Family Integrity

Category: International Research and Comment

  • Petition asking the church to make a statement about the use of aborted babies in vaccines

    Around the world there is an increasing push to remove the ability for people to decline vaccines for themselves or their dependents for religious reasons. Why? Because no churches have statements objecting to vaccines for any reason.1, 2

    However, there are valid reasons why people would object to vaccines—the foremost of which is the use of aborted babies in vaccines. If churches would make statements about the use of aborted babies in vaccines it would empower those who would decline vaccines to do so. It would also provide assistance in the fight against government mandated or coerced vaccination and even to appeal to private businesses to rethink their coercive policies.3

    Please consider taking these actions.

    A.      Print, fill out, sign and give the petition to the leadership of your local church. 

    B.      Send the petition to all your Christian contacts in the world asking them to do the same.

    The petition is designed to be signed by individual Christians anywhere in the world and given to their local church. It asks their church to: one, make a statement opposing the use of fetal cell lines in vaccines and mandatory or coerced vaccination and two, communicate this opposition with the congregation and with the appropriate politicians. 

    The petition is designed to accomplish these things:

    1.       Raise awareness of the issue of the use of fetal cell lines in vaccines. 

    2.       Alert people so that they are ready to fight against mandatory/coerced vaccines. 

    3.       Create a ground swell of churches making statements on this issue (and posting them on their websites) to empower people to fight against mandatory/coerced vaccination. 

    4.       Raise an objection to mandatory/coerced vaccines with the state pre-emptively. 

    These four things will create a good foundation for if/when further appeals need to be made to the state not to force or coerce vaccination.

    International-Petition-PDFDownload
    International-Petition-editable-PDFDownload

  • THE WRONGS OF THE UNITED NATIONS’ RIGHTS OF THE CHILD

    THE WRONGS OF THE UNITED NATIONS’ RIGHTS OF THE CHILD

    By Charles H. Francis, Esq.

    Mrs Babette Francis, president of Endeavour Forum, Australia, has given her kind consent for the NCHR,  HEF and Family Integrity to publish her late husband’s, Charles H. Francis, essay “The Wrongs of The United Nations’ Rights of The Child” on their websites.

    Ruby Harrold-Claesson and Barbara Smith

    August 18, 2010.

    After World War II, when the United Nations first became established, most people looked to it with hope for the future. Primarily it was envisaged as a world authority, which would serve to prevent wars and act as mediator and arbitrator when disputes developed between member nations. Secondly, as the gross violations of human rights by the Nazi regime became more fully known, the United Nations was seen also as a world body to establish and protect human rights throughout the world.

    This essay discusses human rights in the context of the present “rights of the child” mentality prevailing at the United Nations. Legitimate concern for the world’s children has, unfortunately, given way to a dangerous and false vision of an autonomous child with the same objectionable humanist “rights” as any adult. This vision, if given legal effect or legitimacy of any kind, poses a real threat to the authority of parents and to the integrity of the family.

    IN THE BEGINNING: CHRISTIAN INFLUENCE AT THE UNITED NATIONS AND THE BEST INTERESTS OF CHILDREN

    Most of the countries that played a major part in the early development of the United Nations and in the drafting of its first declarations had a strong underlying Christian and thus pro-family ethos.[1]

    The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly fifty years ago, is evidence of this, asserting, as it does, “Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance,” in Article 25(2), and declaring, “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children,” in Article 26(3). The United Nations made similar declarations after this that tended to focus on improving children’s health, nutrition, safety, and education.[2]

    There appeared to be a general agreement that such interests were ordinarily best served by keeping children within integrated families and under the care, guidance and control of their parents.

    THE TURN TO HUMANISM AND TO DELIBERATE AMBIGUITY

    In 1989, the United Nations General Assembly introduced a new Convention on the Rights of the Child. It was promptly signed by 130 nations with, it would seem, singularly little debate or scrutiny and even less intelligent discussion on the legal effect of its provisions.

