Posts Tagged ‘parenting’


Gullible School Officials + Psychic Babbling = Trouble For Ontario Mom

June 17th, 2008 by Oskar Kennedy

Colleen Leduc, of Barrie, Ontario is a single mother, raising an 11 year-old autistic daughter. She sends her daughter to public school, because that’s all she can afford.

On May 30th, she received a call from her daughter’s school, asking her to come in right away. When she got there, she was informed that there were suspicions that her daughter was being sexually abused.

“The teacher looked and me and said: ‘We have to tell you something. The educational assistant who works with Victoria went to see a psychic last night, and the psychic asked the educational assistant at that particular time if she works with a little girl by the name of “V.” And she said ‘yes, I do.’ And she said, ‘well, you need to know that that child is being sexually abused by a man between the ages of 23 and 26.’”

Based on this ridiculous cold reading trick, school officials called the Children’s Aid Society, which launched an investigation into the allegations.

Luckily, Leduc was able to satisfy CAS that the abuse was entirely imaginary.

[A] case worker came to the Leduc home to discuss the allegations of sexual misconduct, only to admit there wasn’t a shred of evidence that anything had ever happened at all. They labelled Leduc a “diligent” mother doing the best she could for her child under difficult circumstances, closed the file and left, calling the report “ridiculous.”

This, right here, is why belief in spooky mind powers isn’t harmless fun. These baseless allegations wasted the time and resources of the school, the CAS and most significantly of Colleen Leduc. She’s only lucky that the “psychic” didn’t blame her for the non-existent abuse. I hope that Ms. Leduc sues the crap out of the “psychic,” and every school official who was involved in perpetrating this farce.

spread the panic!
[Ask] [Bloglines] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Fark] [Google] [Mixx] [MySpace] [Newsvine] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [Sphere] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Twitter] [Windows Live] [Yahoo!] [Email] More »
└ Tags: , , , , , , ,

How Many Times Does It Have To Fail?

June 20th, 2008 by Oskar Kennedy

CNN.com/crime is reporting that a 16 year old Oregon boy, whose parents raised him in a faith-healing only church called the Followers of Christ, has died of a urinary tract blockage. The blockage caused a buildup of urea in his bloodstream, which poisoned his organs and caused heart failure.

He probably had a congenital condition that constricted his urinary tract where the bladder empties into the urethra, and the condition of his organs indicates that he had multiple blockages during his life, said Dr. Clifford Nelson, deputy state medical examiner for Clackamas County.

“You just build up so much urea in your bloodstream that it begins to poison your organs, and the heart is particularly susceptible,” Nelson said.

Nelson said a catheter would have saved the boy’s life. If the condition had been dealt with earlier, a urologist could easily have removed the blockage and avoided the kidney damage that came with the repeated illnesses, Nelson said.

In March, the boy’s 15 month old cousin died of bronchial pneumonia and a blood infection, after her parents refused to do anything but pray for her recovery. The two children are the latest in a series of deaths among younger church members, which in 1999 prompted the state of Oregon to remove protections based on religion for parents who treat – or rather, FAIL to treat – their children with prayer rather than actual useful medicine.

Unlike the parents of the little girl, who were charged with manslaughter and criminal mistreatment, the parents of the latest victim have another out. Oregon law allows minors over the age of 14 to refuse medical treatment. If it turns out that the boy was offered treatment and refused it, his parents are off the hook.

Two things spring to mind. First, these people are serial child abusers. Points to Oregon for having the stomach to prosecute them. We can only hope that their planned religious freedom defense doesn’t stand up in court. A competent adult should have the right to refuse medical treatment for any reason, but withholding medical help from a sick toddler is crazy and criminal, and no amount of faith should shield willfully neglectful parents from prosecution.

Freedom of religion, like every freedom, has to have practical limits. Freedom of speech doesn’t protect the proverbial guy shouting “fire” during the premiere of the latest summer blockbuster. Freedom to practice one’s religion without government interference shouldn’t protect parents who routinely let helpless children die from easily treatable diseases. We as a society need to come to some kind of consensus that exempting churches from property taxes is acceptable, but subjecting children to potentially fatal neglect isn’t.

Second, and more personal, are some variations on the question I asked above. How many times does the power of prayer have to fail before these parents will wake up and stop letting their children die? I don’t expect them to stop believing in their god, but is a healthy dose of “those who help themselves” too much to ask? How deeply indoctrinated do you have to be to believe that your all-powerful, benevolent deity has a plan that includes your son or daughter dying for want of a bottle of penicillin? Is there any way to shake these people awake before another child dies? If anybody has answers to any of these, I’d love to hear them.

spread the panic!
[Ask] [Bloglines] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Fark] [Google] [Mixx] [MySpace] [Newsvine] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [Sphere] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Twitter] [Windows Live] [Yahoo!] [Email] More »
└ Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Big Announcement 2.0 – Seriously, Really Big This Time

August 4th, 2008 by Oskar Kennedy

After three months of nervously keeping it secret, I can finally share the biggest thing to happen to my life since I got married. No, I’m not going to drop out of law school to start a dating service for narcoleptic furries. My wife is going to have a baby.

