Tag Archives: Nanny State

News

Carmel High School censors and destroys poster from pro-life student club

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Carmel Teens for Life poster destroyed by left-wing Carmel High School fascists
Carmel Teens for Life poster destroyed by left-wing Carmel High School fascists

Another post in our continuing series analyzing why you should never send your children to public schools.

The story comes from Fox local news in Indianapolis:

Excerpt:

Administrators at Carmel High School are facing the threat of a lawsuit after removing a pro-life poster from the building.

Liberty Counsel, a nonprofit organization “dedicated to advancing religious freedom,” says administrators removed the poster display created by Carmel Teens for Life after another student complained that it was “offensive.”

The club reportedly spent over 25 hours painting the display which included 300 hearts, each representing 10 lives, to symbolize the written statement “3,000 Lives Are Ended Each Day.”

When they were caught red-handed, the fascist administrators tried to threaten the students to stop them from seeking legal advice about their first amendment rights:

In addition, administrators reportedly asked members of the club sign an agreement, which prohibits the club from using the word “abortion” in future displays or other forms of communication. The agreement reads “I will not have communications with outside agencies as a representative of the Teens for Life Club without prior approval from the Sponsors…” and “Prior approval for all communications regarding the Teens for Life Club will be requested from the Teens for Life Club Sponsors…”

The organization says members were threatened that if they did not sign the agreement immediately, the club sponsors would be forced to resign.

Liberty Counsel has more on the strong-arm bully tactics of the radical feminists:

The School District summoned the club’s leaders, demanding that they sign an agreement that they would not seek outside legal counsel or parental input, that they would have to receive prior approval for “all communications,” and that they not use the word “abortion” in any communications, including Facebook. There was also a threat to withdraw teacher sponsorship if the teens did not sign the “Agreement.”

[…]It is highly improper for school officials to demand students forgo their rights and promise to not seek legal counsel or parental input.

That was their response to destroying the poster – cover it up, threaten the teens, don’t tell your parents, don’t tell the lawyers, don’t tell the media. These are the kinds of people who run public schools – little left-wing dictators who hate the values of the parents who pay their salaries. They are more interested in lobbying for pay increases than providing children with an education that allows all points of view to be heard. Zero critical thinking from these secular left education school graduates. They can’t get jobs in the real world, but they are good at bullying children in a government-run monopoly.

Leftist Indiana news station RTV6 reported on the story:

Carmel Clay Schools

Carmel Clay Schools denies the rights of students to express their opinions, except if they agree with the secular leftist fascist school administrators. They are trying to cover up the way that they censored the free speech rights of the students. Their response was to threaten the students, to make the problem go away without having to admit fault. The school district allows posters from young Democrats and LGBT activists, just not from pro-lifers.

It’s important to understand that school adminstrators and their government allies are generally not moral people.

Consider the architect of Ontario’s sex education curriculum:

Ben Levin, the man who “appeared to have it all,” was today sentenced to three years in prison for three child pornography offences.

[…]The once-tenured professor at Ontario’s Institute for Studies in Education had a “hidden, dark side” in a “depraved on-line world” as a “deviant mentor” who made “insidious attempts to normalize the sexual exploitation of children,” McArthur noted in her 23-page reasons for sentence.

[…]A member of Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne’s transition team, Levin was deputy minister of education in 2009 when he and then-minister of education Wynne developed the “equity and inclusive education strategy,” part of which was the 2010 radical sex-ed curriculum shelved by then-Premier Dalton McGuinty after parental backlash. The 2015 sex-ed curriculum is virtually the same as the 2010 version.

[…]Levin himself claimed in a 2010 interview: “I was the deputy minister of education. In that role, I was the chief civil servant. I was responsible for the operation of the Ministry of Education and everything that they do; I was brought in to implement the new education policy.”

[…]Levin pled guilty on March 3, 2015, to three of an original seven child pornography related charges.