    This Convention was full of platitudinous phrases and contained much ambiguous language. However, many prominent lawyers became aware of the problems and traps within it and lectured and wrote on its proper interpretation, warning their countries not to sign or ratify it. Most of the representatives of the various nations, which rushed like so many lemmings to sign the Convention, probably had no real understanding of its meaning. It was feted as a Convention in the best interests of children, and those nations that signed it were said to demonstrate a commitment to the prevention of child abuse. Those who expressed concern about possible interpretations of the Convention were falsely assured that parental rights were fully preserved by Article Five.[3]

    A number of the supporters of this 1989 Children’s Rights Convention also maintained, quite falsely, that its main object was the protection of children, and that it did no more than provide for those rights that were already law in more advanced democracies such as the United States of America. In reality, had legislation setting out similar provisions to those of the Convention been introduced into the House of Representatives in the United States (or in Australia), it would probably never have become law.[4]

    By 1989, however, many supporters of humanist philosophies had already realized it was far easier to implement their ideas by incorporating them in United Nations’ Conventions, which their countries might thereafter ratify, rather than by attempting the more difficult (if not impossible) task of trying to pass such provisions through their countries’ legislatures, where they were likely to receive much closer scrutiny, and where the legal interpretation and actual effect of the provisions might be the subject of proper analysis and debate.[5]

    In essence, the 1989 Children’s Rights Convention was humanist (not Christian). Humanism denies and rejects God (as well as prayer, any divine purpose and theism generally) and all religions that place God above human desires. Despite its followers’ claims of neutrality, humanism is a secular religion, and is more dogmatic than any church teaching. Humanism recognizes and accepts abortion, euthanasia, suicide and countless other immoral acts, and works for the establishment of a completely secular society, which is its goal. It also realizes that the traditional family, marked by strong parental authority, is an obstacle to this goal and, therefore, seeks to dismantle it.

    In consequence, the 1989 Convention gave to children a sphere of autonomy and freedom from control (in particular a freedom from parental control) and thereby introduced a radically new concept of children having rights entirely separate from their parents, with the government accepting the responsibility for protecting the child from the power of parents.

    Professor Bruce Hafen of Brigham Young University has wisely pointed out that parents who subscribe to “children’s rights” thinking and “leave their children alone” so they develop their personalities are irresponsibly abrogating their parental duties, leaving their children a ready prey to a wide range of immoral and evil influences.[6]

    Indeed, in England some of the strongest support for “children’s rights” has come from well identified homosexual and pedophile organizations, which long ago realized that the easiest way to obtain access to children was to demand their freedom from any form of restraint, thereby exposing them to the predatory behavior of those who would harm them.[7]

    While some Articles of the Convention are praiseworthy (for example its prohibitions on slavery and child prostitution), there are five Articles in particular (12, 13, 14, 15 and 16, discussed below) that would create grave difficulties for parents seeking to exercise authority over children. These Articles appear to be the spearhead of a very serious invasion of parental rights.

    ARTICLES 12 TO 16

    Article 12 is the first to provide a charter of autonomous children’s rights. Its implications therefore require close attention. It assures to a child the right to express views freely in all matters affecting the child, the view of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.

    But who is to determine what weight is to be attached to those views? Obviously not the parents alone. Article 12 enables children to ventilate their disagreements with parental rulings in primarily public and legal forums.[8] Carried to its logical conclusion, the child will be able to demand state intervention to challenge any parental conduct the child doesn’t like (or conduct the child claims is not in his “best interest”). This is an absurd threat to parental authority.

    Article 13 assures to the child the right of freedom of expression, which includes “freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds.” This Article will prevent parents from protecting their children from objectionable or immoral materials, often disseminated in schools. A recent case in Australia provides a most disturbing example: When a family tried to persuade their daughter’s school that some of its curriculum was inappropriate for young secondary students, the Department of Secondary Education invoked the provisions of the Convention as authority for overriding parental rights and wishes.[9]

    We would do well, at this juncture, to consider some material that the United Nations has already approved for children, since we can assume that the Convention on the Rights of the Child would support the unrestricted dissemination of such material to them.

    The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has already produced two sex education films, “The Blue Pigeon” and “Music for Two.” “The Blue Pigeon” is a cartoon targeted at 10- to 12- year-old children, and graphically depicts sexual intercourse between two children attending a children’s picnic. “Music for Two” depicts the fantasies of a young girl who foresees herself as tired, overworked and overburdened when married, and her husband as indifferent and uninterested. By contrast, sexual intercourse with a boy neighbor is depicted as a happy, commitment-free sexual relationship.[10]

    It takes no genius to discern this message of approval for sexual activity outside of marriage and even for children at a very young age. Parents must understand that this is the type of “information” the United Nations wishes to “impart” to their children.