The answer to your first question is February. The due date is sometime in mid-to-late February. If that wasn’t your first question… well, I’ve spent three months anticipating reactions to this announcement, so I’ll try to cover as many of them as I’ve thought of. If I don’t answer your particular question, or if you don’t like my answers, feel free to leave a comment. Or have your own god damn baby. Bonus ultrasound photo if you make it to the end.

(more…)

spread the panic!
[Ask] [Bloglines] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Fark] [Google] [Mixx] [MySpace] [Newsvine] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [Sphere] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Twitter] [Windows Live] [Yahoo!] [Email] More »
└ Tags: , , , , , , , ,

CNN screenshot juxtaposes Iran and Tennessee; connection: religion

August 5th, 2008 by Scooter Grant

I pulled this CNN.com screenshot at about 3:45 p.m. on Sunday 28 July:

Click To Enlarge

Click to Enlarge

The same weekend that Iran’s freakazoid religious police are hanging people for dealing drugs, being intoxicated in public, and committing adultery, someone in Tennessee goes to church and starts shooting. The grisly scene in Tennessee — where apparently even the Unitarian woo-woos aren’t safe — is the fourth time in 15 months that a freakazoid Christian went to a house of worship and started blowing people away.

My point, and I do have one, goes thusly: On the one hand, you have the state religion authorizing, no requiring periodic waves of particularly cruel, slow, public executions (i.e., suspension hanging by cranes) for infractions of social norms that civilized people would consider minor. And on the other hand, you have the quasi-state religion, kow-towed to by politicians and spoken of with superstitious reverence by the entertainment industry, that also isn’t safe from murderous fanatics.

The guy in Tennessee went to a Unitarian church because the worshipers weren’t Christian enough. That’s logic for you. They don’t follow Jesus as closely as he does — so he kills them. If that’s not a Christian message for you, I don’t know what is.

Ever seen a headline that reads anything like “Shooting spree at atheists’ gathering shocks community”? I sure haven’t. So in the interest of serious, in-depth research, I googled “atheist shooting spree.” Here’s what I got:

Click To Enlarge

Click To Enlarge

Here’s another recent headline for good measure: “Israeli parents forget daughter at airport.” The ultra-Orthodox couple — and ultra-Orthodox anything tends to involve keeping the woman at home as a baby factory, even in the States — had multiple bags of duty-free shopping, 18 suitcases, and 5 kids. Guess what got left behind? One of the kids.

[T]he parents were unaware they had boarded the aircraft with only four children instead of five until they were informed by cabin staff after 40 minutes in the air.

Let’s work this backwards: Forty minutes in the air + time spent waiting on the tarmac + boarding the plane and waiting for everyone else to board the plane (did they board early as a party with special needs?) = probably over a full freaking hour that they didn’t notice that one of their kids wasn’t with them! And a 3-year-old, at that! And because it’s that kind of blog, I blame their religion. Any freakazoid belief system that requires you to have so many kids that you forget — or “forget” — to take one of them on vacation with you should just be banned and its practitioners caned. The Yahoo! news URL references the comedy film Home Alone; instead, it should reference something like the documentary Jesus Camp.

spread the panic!
[Ask] [Bloglines] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Fark] [Google] [Mixx] [MySpace] [Newsvine] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [Sphere] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Twitter] [Windows Live] [Yahoo!] [Email] More »
└ Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Some Things To Know About Fatherhood

August 28th, 2008 by Oskar Kennedy

When the mother of your baby schedules an appointment with her obstetrician, she will sometimes let you choose if you will attend or not. This is not a real choice. She’s handing you (gift-wrapped, with a big, honkin’ bow) an opportunity to prove that you’re a prepared to be great father/partner/baby daddy. If she gives you the option, and you decline, you’re really just showing her that you’re the kind of Neanderthal who’d run off to hunt mammoth with the boys, leaving her to defend the cave against the wolves who want to eat her and her baby.

Somewhere around the fourth month, when you take her in for an appointment, the doctor or midwife will tell you that you’re going to get to listen to your baby’s heartbeat. A device that looks suspiciously like a Geiger counter will appear, someone will squirt goo onto her belly, and then smear the microphone around in the goo, searching for the vicinity of the baby. (If your baby has a flair for the dramatic, it might snuggle itself into its mother’s pelvis, where the bones prevent reception of the sound. Don’t panic.)

Decades of dramatic movie trailers, and trips through the giant heart at the Franklin Institute, have conditioned us to expect a THA-THUMP, THA-THUMP heartbeat sound, like an elephant skipping on a hardwood floor in the upstairs apartment. Your baby’s heartbeat will sound nothing like this. Instead, it’s a rapid wooshing sound. Think of a bird’s wing, flapping underwater, a little faster than twice a second.

This next bit is the important one. Your baby’s mother will be feeling joy, relief and some species of pride that she’s gotten through the touchy early months without making a major mistake. No matter how unexpectedly silly the noise is, do not snicker. If you do, your chances of getting to do the thing that started the whole process will plummet dramatically.

spread the panic!
[Ask] [Bloglines] [del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Fark] [Google] [Mixx] [MySpace] [Newsvine] [Reddit] [Slashdot] [Sphere] [StumbleUpon] [Technorati] [Twitter] [Windows Live] [Yahoo!] [Email] More »
└ Tags: , , , , , , ,

Next Page ›