Wards of the Nanny State: Protecting America’s Children from Police State Goons, Bureaucratic Idiots and Mercenary Creeps…(Read And E-mail!)
By John W. Whitehead
Rutherford.org
September 20, 2016
When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ [Hitler] said in a speech on November 6, 1933, “I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.’”—As reported by historian William L. Shirer
It’s not easy being a parent in the American police state.
Danger lurks around every corner and comes at you from every direction, especially when Big Brother is involved.
Out on the streets, you’ve got the menace posed by police officers who shoot first and ask questions later. In the schools, parents have to worry about school resource officers who taser teenagers and handcuff kindergartners, school officials who have criminalized childhood behavior, school lockdowns and terror drills that teach your children to fear and comply, and a police state mindset that has transformed the schools into quasi-prisons.
In your neighborhoods, you’ve got to worry about the Nanny State and its network of busybodies turning parents in for allowing their children to walk to school alone, walk to the park alone, play at the beach alone, or even play in their own yard alone.
And now in the last refuge for privacy—one’s home—parents are being put through the grinder, their actions scrutinized and judged by government goon squads armed with outrageous, overreaching, egregious laws that subject families to the hyped-up, easily offended judgment of the Nanny State.
The latest slap in the face comes from the Arizona Supreme Court whose 3-2 ruling in Arizona v. Holle paves the way for parents to be charged as child molesters or sexual abusers for such innocent acts as changing their children’s diapers or taking baths with their kids.
I kid you not. This is really happening.
As Chief Justice Bales wrote in his dissent:
Parents and other caregivers who have changed an infant’s soiled diaper or bathed a toddler will be surprised to learn that they have committed a class 2 or 3 felony. They also will likely find little solace from the majority’s conclusion that although they are child molesters or sex abusers under Arizona law, they are afforded an “affirmative defense” if they can prove by a preponderance of the evidence that their touching “was not motivated by a sexual interest.” Such a defense, as the majority notes, does not mean that a crime has not occurred, but instead that the miscreant may avoid “culpability” by persuading the factfinder that the “criminal conduct” should be excused.
Now the court is not fully to blame for this idiotic ruling.
That prize goes to the well-meaning idiots in the Arizona legislature who drafted legislation that criminalizes any contact between an adult and a child’s genitals, whether or not improper sexual intent was involved.
By allowing this legislation to go unchallenged, however, the Arizona Supreme Court has created a paradigm in which parents are de facto sexual predators who, if formally charged, have the burden of proving their innocence “after a lengthy, expensive, and reputation-tarnishing trial.” As legal reporter Mark Joseph Stern writes for Slate: “Arizona’s Supreme Court had an opportunity to remedy this glaring problem… But by a 3-2 vote, the court refused and declared that the law criminalized the completely innocent touching of a child.”
The Rest…HERE