    Article 14 declares “the right of the child to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.” The Convention affords parents and guardians only the limited right to “direct” children in the exercise of this right (although there is no real protection for this right; the state merely gives it “respect,” which, without means of enforcement, is somewhat meaningless). “Direction” of course implies that a parent will not be able to require a young child to go to church or Sunday school if the child does not wish to do so.[11]

    American Christian leader Dr. James Dobson has suggested that the real freedom given by Article 14 is freedom from parental control in the area of religion. Parents are relegated to providing a state-monitored influence over the religious practices of their own children.[12]

    Article 15 “recognizes” the right of the child to freedom of association and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly. Such rights make it difficult, if not impossible, for parents to control the company their children keep, even though that company may be truly harmful. The Convention does not balance these “children’s rights” against those of parents (which should always serve the best interests of children), however valid and compelling. In some Australian towns where young teenage vandalism and crime is rife, teenage curfews have been introduced. Usually they have proved successful, but civil libertarians have already complained that curfews are a breach of Article 15 of the Convention. In this regard, the Convention appears to be directly opposed to the view of the United States Supreme Court, which has held such curfews lawful.[13]

    Article 16 protects the child’s right not to be “subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy.” The inclusion of the word arbitrary may permit children to exclude parents from anything they consider private, including medical treatments, and presumably activity in the child’s bedroom or any other part of the home set aside for the child’s use. This Article greatly strengthens the position of Planned Parenthood, which routinely puts young girls on birth control pills without notice to (much less consent from) their parents. The United States Supreme Court has, of course, already upheld privacy rights for children in the context of abortion and contraception. Mature minors (maturity being determined by a judge) can have abortions without any parental involvement, and immature minors may have abortions if the judge thinks it is in their best interests.

    THE NEED TO COMBAT THE UNITED NATIONS’ “RIGHTS OF THE CHILD”

    The picture should be clear by now: The Convention is a very serious invasion of parental rights. A careful analysis of its terms proves that it is anti-parent. It takes many important decisions regarding the well-being of children (on education, philosophy, morality and religion) away from parents and gives them to the State, and ultimately, to the United Nations itself.

    Most great civilizations have been destroyed not from without but from within. In almost every such instance, the breakdown of the family was key to the collapse. Responsible parents realize that children (especially adolescent children) need protection from their own actions, which spring from a lack of mature judgment. The Convention’s invasion of parental control can only make this task more difficult, if not impossible.

    The new humanist philosophy, increasingly embraced by so many Western democracies today, and brought to the United Nations by their delegates, has enormous potential for harm, especially when applied to our children. The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child reflects this philosophy and is, in many ways, diametrically opposed to what the United Nations had to offer the world in its 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

    We desperately need to re-appraise the United Nations’ present direction. We must realize that those humanist philosophies, which masquerade as a concern for human rights, will end up trampling them — just as the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child pretends to protect children, but damages the parental authority that is their best protection. The humanist element of such documents has the potential to destroy all that is best in Christian civilization, replacing it with a profoundly chaotic, harmful and ultimately evil empire.

    How to control adults by means of ‘children’s rights
    By Lynette Burrows
    The Fight for the Family
    By Lynette Burrows

    The Folly of Sweden’s State Controlled Families
    The lawyer, Mrs Siv Westerberg’s lecture to The Family Education Trust.

    Smacking: Those Swedes must be crazy!
    By Jean-Francis Held

    The Empresses’ New Clothes or Smacking: those Kiwis must be crazy
    By Ruby Harrold-Claesson

    [1] – The United States and Great Britain were foremost among them. To some extent, the drafters of the postwar declarations were using 20th-century national constitutions as their models, adding the protection of the family and the child to those political and civil democratic rights that they wished to identify and preserve.

    [2] – Such declarations included the Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1959, a valuable document that included Principle 6, providing that “the child shall wherever possible grow up in the care and under the responsibility of his parents.” The 1959 Declaration was in many ways not unlike the 1924 League of Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child, which had stated that “mankind owes to the child the best it has to give.” The philosophy of the 1959 Declaration was again essentially Christian, and anticipated that, at a later date, there would be further and more detailed provisions.