Many people go into the education system to normalize immoral behavior, and naturally they teach students to feel offended at any sort of judging of their immorality. When one student is offended by a pro-life viewpoint, the teachers and administrators naturally side with the pro-abortion student. They don’t side with the moral person, they side with the immoral person. Often, they are acting to protect their own immorality because they are sensitive about being judged by those who are moral.

How are we going to solve this problem of administrator discrimination against moral people? We can’t fire the administrators, it’s almost impossible to get education officials removed from a government-supported monopoly. But there is a way to solve it.

School choice

The first thing to understand is that parents really need to be promoting school choice as a public policy. When parents pay money to the government, it is handed out to schools willy-nilly, and not tied to school performance. There is no accountability to parents, and that favors the misconduct of the administrators. The simple fact of the matter is that increased spending on education does not result in improved student performance. The money is often eaten up by hiring far left school administrators whose job is to indoctrinate the students with secular leftist propaganda, not to teach them marketable skills. Parents want their kids to get jobs that will pay well.

The right way to achieve this goal of student-centered education is to stop the mandatory collection of taxes for education by the government, abolish the federal Department of Education, and put the money earned by parents back in the hands of the parents, so that they can purchase the education from the school that is focused on teaching children to invent products and services for customers. Indoctrination in global warming, Marxism and LGBT activism is not what parents want for their kids. It doesn’t make the child independent and self-sufficient.

News

Government investigates women for letting her children play in fenced-in backyard

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Winnipeg mother Jacqui Kendrick Winnipeg mother Jacqui Kendrick is stunned she was investigated by CFS
Winnipeg mother Jacqui Kendrick investigated by the government for unlicensed parenting

McKenzie tweeted this story from CTV News in Canada, and I had to blog it.

Excerpt:

A Winnipeg mother says she was investigated by Child and Family Services simply for letting her children play in her backyard.

Jacqui Kendrick, a stay-at-home mom, says a CFS worker showed up unexpectedly at her door in early April. The worker told her they were doing a “well-being check” after receiving a complaint about her children being left unsupervised.

Kendrick has three children ages two, five and 10, who love to play in the family’s backyard after school. The backyard is fully fenced in, with a wood fence covering three sides, and a portion of the front covered by a chain link fence and gate.

Kendrick told CTV Winnipeg she’s always either with her kids or looking in on them from her living room windows.

[…]Still, the worker with the CFS — the the provincial body that apprehends abused and neglected children — insisted she was obligated to investigate and ask a few more questions.

“We had to go through a whole interview asking so many questions — asking me about if we’ve ever dealt with CFS before, what my childhood was like, how I punish my children, whether we drink or do drugs… She had to look to see where my kids slept. She had to see if we had enough food in the house,” Kendrick said.

“The whole time I’m sitting there, pretty much in tears, because I couldn’t understand what was going on.”

Well, this is just one big misunderstanding, so there will be no permanent record in government files, right? Wrong:

Manitoba’s Child and Family Services says it will not erase the file of a Winnipeg mother who was investigated for letting her children play in her backyard.

The agency would not comment on the specifics of the case of Jacqui Kendrick, a stay-at-home mother of three. But regardless of the results of their investigation, the agency said it would not erase the file because all documentation and records need to be accessible in the event that another concern arises in the future.

This is the kind of thing that parents should know about when there are deciding where to live. I can guarantee you that the person who called the government is no conservative. Now imagine a nosy neighbor decided that your views on social issues, e.g. – the definition of marriage, shouldn’t be passed on to your children. Or suppose a nosy neighbor didn’t like the church that your children attended. Or the yard sign for a conservative candidate in your yard. There are government agencies out there to help them to make sure that your children believe the “right” views – the things that the secular left want them to believe.

What secular leftism teaches people on the left is that some opinions and values are so wrong that they are 100% justified in using the government to stamp them out. Something to think about when you are deciding where to live and how open to be with your neighbors about what you believe. By all means, make a big impact. But be aware of what the other side thinks about what you’re doing.

Polemics

Stephen Baskerville: five myths about no-fault divorce

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Marriage and family
Marriage and family

From the Catholic News Agency.

