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I teach my children that it is their duty to give water to the thirsty and the dying if no one else would do it. I also teach my children that immoral laws should not be obeyed. Tell me how I am wrong.

You are not wrong and I agree with you. But that doesn't mean that you should drive your 10-yr-old son to a protest area and get him arrested.

To answer your question, there is a difference between protesting and doing work of charity. To send a child who cannot comprehend a knotty political controversy, with a slogan, is indeed using a child as a prop. To send a child to do charity, (or in this case, not to prevent a child from doing charity), even if threatened by the cops, is good parenting.

As far as the police and the hospital were concerned, those outside were political protestors. They were publicly expressing their disapproval of completely legal actions that were being carried out in the hospital. That they may have been morally correct does not change the fact that the people outside the hospital were making a political protest - a protest against the status quo as it applies to right-to-life laws. Sorry, I don't see that bringing a child to one of these events and getting him arrested for whatever reason is good parenting. Guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that one.

To send a child who cannot comprehend a knotty political controversy,

To many of us, the Schiavo case is a knotty political controversy. Yes, I realize to many that it's a slam-dunk open-and-shut case, but there are many of us who believe that it's much more complicated than that. Similarly, there are those who believe that war is always bad, and to them, that opinion is just as slam-dunk and open-and-shut as the Schiavo case is to many here. I have no doubt there are liberals out there who would believe that getting their child arrested in a war protest would be doing charity. As far as I am concerned, very little is that cut-and-dried, and I would always advise getting a child arrested for any type of political protest.