    [3] – Article 5 reads as follows: States Parties shall respect the responsibilities, rights, and duties of parents or, where applicable, the members of the extended family or community as provided for by local custom, legal guardians or other persons legally responsible for the child, to provide, in a manner consistent with the evolving capacities of the child, appropriate direction and guidance in the exercise by the child of the rights recognized in the present Convention. But who is to decide what constitutes “a manner consistent with the evolving capacities of the child”? When this Article is read in conjunction with the child’s rights contained in Articles 12 to 16, and with the fact that parents have no right of control, it is apparent that this determination is not necessarily to be left to the parents alone.

    [4] – The obvious legal implications of Articles 12 to 16, once properly understood and publicized (as they were in the U.S. Senate), are likely to lead to their rejection. (In Australia, the adoption of these Articles as Federal law would necessitate an amendment to the Constitution by referendum.)

    [5] – In England, however, some unfortunate features similar to those of the Convention found their way into the Child Act of 1989.

    [6] – Professor Bruce C. Hafen, and Jonathan O. Hafen (1996) Harvard International Law Journal 37(2), pp. 449-491.

    [7] –  See “The Fight for the Family” 1998, Lynette Burrows — Family Education Trust, Oxford, England, ISBN 0 906229 14 6.

    [8] –  Article 12(2) reads: [T]he child shall in particular be provided the opportunity to be heard in any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting the child, either directly, or through a representative or an appropriate body, in a manner consistent with the procedural rules of national law.

    [9] – Newsweekly (Australia) January 24, 1998, at 17. The U.N. has a track record in this regard: Its Committee on the Rights of the Child has already criticized England for not having a way for children to dissent from parental views. The Committee’s criticism was made in relation to parents withdrawing their children from school sex education programs that the parents deemed unsuitable. U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, Report on the United Kingdom, February 15, 1995.

    [10] – “Behind the Mask of UNICEF,” Population Research Institute Review (1992), Baltimore, MD.

    [11] – Professor Bruce Hafen, when speaking in Ireland last year, confirmed this interpretation of Article 14 when he said that a parent who might compel his child to go to Mass could well find himself in breach of this Article. The Irish News, March 26, 1997.

    [12] – Satanic cults will no doubt make use (or misuse) of Article 14, which enables them to attract children away from the religions of their families more easily. Such cults are typically interested in young children or adolescents.

    [13] – City of Dallas v. Stenglin, 490 US 19 (1989).

  • How the Convention on the Rights of the Child Will Destroy Family Sanctity

    How the Convention on the Rights of the Child Will Destroy Family Sanctity

    by Aaron Young

    The Convention on the Rights of the Child, an international treaty commonly referred to as CRC, is one of the greatest threats to parental rights our country has ever witnessed.  Fasten your seatbelts for the fight for ratification.
    The CRC’s devastating impact on American children and their families can be seen easily in the text of the treaty and its application in both foreign states and in recent U.S. court decisions. Do not be misled by the arguments of American legislators, legal scholars and transnationalists who say U.S. ratification of the CRC would prove our commitment to the protection of the world’s children and their rights to the international community. The CRC is in no way a harmless treaty; it is an instrument used by transnationalists for widespread social change, beginning right here in our own country. Similar to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) treaty, U.S. ratification will in no way provide the children of the world with any additional forms of protections they don’t already enjoy under United States law, just as CEDAW affords women no rights beyond what they currently enjoy under U.S. law.
    The 54 articles within the treaty do not provide American children with any protection from any dangers that they do not already enjoy in the U.S…

  • England: ‘Evil destruction’ of a happy family

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5858902/Evil-destruction-of-a-happy-family.html

    ‘Evil destruction’ of a happy family

    A system involving social workers, police and courts took a child away from loving parents for no apparent reason, writes Christopher Booker.

    By Christopher Booker
    Published: 5:48PM BST 18 Jul 2009

    Comments 287 | Comment on this article

    Two weeks ago I reported as shocking a story as this column has ever covered. It described how a loving family was torn apart when the parents were arrested by police on what turned out to be wholly spurious charges, so that their three children could be taken into care by social workers. As reported on another page, it now seems this awful episode has come to a happy ending.

