I was discussing this with my wife this morning, and she mentioned a local “cult” where the kids dress about the same as the FLDS kids, where they live in a closed community without television, Internet, or vaccinations, go to their own schools, are part of large inbred families, are used to leaders ordained by God. So when is the state of Ohio going to move against the Amish?
Somebody has approached that idea from the other side:
The Amish (adults) want the Amish to continue, and a lot of Americans who like the idea of having a few buggys and bonnets around want them to continue too. But the price of doing that is allowing generation after generation of children to be handicapped. We don’t fancy that when it’s Yearning for Zion Ranch. Why do we think it’s okay for the Amish?
What you mean “we”, Paleface? I think it’s OK for people to do with their (note: possessive pronoun!) children as they see fit. I see Amish kids all the time and in generally they seem saner than the moonbattery I see on this site, not to mention physically healthier. I haven’t even seen anything egregiously awful about the FLDS, and nothing in either that would lead to a valid comparison with Heaven’s Gate.
But I could be wrong. Ophelia Benson is obviously much more intelligent than I am, and she knows that she’s smart enough to run other people’s lives, while I know only that I have a full-time job running my own.
Thanks (?) to Right Wing Nation.
May 17, 2008 at 11:12 pm |
“I think it’s OK for people to do with their (note: possessive pronoun!) children as they see fit.”
Yeah? Kill them? Rape them? Beat them up? Sell them into slavery? Pimp them? Cut their fingers off?
Note possessive pronoun – so you think people own their children the way people own chairs and apples and golf clubs?
One thing that was egregiously awful about the FLDS is that the young teenagers coould not refuse the marriages. But you think it’s OK for people to do with their children as they see fit, so maybe you think that’s fine.
May 18, 2008 at 1:34 am |
First, re the right of refusal…that simply isn’t true. Go out there and read what the FLDS members themselves are saying, not the press or CPS.
As for ownership of children, I simply pointed out how our language works. We have rightly decided that human beings can’t be property. But control is one of the key elements of ownership, and any sane person will admit that children need to be controlled by somebody (especially if they’ve seen what happens when they have not been controlled). Thus, the relationship of adults to children is more like ownership than anything else. And as a general rule, if somebody is going to exercise the rights of ownership, better it be the parents who know and love the child, than a group of strangers with guns. Certainly, children might be abused by parents. They will almost certainly be abused by the State.