Tag Archives: Parental Rights

News

Canadian parents jailed and fined for spanking child

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Political Map of Canada

Story from Life Site News. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

The parents of a 14-year-old girl were sentenced each to 10 days in jail plus a $500 fine on December 9 for using a belt to spank their daughter. They had been found guilty of assault in June of this year, but sentencing was put off until a later date.

The jail time was remitted due to the five days the couple spent locked up after being arrested, according to Quebec Media Inc.

Lawrence Zachow, 60, and his wife Aida Calagui-Zachow, 54, were originally charged with assault with a weapon for the Jan. 15, 2008 spanking. However, Judge Michael Stevens-Guille found them guilty of the lesser offense of assault, saying he understood the parents were disciplining the girl according to their religious beliefs, and not just reacting in anger.

“Whatever one’s belief in higher authority, if you live in Canada you are subject to the laws of Canada as interpreted by the courts, in this case the Supreme Court of Canada,” Stevens-Guille said in the ruling. “Spare the rod and spoil the child is not the byword of the discipline of children in this country in 2010,” he added.

According to QMI, the court was told that the spanking was the result of a confrontation between the parents and the daughter, in ninth grade at the time, over the girl’s admission that she was having sex with her boyfriend. She refused her parents’ request to break off the relationship.

Following the spanking, which the girl told the court did not hurt, she reported her parents to a school official who called the police.

[…]In 2004, the Supreme Court of Canada banned spanking of children under 2 and over 12 and criminalized it at any age with an implement such as the common wooden spoon.

I do not agree  with spanking a 14-year old. My point in posting this is to show how social engineers in Canada’s most liberal province do not really believe that parents are the authority over their own children. And I think they are especially annoyed by the idea that fathers should be able to push their morality on children because of their authority as provider and moral leader. What incentives does this create for fathers who want their daughters to not act immorally? Does being overridden by the state make men more likely to marry? Does it make men more likely to want to have children? What man takes on a marriage and children when he can be overruled and regulated by the feminist state at any time? Why bother to have children at all, if the state decides what vision of morality the children will be raised with?

Don’t forget the previous story of the daughter who took her father to court for grounding her – and won! She was sending naked pictures of herself on her father’s computer. Is that what fathers can look forward to? And with government approval, no less? Why should a man sign up for that? What is the point? Why bother? Why not just stay single, stop working so hard, and enjoy the freely available sex that is available as the number of fatherless women increases as feminism dominates society more and completely destroys the institution of marriage?

Women think men want to marry as much as they do and for the same reasons, but it’s false. Men marry for respect, and to be recognized as essential, and as the moral and spiritual leader of the home. ALL THESE THINGS are taken away by the feminist state’s regulation of the family. Men today get no respect, no special role as provider, and no authority as leader. They have been replaced and marginalized from their traditional roles, by design. There is really no reason for men to MARRY any more, and no reason for them to take on the burden of parenting. There is nothing in it for men. Women don’t value men, and women vote for social policies that discriminate against men and marginalize them for their traditional roles – substituting government social programs and welfare for husbands and fathers. Imagine – courts overruling the judgment of parents about a 14-year old having sex! Unbelievable! What man wants this? NONE.

This is a question that women today never ask: What is the value proposition for men to marry and raise children?

And there even more to it than that. Presumably, these parents worked for 30 years each paying 40% of their income to the government. That would involve scholarships for these judges and lawyers to got the school. And funding for the courts and the prisons. And funding for public schools to teach their daughter sex education. And funding for public school teachers to call the police on them. Police that are funded by their taxpayer dollars. They literally paid the state to incarcerate them for the crime of disciplining (in an excessive way, granted) their own daughter, who had been indoctrinated by the state’s sex education programs to think that pre-marital sex was normal.

There is something deeply, deeply disturbing about paying for your own execution. And it brings to mind that old sick pre-occupation of the secular left to avoid being judged morally at all costs – the same sickness that causes them to reject the objective moral law. In fact, they would probably find everything that I am saying to be quite odd. Morality? What is morality? These people don’t understand what morality even is. The purpose of life, on their view, is to be happy in whatever way feels right to you. And anyone who tries to form your character to any end should be arrested and put in jail.

Previous story on Sweden fining and jailing parents for spanking their child.

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

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)