Introduction:

Almost four decades after the “no-fault” divorce revolution began in California, misconceptions abound. Even the many books about divorce, including myriad self-help manuals, are full of inaccurate and misleading information. No public debate preceded the introduction of no-fault divorce laws in the 1970s, and no debate has taken place since.

Yet divorce-on-demand is exacting a devastating toll on our children, our social order, our economy, and even our constitutional rights. A recent study estimates the financial cost of divorce to taxpayers at $112 billion annually. Recent demands to legitimize same-sex marriage almost certainly follow from the divorce revolution, since gay activists readily acknowledge that they only desire to marry under the loosened terms that have resulted from the new divorce laws. Divorce also contributes to a dangerous increase in the power of the state over private life.

Here are the five myths about no-fault divorce:

  • No-fault divorce permitted divorce by mutual consent, thus making divorce less acrimonious
  • We cannot force people to remain married and should not try
  • No-fault divorce has led men to abandon their wives and children
  • When couples cannot agree or cooperate about matters like how the children should be raised, a judge must decide according to “the best interest of the child”
  • Divorce must be made easy because of domestic violence

And the details about number three:

Myth 3: No-fault divorce has led men to abandon their wives and children.

Fact: This does happen (wives more often than children), but it is greatly exaggerated. The vast majority of no-fault divorces — especially those involving children — are filed by wives. In fact, as Judy Parejko, author of Stolen Vows, has shown, the no-fault revolution was engineered largely by feminist lawyers, with the cooperation of the bar associations, as part of the sexual revolution. Overwhelmingly, it has served to separate large numbers of children from their fathers. Sometimes the genders are reversed, so that fathers take children from mothers. But either way, the main effect of no-fault is to make children weapons and pawns to gain power through the courts, not the “abandonment” of them by either parent.

Al Mohler wrote about the history of no-fault divorce a while back, and I think it’s worth reviewing why we have this lousy law.

The story behind America’s love affair with no-fault divorce is a sad and instructive tale. As Baskerville documents, no-fault divorce laws emerged in the United States during the 1970s and quickly spread across the nation. Even though only nine states had no-fault divorce laws in 1977, by 1995, every state had legalized no-fault divorce.

Behind all this is an ideological revolution driven by feminism and facilitated by this society’s embrace of autonomous individualism. Baskerville argues that divorce “became the most devastating weapon in the arsenal of feminism, because it creates millions of gender battles on the most personal level.” As far back as 1947, the National Association of Women Lawyers [NAWL] was pushing for what we now know as no-fault divorce. More recently, NAWL claims credit for the divorce revolution, describing it as “the greatest project NAWL has ever undertaken.”

The feminists and NAWL were not working alone, of course. Baskerville explains that the American Bar Association “persuaded the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws [NCCUSL] to produce the Uniform Marriage and Divorce Act.” Eventually, this led to a revolution in law and convulsions in society at large. This legal revolution effectively drove a stake into the heart of marriage itself, with inevitable consequences. In effect, no-fault divorce has become the catalyst for one of the most destructive cultural shifts in human history. Now, no-fault divorce is championed by many governments in the name of human rights, and America’s divorce revolution is spreading around the world under the banner of “liberation.”

And note that Democrats oppose any effort to reform laws that make it easy to break up marriages:

A basic dishonesty on the question of divorce pervades our political culture. Baskerville cites Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm as referring to divorce as a couple’s “private decision.” Granholm’s comments came as she vetoed a bill intended to reform divorce law in her state. The danger and dishonesty of referring to divorce as a couple’s “private decision” is evident in the fact that this supposedly private decision imposes a reality, not only on the couple, but also on children and the larger society. Indeed, the “private decision” is really not made by a couple at all–but only by any spouse demanding a divorce.

So, no-fault was pushed by two groups: feminists and trial lawyers.

There’s a lot of talk these days about gay marriage and how it undermines marital norms and normalizes raising children without either their biological father or biological mother. But before there was gay marriage, there was no-fault divorce, which deprives children of their biological father. There is no provision for no-fault divorce in the Bible, so it seems to me that Christians should be against frivolous divorce just like we are against same-sex marriage.