Posted on 02/21/2011 4:36:52 PM PST by jazusamo
SALEM – Prosecutors and lawmakers endorsed a bill Monday that would remove all legal protection for parents who rely on faith healing rather than provide medical treatment to their children.
Clackamas County District Attorney John Foote and others told the House Judiciary Committee that House Bill 2721 would help prevent needless deaths.
The bill was a response to the Followers of Christ, an Oregon City church with a long history of children dying from treatable medical conditions. HB 2721 would remove spiritual treatment as a defense for all homicide charges and subject parents to mandatory sentencing under Oregon's Measure 11.
Rep. Carolyn Tomei, D-Milwaukie, one of the bill's sponsors, said she expects the proposal to receive broad support in the House and Senate, where it has the backing of Sen. Bruce Starr, R-Hillsboro. Starr and Tomei testified in favor of the bill. No one spoke in opposition.
Starr helped craft a1999 bill that restricted the use of religious belief as a criminal defense
OR Ping!
Are there any Muslim sects who use faith healing and refuse medical care? If so, they will be above this law. Automatically.
Anti-religious laws don’t apply to muzzies.
Ever.
That’s a good question. I haven’t read about any specifically but the way the girls and women are treated I wouldn’t doubt it, of course it wouldn’t apply to males.
In that case it wouldn’t so much be faith healing as letting them die for convenience.
I seriously doubt that Muslims have any real religious faith anyway. They are mindless fanatics and hysterical automatons. I don’t think they have any actual understanding of anything spiritual.
Where would they get such understanding? From a book that preaches hatred, murder and pedophilia?
Salem and “witch hunts” have something to do with one another, don’t they?
I think they do -- they're way too evil to explain through purely secular mechanisms.
Good points. Islam is a cult much the same as the Followers of Christ.
The “preventive” claims of this seemingly benign effort are what really sound Big-Brotherish. Do they propose to take the healthy out of families along with the deathly ill based on this?
To be perfectly fair, F.O.C. doesn’t sound very biblical. If Jesus granted a bodily healing to all comers, and promised that faith would allow all His believers to offer the same, it somehow escaped getting recorded for posterity. Anyhow, for the rest there were people like “Luke, the physician” (yes, that Luke). Any Christian should know better.
The linked piece in this article pretty well explains the problem. Their graveyard has many children and babies in it that basic medical care would have saved.
It states this proposed law would not apply to anyone of legal age. If an adult in the eyes of the law wants to shun medical care that’s their decision, but not kids.
This could end up with the Supremes.
Good point. I never thought of it that way.
For absolute physician shunners like this, it’s easy to be unsympathetic to them. I’m concerned about mission and precedent creep into other areas of child raising that don’t entail unreasonable risks of harm.
Agreed. The fanatical members of this organization are the problem. A number of members have sought medical care for their children and even themselves but don’t admit to it. Their have been former members post comments to that effect in prior Oregonian articles.
I’m shocked that it hasn’t hit all the courts already. Christian Scientists are a large, widespread, well known group which reportedly have similar teachings. If this has resulted in significant carnage, the anti-any-God MSM would be shrieking about it from coast to coast.
There are cases where the parents are protected from government intrusion when a sick child is prevented from receiving medical care versus religious convictions of the parents. But I am not sure about a religious organization. The typcial issue is the separation of church and state.
Faith healers could prove their case, simply put that when someone is diagnosed with an illness by a licensed medical doctor, and the faith healer is able to demonstrate the efficacy of prayer alone in healing a condition not known to spontaneously heal, or just naturally heal over time, this would objectively demonstrate that what they do works.
But if they cannot prove this in an objective way, then they should discontinue what they are doing as a means to physically, not spiritually or emotionally, heal.
Importantly, there is no shame in doing so, as even they will admit, that few healers truly have “the gift” to heal. But unless they do, it is unfair and even cruel to subject a sick person to a healing that you cannot prove works.
Well said.
This group is probably the most fanatical one in the country with their beliefs, at least of any group that’s gotten media attention.
Christian Scientists tempered their stand on this some time back and don’t object to medical intervention.
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