re: #82 MandyManners

I *think* No. 4 refers to sex education, birth control and abortion for minor girls.

The problem is, it isn’t specific, and is presented as an absolute statement.

And discussions here over the last few months related to vaccination point up how ridiculous such a stance is. Sometimes, the well-being of society - and the child - are better determined by the state. Vaccination is one of these cases. And so are all the children who’ve died because their parents decided to pray their diabetes or hemophilia or appendicitis away or who starved to death because their parents decided to put them on some bizarre “alternative” diet or who’ve been outright murdered by parents who thought they were possessed by a demon.

All rare cases, to be sure (although the anti-vaccination morons are growing alarmingly of late) but nowhere near rare enough. Even parental rights have limits when the parent’s actions wind up causing harm to children too young to make decisions for themselves. In such cases, the state clearly must step in, and has been granted the authority to do so by the citizenry. We live in a society where individuals are granted extremely wide latitude to act without interference from the state, but the reality is that the state’s authority trumps that of the individual and family, and that such an arrangement is a necessity for a well-ordered society. Putting the family’s authority ahead of that of the state leads to chaos, and the sort of existence exemplified in works of fiction such as The Lord of the Flies, Mad Max or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre - none of which are anything to be wished for.