There should be no religious exemptions in such cases.
Having read
a few articles on
the extent of, well, the horror, I am left asking myself how and why so many of these parents and family members literally get off scot free. Some do not even face charged and those that do, often only have a few days in jail or their jail time overturned for community service. While Oregon has finally removed the religious exemptions to killing your child, Idaho at the date of the article's above (2013) still has full protection.
In Oregon, for example,
prior to the removal of the religious exemption clauses in the legislation;
In 1997, 20 years after Matthew’s death, a six-year-old boy in Oregon died from a necrotic bowel due to a hernia that could easily have been treated. The pathologist’s first reaction was “Not again!” He and his associate had compiled evidence of 18 children who had died over the last 10 years from curable diseases in a Followers of Christ congregation of 1,200 people. That worked out to 26 times the usual infant mortality rate. And it wasn’t just children: followers’ wives were dying in childbirth at 900 times the usual rate. One died of a type of infection that hadn’t killed anyone in America since 1910.
Nothing could be done about it, because Oregon had one of the strongest religious shield laws in the country. It protected parents from allegations of religious intolerance and gave them the right to withhold medical care for their children. In fact, the shield had just been beefed up: a new law to increase the punishment for murder by spousal or child abuse specifically prohibited prosecution for manslaughter if the person responsible was acting on religious beliefs.
A TV reporter named Mark Hass was told that there had been a cluster of preventable deaths among the Followers of Christ in Oregon City. He looked into it, but there were no criminal complaints, no police investigations, and the county DA was uninterested. When his investigation seemed to have reached a dead end, someone suggested he visit the local cemetery. He counted the graves of 78 children. He launched America’s first major series of TV reports on faith-healing abuse on KATU in Portland.
It boggles the mind that this is legal.
Idaho is just as bad, if not worse. In at least one incident in the article detailing some of the horrors being legally perpetrated against children and adults under the guise of religious freedom, one caretaker at a cemetery reported that some from the Followers of Christ church in the area arrived at the cemetery and told him they needed to bury a child there. He claimed the baby was just in the back seat. He told them that they could not bury the baby there without a death certificate. And the Followers of Christ are not the only religion practicing such beliefs.. There are others.. And if children die or fall sick in Idaho or any other State where exemptions exist, it is completely legal. Worse yet,
the true extent of the deaths may never be known. To put it
into some perspective:
4-year-old Natali Joy Mudd was found dead by detectives in her own home, with a tumor in her eye that was almost as big as the rest of her head. At the horrific scene, a police sergeant found horizontal trails of blood along the walls of the house. The trails matched the height of the girl’s head. Natali had apparently been leaning against the wall as she dragged herself from room to room, blinded, trying to find a way to freedom, before the tumor killed her.
Natali’s parents belonged to the Faith Assembly Church, a Pentecostal offshoot. They didn’t believe in medical care, and they were not prosecuted because Indiana had strict religious shield laws. Two years later, Natali’s five-year-old sister died from an untreated tumor in her stomach the size of a basketball.
The Faith Assembly Church was responsible for as many as 100 childhood deaths and for a maternal childbirth mortality rate that was 870 times the usual rate. The most common cause of death was infant mortality in home births;
How can this be allowed to happen?
In 2014, a Republican lawmaker
pushed back against attempts to remove such exemptions:
A Republican lawmaker in Idaho is trying to stop a law aimed at preventing the deaths of children whose parents eschew medical treatment in favor of prayer. The Associated Press reported that state Rep. Christy Perry (R) believes that a law proposed by Democratic Rep. John Gannon violates religious freedom of families who believe God’s will supercedes modern medicine.
“This is about religious beliefs, the belief God is in charge of whether they live, and God is in charge of whether they die,” said Perry of the Followers of Christ, an extremist group who have let at least four children die of treatable illnesses in the last three years.
“This is about where they go for eternity,” she insisted.
It's infuriating!
I would think that if there is a God and you deliberately allow your child to die, you'd probably spend eternity in hell..