    However a new case has lately been surfacing, if anything even more shocking. This also involved the arrest of two parents and the abduction of their child by social workers, in a story so bizarre that, at last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions, Gordon Brown was asked about it by the family’s MP, Charles Hendry, who has long been concerned with the case because the mother is a vice-chairman of his local Conservative Association. The family’s horrified GP says that, in 43 years of medical practice, he has never “encountered a case of such appalling injustice”.

    I first planned to describe this case in April, but was pre-empted by the draconian reporting restrictions on family cases, which, for reasons which will become tragically clear, have now been partly lifted.

    The story began in April 2007 when “Mr Smith”, as I must call him, had a visit from the RSPCA over the dog-breeding business he ran from the family home. He had docked the tails of five new-born puppies – a procedure that had become illegal two days beforehand. Unaware of this, he promised in future to obey the new law.

    Three days later, however, at nine o’clock in the morning, two RSPCA officials returned, accompanied in cars and riot vans by 18 policemen, who had apparently been tipped off, quite wrongly, that Mr Smith had guns in the house.

    Armed with pepper spray, they ransacked the house, looking for the nonexistent guns. The dogs, released from their kennels, also rampaged through the house. When Mr Smith and his wife, who was three months pregnant, volubly protested at what was happening, they were forcibly arrested in front of their screaming five-year-old daughter “Jenny” and taken away. Two hours later, with the house in a shambles – the dogs having strewn the rabbit entrails meant for their dinner across the floor – social workers arrived to remove the crying child.

    Held for hours in a police cell, Mrs Smith had a miscarriage. When she was finally set free, she returned home that evening to find her daughter gone. It was the beginning of a barely comprehensible nightmare.

    Her husband was charged with various offences connected with the dogs, including the tail-docking, but was eventually given a conditional discharge by a judge who accepted that he was “an animal lover” who had not been cruel to his dogs.

    Far more serious, however, was that the social workers seemed determined to hang onto the child, now in foster care, on the sole grounds that they had found the house dirty and in a mess (the “animal entrails” played a large part in their evidence). This was despite the testimony of a woman Pc (who had visited the house a month earlier on a different matter) that she found it “clean and tidy”. Two hundred horrified neighbours, who knew the couple as doting parents of a happy, well-cared-for child, were about to stage a protest demonstration when they were stopped by the police, on the social workers’ instructions that this might identify the child.

    For more than two years the couple have been fighting through more than 100 hearings in the courts to win their daughter back. From a mass of evidence, including psychiatric reports and tape recordings made at meetings with her parents (only allowed in the presence of social workers), it is clear she has been desperate to return home. It is equally clear that considerable pressure has been brought on the child to turn her against her parents,

    One particularly bizarre psychiatric report was compiled after only an hour-long interview with the little girl. When she said she had once choked on a lollipop, this was interpreted as signifying that she could possibly have “been forced to have oral sex with her father”.

    After Mrs Smith alone had been subjected to four different psychiatric investigations, which came up with mixed findings, she refused to submit to a fifth, and this apparently weighed heavily with the judge who last December ordered that “Jenny” should be put out to adoption.

    In the Appeal Court 11 days ago, Mr Justice Bodey ruled that, because the mother had refused that fifth test, indicating that the parents put their own “emotional wellbeing” in front of that of their child, the adoption order must stand. When this judgment was reported, an independent social worker, who had earlier been an expert witness in the case, wrote to Mr and Mrs Smith to say he was “horrified” to learn that Jenny was “not back in their care”, having assumed for over a year that “she must have been returned home”.

    Their equally horrified GP, saying that he had never “encountered such a case of appalling injustice”, wrote “the destruction of this once happy family is in my opinion evil”. So shocked was their MP, Mr Hendry ,that he last Wednesday took the highly unusual course of raising the case with the Prime Minister at question time. Numerous others who know the family well have expressed similar dismay. One neighbour, herself a former social worker, whose own daughter often played with “Jenny”, said: “I worked with children in social services for 25 years and I have never seen anything like this. It is disgusting.”

    What is clear in this case, as in so many others, is that a system involving social workers, police and courts in what is an obviously very close alliance should yet again have left a happy, loving family destroyed for no very obvious reason, Almost equally alarming is the way that system manages to shield itself from the world, through reporting restrictions which it claims are designed to protect the children but which too often end up by protecting only the system itself.

