I am astonished that you and I should be so far apart on this.  I cannot imagine that you would approve of the government forcing science teachers to teach creationism in science classes.  Everyone’s religious liberty is as stake if the government stoops to taking sides in religious disputes.
But the subject of this thread is a religious dispute as well, where parents make health-care choices which are informed by their religious beliefs and the government objects because the choice of the parents is deemed to be suboptimal.  I would like to see the government refrain from picking sides in religious disputes in both cases for the same reasons.

To take your falacious slippery slope arguement and extend it in the equally absurd but opposite direction, I could say that why don’t we give parents complete and total ownership of their children?

I am unable to figure out what I can have said to spark such strong language.
I have already indicated [ http://www.wowowow.com/cl/303105 ]  [ http://www.wowowow.com/cl/303401 ] that I encourage intervention and investigation in any case where it is alleged that a parent is abusive, incompetent and/or malevolent; I cannot see why that should not suffice.  (And if a parent has been found to be any or all of those things, why should a child remain in the custody of such a parent?)

… a balance between parent authority and government authority needs to occur.

If I advocate removing children from a parent found to be abusive, incompetent and/or malevolent, am I not, in fact, advocating balance?
If, as you say, there should be balance, then there must necessarily be a line drawn somewhere.  I have suggested that the line of my preference would be where a parent is found to be abusive, incompetent and/or malevolent.  We disagree about what the line should be, but what is inherently absurd about my suggestion?

My husband writes: One of my major subjects of study in college was the Holocaust; later I learned more on the subject when I visited the Buchenwald death camp in what was then Communist East Germany.  I am convinced that I have valid, rational reasons to be distrustful of governmental power … including the power of the U.S. government which interred American citizens of Asian descent which - in theory - had exactly the same right to liberty which the rest of us supposedly have.  Yet these people lost their liberty (not to speak of their property and their careers) anyway.
As a child of the Vietnam War era — a war promoted by means of the fear of a “domino effect” of Communist takeovers — I also have good reason to also be suspicious of fallacious slippery slope arguments … so I am.
Moreover, I am also mindful of the (putative) facts that …
>  governments are every bit as capable of being abusive as are parents … but it is far more difficult to correct a problem in a governmental system than it is to correct a problem with an individual parent, and
>  the government is vastly more skilled at envisioning the “ideal” than it is skilled at implementing its intentions, and
>  pitting private individuals against an entity which can print its own money is inherently unfair, and
>  the most well-meaning do-good-ism on the part of the government often itself goes terribly awry.

If the government is going to intervene in parenting not because of alleged parental abuse or malevolence or ill-will, but simply because the government deems a parent’s choices to be suboptimal … if the government is going to take it upon itself to choose a health-care regimen for child, then what  in principle  is the difference between that and the governments also choosing the child’s education or mate or career or religion?
Is this a question that only some kind of wild-eyed, foaming-at-the-mouth fanatic would ask?
I am not intending to make a slippery slope argument of any kind, fallacious or otherwise.  I am only asking a question: What’s the difference?  Is this an absurd question even to ask?


There are an abundance of abused children and of abused spouses here in the U.S.; as I understand it, there are insufficient resources available to adequately deal with these situations - drastically insufficient.  Besides that, the government has inadequate resources to fight wars, care for the wounded, secure the borders and ports, re-float the economy, etc.  Seems to me that it would be absurd to ask the government to also second-guess the choices of well-meaning parents.  Is that a crazy thing to think?

A parent does not have the right to indirectly kill their child through lack of treatment.

If, as you say, there should be a balance, then there must be two sides to the story.  I have already indicated that I approve of stopping murders; if parents or anyone else conspire to kill someone, that is a crime.  But that needs to be a proven finding, not a mere accusation or assumption.
Mustn’t there be another side, too, if there is really balance?  All of us are going to die (and are dying right now, for that matter), and I (for one) would rather not have the manner of my death dictated by the government.  If even non-malevolent parents are not allowed to make their own decisions, where is the ‘balance’?

The question here is, "Does a parent have the right to refuse life saving treatment for their child?"  In my mind, the answer is no.  It doesn’t matter whether the reason is religion, hatred on the part of the parent, confusion about how reality or even parental mental illness.

Fine.  We disagree (in part because we would not agree on what it means to be “life saving”), but I would not say (or even think) that you are being absurd in believing what you do.  I assume, instead, that you have your reasons for feeling this way.