Don’t mow your lawn – go to jail..
Yahoo news reports that Canton, Ohio has decided to include possible jail time for offenders who don’t mow their yards to the city’s liking. Apparently they think that the $250 fine isn’t enough. My question is: who is going to mow the home-owner’s lawn while he is in jail? Perhaps after three weeks in jail they will haul him before the judge, and being a repeat offender, assess another 30 days in jail. Sounds kind of like debtor’s prison to me.
If that’s not bad enough, Cameron County, Texas justice of the peace Gustavo Garza is forcing fathers to spank their teen-aged children in front of the court as punishment for truancy – or more accurately, in order to avoid a $500 fine. Not only is this “justice” forcing parents to “discipline” their children against their will (with what is evidently a heavy piece of wood Garza provides), but I bet there is no provision in the code that allows for this type of sentence in the first place. Just another example of out of control judges making our personal decisions for us, and claiming impunity. This is reminiscent of a recent judge’s decision to put a father in jail for 180 days because his daughter didn’t get her GED within a time limit set by the judge. Of course, the 18-year-old girl, her fiancee, and her 18-month-old daughter live with her mother. The mother is not being threatened by the court. We have become a third-world nation when it comes to justice.
Last October Bill O’Reilly reported: King Middle School in Portland, Maine, medical workers are allowed to give the girls as young as 11 birth control pills without their parents knowing about it. Bill rightly states:
“This is foolish, ridiculous, and irresponsible. But in the secular progressive world. The SP doctrine is to quote, “empower children” and downgrade parental authority because some parents are bad.”
This is an issue of parental rights. The schools have decided that they “own” the children, or at least have full parental rights over them while they are on school property (whether or not school is in session). First, one must remember that the State is allowing the schools to take this stance, as the schools themselves not only have no legal or Constitutional standing that gives them these rights or even the right to tax or enforce attendance. In this particular case, how is it that they can legally mass-medicate children (or anyone) based on an assumption that SOME of these children MAY get pregnant? There are documented negative effects of using birth control pills. Has the school done a complete medical assessment of each girl they plan to give these drugs to? Where has legislation been passed by the will of the people that gives them the right to even address the problem of “underage” pregnancy? There are freedom of religion issues, too – some people believe that person-hood comes at conception, so using a drug that prevents implantation AFTER conception is murder. If they can do this, can they give the boys vasectomies? WHERE do they get this authority? The answer is: NOWHERE! Remember, the local INDEPENDENT school district is NOT the State, and they are NOT qualified to take your parental rights from you or to exercise good judgment about what is best for your child. Are not these attitudes actually coming from the schools? In other words, the very schools that are wanting to enforce these draconian ideas are the ones propagating the ideas of atheism, free sex, and no responsibility to parental authority that cause the problems of crime, rape, and irresponsibility? Medicating the problem does nothing to get at the root cause, which is needed to solve the societal problem. Only teaching personal responsibility and culpability will do this.
This is why more and more people are home-schooling their children, like we do.
Fortunately, the Southampton Town board of Southampton, NY, has backed off of their prohibition of the use of clothes lines in the town. I imagine, if nothing else, they caught a lot of flak from the environmentalist-minded folks out there. And then there are those who are just trying to save on their utility bills. Sure, some standards are needed in towns to keep them from looking like a Darfur camp, but some of these elitist ideas boil down to outright oppression of the less-fortunate.