    Leave your comment here:

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5858902/Evil-destruction-of-a-happy-family.html

  • Cabinet Minister’s Smacking Law Comments Welcomed

    MEDIA RELEASE

    1 June 2009

    Cabinet Minister’s Smacking Law Comments Welcomed

    Family First NZ is welcoming comments made by Social Development Minister Paula Bennett in a radio interview over the weekend.

    When a caller to the programme on Newstalk ZB asked the Minister whether she thought a smack as part of good parental correction should be a criminal offence in NZ, the Minister responded ‘No I don’t, I believe that actually good parenting should be left to do that in their different ways in their different homes and I don’t have an interest in going into people’s homes and telling them how to parent’.

    “This is a welcome change to the previous message that parents have received from politicians that ‘we know best how to raise your kids’,” says Bob McCoskrie, National Director of Family First NZ.

    “Ms Bennett is also willing to acknowledge the difference between a smack as part of good parental correction, and child abuse. She went on to say ‘I’ve got the hat on of being hugely hugely concerned with serious abuse – now I think they’re very different things so do understand I’m not saying that section 59 was ever going to stop that…’. She also admitted that she would never have introduced an anti-smacking bill.”

    Paula Bennett now joins Labour leader Phil Goff as having indicated that a smack as part of good parental correction should not be a crime in NZ, as the law currently stands. This is the question being asked in the upcoming Referendum on the anti-smacking law.

    The Minister also acknowledged the level of daily concern from parents regarding the law and its impact on their parenting and the attitude of children.

    “If the politicians believe that the law as it currently stands is wrong, they should save the country $10m on a Referendum and amend the law now,” says Mr McCoskrie. “They can simply adopt the private members bill put forward by ACT MP John Boscawen, and then heed the calls for a Royal Commission to target the real causes of child abuse.”

    ENDS


    For More Information and Media Interviews, contact Family First:

    Bob McCoskrie – National Director

    Mob. 027 55 555 42

  • Plea for the return of German homeschoolers to their parents

    For those following the cases of German homeschoolers, here is your
    opportunity to add your name to the cause of the Gorber children.

    Six were snatched in an armed offenders style raid at the beginning of the
    year and have spent 6+ months in state custody.

    The 3 year old boy was finally allowed home a few weeks ago.

    The children have asked for as many people as possible to support them by
    signing the plea for their return, because they have asked and asked until
    they are blue in the face and the authorities are not listening to them.

    http://educatinggermany.7doves.com/2008/09/06/plea

    Thank you!

  • T.S. Eliot on transmission of culture

    Quote from TS Eliot

  • Why a smacking ban must be slapped down

    A great article from Wales:

    http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/columnists/2008/07/29/why-a-smacking-ban-must-be-slapped-down-91466-21420462/

    Why a smacking ban must be slapped down

    July 29, 2008 by Denise Robertson, Western Mail

    I’M TOLD there are moves in Parliament to bring in a Bill to outlaw smacking. If they succeed, I will again oppose it, which seems odd when I abhor smacking and long for a world in which every child is free from fear.

    The reason for my objection is “mission-creep”, that insidious disease which overtakes too many pieces of legislation that at first seem sensible. In other words, give an idiot a law a sane man or woman would use sensibly and the idiot will abuse it.

    Mission-creep has overtaken terrorism laws so that they are now used against ordinary citizens. Latest figures reveal that councils across Wales and England launched more than 10,000 spying missions last year to investigate possible petty offences.

    Rules to curb paedophile activity have led to inexcusable situations like a mother from Aberfan being banned from riding in a taxi with her disabled child until she has a criminal record check.

    If a smacking ban succeeds, forget assurances that it will be used with common sense. Before long some good mum or dad will be hauled into court because, in a moment of panic, they tapped little Johnny’s legs for running into the road. The case will probably be thrown out when the court sees the whole picture, but not before that family has been traumatised.

    We already have laws to prevent the abuse of children – laws which are not used often enough in my opinion – but my fear of mission-creep if there is a total ban on smacking is very real.

