminals.

“They took our fingerprints and put us in cells – they didn’t interview us until midnight and we weren’t let out until three in the morning.”

The UK is a party dominated by secular humanists on the political left. Their desire for selfish pleasure is so strong that they look upon any attempt to disagree with them or make them feel bad about what they are doing as a punishable offense. Secular humanists are very clear about what they believe. They believe that life is about the pursuit of happy feelings. They have no concept of human rights like the right to free speech in their atheistic worldview. So if you interrupt them in their pursuit of pleasure and draw attention to the destruction they are causing, they will attack you. They believe that the strong have a right to crush and coerce the weak into serving their desires for happiness.

To a secular humanist, everyone else exists as a depersonalized object to be used and thrown away. Other people have no value – and there is no such thing as virtue or a way humans “ought to be”. It’s is very much a Darwinian struggle to use the people around you in order to have the most happiness you can until you die. Morality is is just the fashion of the time and place – it’s not real. There is no standard of conduct. You obey the fashions of your place and time unless you can somehow break the rules and avoid being caught and sanctioned. Ethics is illusory on secular humanism. It’s just traffic laws and personal preferences.

The same people who oppose pro-lifers today would have opposed the abolition of slavery. The situation is identical. Declare a group of weaker, disadvantaged people to be non-persons, and then exploit them. Anyone who is pro-abortion (i.e. – who votes for left-wing parties like the Democrats) is pro-slavery. Period. The principle of abusing and killing the weak for your own happiness is the common denominator between both views. Only in a theistic universe do persons have human rights granted by God, like the right to life, and the right to free speech. In an atheistic universe, rights can be brushed aside by the strong.

News

Woman recants rape charge after man spends 2 years in jail

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Political Map of Canada

Story from Calgary, Alberta, the most conservative province in Canada.

Excerpt:

Charges against a Calgary man accused of raping a woman over a 10-hour period nearly two years ago have been unexpectedly stayed.

Crown prosecutor Karuna Ramakrishnan issued the stay after the 44-year-old complainant, who recanted her story under cross-examination by defence lawyer Rebecca Snukal on Wednesday, failed to show up in court on Friday for further questioning.

She had been ordered to do so by Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Sandy Park, so Ramakrishnan could reconsider her position.

John Francis Dionne, 43, had faced charges of sexual assault causing bodily harm, kidnapping, assault causing bodily harm and uttering death threats in connection with the alleged incident on Oct. 28, 2008.

His first trial ended in a mistrial in June, because of an issue with one of the jurors, and was rescheduled for this week.

The woman initially outlined in detail what she says occurred during the ordeal, but when cross-examined, she couldn’t remember specific details.

Then, when asked why she would accept a ride from the man she claimed had raped her for 10 hours she became frustrated and denied it even happened.

“I’m lying about everything,” she told Snukal.

“Hurry along because I’m lying about everything. He’s not a rapist . . . so there, that’s it. End of it . . . he didn’t rape me.

“Let Mr. John Francis go free. He’s not a rapist. It’s over. That’s all I have to say. Let him out.”

Dionne, who had been in custody since his arrest, was to be released some time later on Friday.

Her name has not been released – but his name was released. His life is therefore ruined. And she will probably not be charged, since it is very rare that women are charged for making false accusations. The man spent 2 years of his life in jail. Was there any evidence? She says she was lying about EVERYTHING. How could there be any evidence? And yet he spent two years in jail.

What effect will this have on men? What should men believe about women when things like this happen? What does this tell us about the court system?

Why do women make false accusations of rape?

One recent study listed three reasons why women invent false rape accusations.

Excerpt:

A study of rape allegations in Indiana over a nine-year period revealed that over 40% were shown to be false — not merely unproven. According to the author, “These false allegations appear to serve three major functions for the complainants: providing an alibi, seeking revenge, and obtaining sympathy and attention. False rape allegations are not the consequence of a gender-linked aberration, as frequently claimed, but reflect impulsive and desperate efforts to cope with personal and social stress situations.” ( Kanin EJ. Arch Sex Behav. 1994 Feb;23(1):81-92 False rape allegations. )

In 1985, a study of 556 rape allegations found that 27% accusers recanted when faced with a polygraph (which can be ordered in the military), and independent evaluation showed a false accusation rate of 60%. (McDowell, Charles P., Ph.D. “False Allegations.” Forensic Science Digest, (publication of the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations), Vol. 11, No. 4 (December 1985), p. 64.)

And this also happens in divorce trials in order to get custody.

False accusations in divorce trials

Consider this article from Touchstone magazine, by Stephen Baskerville.

Excerpt:

Today it is not clear that we have learned anything from these miscarriages of justice. If anything, the hysteria has been institutionalized in the divorce courts, where false allegations have become routine.

What is ironic about these witch-hunts is the fact that it is easily demonstrable that the child abuse epidemic—which is very real—is almost entirely the creation of feminism and the welfare bureaucracies themselves. It is well established by scholars that an intact family is the safest place for women and children and that very little abuse takes place in married families. Child abuse overwhelmingly occurs in single-parent homes, homes from which the father has been removed. Domestic violence, too, is far more likely during or after the breakup of a marriage than among married couples.

Yet patently false accusations of both child abuse and domestic violence are rampant in divorce courts, almost always for purposes of breaking up families, securing child custody, and eliminating fathers. “With child abuse and spouse abuse you don’t have to prove anything,” the leader of a legal seminar tells divorcing mothers, according to the Chicago Tribune. “You just have to accuse.”

Among scholars and legal practitioners it is common knowledge that patently trumped-up accusations are routinely used, and virtually never punished, in divorce and custody proceedings. Elaine Epstein, president of the Massachusetts Women’s Bar Association, writes that “allegations of abuse are now used for tactical advantage” in custody cases. The Illinois Bar Journal describes how abuse accusations readily “become part of the gamesmanship of divorce.” The UMKC Law Review reports on a survey of judges and attorneys revealing that disregard for due process and allegations of domestic violence are used as a “litigation strategy.” In the Yale Law Review, Jeannie Suk calls domestic violence accusations a system of “state-imposed de facto divorce” and documents how courts use unsupported accusations to justify evicting Americans from their homes and children.

The multi-billion dollar abuse industry has become “an area of law mired in intellectual dishonesty and injustice” writes David Heleniak in the Rutgers Law Review. Domestic violence has become “a backwater of tautological pseudo-theory,” write Donald Dutton and Kenneth Corvo in the scholarly journal Aggression and Violent Behavior. “No other area of established social welfare, criminal justice, public health, or behavioral intervention has such weak evidence in support of mandated practice.”

If we care about justice for all, then we have to care about this, too.

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