  • Queensland – Laws a legal minefield: lawyer

    http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/queensland/antismacking-laws-a-legal-minefield-lawyer/2008/06/30/1214677902879.html

    Laws a legal minefield: lawyer

    Christine Kellett | June 30, 2008 – 11:59AM

    Anti-smacking laws to punish Queensland parents who used “excessive force” to discipline their children could be too hard to prosecute, a lawyer has warned.

    Moves by the Labor Party to toughen its stance on smacking were made at its state conference earlier this month, with suggestions the practice would eventually be outlawed.

    But Brisbane lawyer Michael Bosscher, of criminal defence firm Ryan and Bosscher, said changes to the Criminal Code to make smacking illegal would be a legal minefield and would cause more problems than they solved.

    He cited the example of New Zealand, where anti-smacking legislation had sparked a public backlash and had prompted calls for a referendum.

    “It is amazing to think Queensland is considering going down this path when New Zealand is trying to reverse its decision,” Mr Bosscher said.

    “Our laws already provide the option to prosecute parents who abuse their children.

    The move comes after shocking cases of children being abandoned outside casinos and hotels in South East Queensland while their parents socialised hit the headlines earlier this year.

    Mr Bosscher said said practical difficulties would arise when police, lawyers and the courts tried to prosecute parents who smacked.

    “The real danger with new laws is how you interpret and enforce them and there is a risk of zealous authorities prosecuting parents for minor smacks that would traditionally be seen as just part of parenting.

    “There’s this nanny state mentality here where the state government is imposing draconian laws upon families, in theory to protect children. However if you start prosecuting parents for smacking children, the potential to destroy families and therefore hurt children, is enormous.

    “Anti-smacking laws would be a controversial issue to prosecute in the courts because one police officers definition of excessively hard smacking could be radically different from another officers view.

    Mr Bosscher said Queensland laws currently allowed parents to use “reasonable force” to discipline their children.

    “A change to the Criminal Code is not needed. The law already has provision to prosecute parents- or any person- who inflicts serious, grievous or bodily harm on a child,” he said.

    “What they are really talking about is changing the law to brand parents as criminals. This is wrong and is not needed in Queensland.”

  • Liberialism IS a mental disorder:

    Liberialism IS a mental disorder:

    Saturday, February 16, 2008

    WorldNetDaily Exclusive
    Top shrink concludes liberals are nuts!
    Makes case ideology is mental disorder

    WorldNetDaily

     

    WASHINGTON – Just when liberals thought it was safe to start identifying themselves as such, an acclaimed, veteran psychiatrist is making the case that the ideology motivating them is actually a mental disorder.

    “Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded,” says Dr. Lyle Rossiter, author of the new book, “The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness.” “Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave.”

    While political activists on the other side of the spectrum have made similar observations, Rossiter boasts professional credentials and a life virtually free of activism and links to “the vast right-wing conspiracy.”

    For more than 35 years he has diagnosed and treated more than 1,500 patients as a board-certified clinical psychiatrist and examined more than 2,700 civil and criminal cases as a board-certified forensic psychiatrist. He received his medical and psychiatric training at the University of Chicago.

    Rossiter says the kind of liberalism being displayed by the two major candidates for the Democratic Party presidential nomination can only be understood as a psychological disorder.

    “A social scientist who understands human nature will not dismiss the vital roles of free choice, voluntary cooperation and moral integrity – as liberals do,” he says. “A political leader who understands human nature will not ignore individual differences in talent, drive, personal appeal and work ethic, and then try to impose economic and social equality on the population – as liberals do. And a legislator who understands human nature will not create an environment of rules which over-regulates and over-taxes the nation’s citizens, corrupts their character and reduces them to wards of the state – as liberals do.”

    Dr. Rossiter says the liberal agenda preys on weakness and feelings of inferiority in the population by:

    · creating and reinforcing perceptions of victimization;

    · satisfying infantile claims to entitlement, indulgence and compensation;

    · augmenting primitive feelings of envy;

    · rejecting the sovereignty of the individual, subordinating him to the will of the government.

    “The roots of liberalism – and its associated madness – can be clearly identified by understanding how children develop from infancy to adulthood and how distorted development produces the irrational beliefs of the liberal mind,” he says. “When the modern liberal mind whines about imaginary victims, rages against imaginary villains and seeks above all else to run the lives of persons competent to run their own lives, the neurosis of the liberal mind becomes painfully obvious.”