Tag Archives: Topic: Parental Rights

The Christian Institute: Nearly two thirds, 60 per cent, of the public think that the curbs should be scrapped.

Religion Clause: Today’s New York Daily News reports that two parents are suing school officials over decisions by two principals to send unvaccinated children home when other students at their schools contracted communicable diseases.

Des Moines Register: Gov. Terry Branstadt’s administration said today it is appealing a Polk County District Court ruling that ordered state health officials to issue a birth certificate listing both members of a same-sex marriage as the legal parents of a 2-year-old girl.

News from The Associated Press: Utah’s Supreme Court is deciding whether a sperm donor contract is proof that a man wanted to be a father, even after his death.

Telegraph: Girls as young as 13 have been fitted with contraceptive implants at school without their parents knowing.

LifeNews.com: Signatures are currently being gathered to put Parental Notification on the 2012 November ballot for the fourth time in California. In 2008 Parental Notification’s Proposition 4 lost by a very small percentage, 52% to 48%.

OneNewsNow.com: Senate Bill 2180, “An Act to Amend Section 97-5-39, Mississippi Code of 1972, to Revise the Offense of Felonious Abuse of Batter of a Child; and for Related Purposes,” submitted by Republican Senator Brice Wiggins, would make it a felony to “whip, strike, or otherwise abuse any child” in a manner that causes “bodily harm.”

The Christian Institute: David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham in London, backed the right of parents to smack their children and criticised those who claim it is abuse, commenting: “There’s a big difference between abuse and parenting.”

Christian Concern: The Department of Health has announced plans to consult the public on whether a controversial IVF technique should be used to prevent some hereditary diseases from being transferred from women to their children. | Christian Concern: Government plans for three-parent babies

The New American: The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a U.S.-based conservative legal advocacy group, noted that Edholm’s recommendation comes at a time when home school families in Sweden are under severe assault. The ADF, in partnership with another U.S. group, the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), has come to the legal aid of a Swedish home school family whose nine-year-old son was abducted by the Swedish government in 2009. According to an ADF press release, Swedish officials “seized the child because they believe home schooling is an inappropriate way to raise a child and insist the government should raise [him] instead, even though home-schooling was legal in Sweden at the time he was taken into custody.

WorldNetDaily: The HSLDA also works with the Alliance Defense Fund to challenge such violations of parental rights. Roger Kiska, a European-based attorney working with the ADF, warned, “Parents have the right and authority to make decisions regarding their children’s education without government interference. Swedish policy on home education is at odds with recognized international legal standards that uphold the right of parents to direct the education of their children. Those standards include the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other human rights documents, all of which recognize that parents have a fundamental right to choose what kind of education their children will receive.”

HSLDA: Roger Kiska is an ADF attorney stationed in Europe who has brought numerous cases before the European Court of Human Rights on family issues, including homeschooling. He says that the European Court of Human Rights has not been particularly supportive of homeschoolers. “The ECHR is giving aid and comfort to Sweden’s repressive home education policies. But ECHR jurisprudence and Swedish, as well as German, policy on home education is at odds with recognized international legal standards that uphold the right of parents to direct the education of their children,” Kiska said. “The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other human rights documents all recognize that parents of children have a fundamental right to choose what kind of education their children will receive. We are committed to working with HSLDA and others to vindicate this right. We will stand with families like the Johanssons and Himmelstrands until we win.”

Christian Newswire: The Home School Legal Defense Association and Alliance Defense Fund and have applied to the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of one family whose child was abducted by the government in 2009 and have filed a brief in a Swedish appellate court on behalf of another family fined an amount equivalent to $26,000.

Radio Prague (includes audio): A woman’s right to give birth at home is back in the spotlight in the Czech Republic, as a group of pregnant women intend to file a complaint at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The Czech state makes planned home births virtually impossible; there are midwives qualified to deliver babies at home, but they lack official registration and insurance companies won’t cover them.

ADF, HSLDA say changes would violate int’l legal standards on human rights

StarTribune.com: After our second child was born, we talked about having a third child. I wasn’t ready to have another child at that time and told her so. Unfortunately, my wife forged my signature on the clinic paperwork for the embryo transfers and never told me.

LifeNews.com: Maryland woman is facing up to five years in prison after facing charges related to her giving the dangerous RU 486 abortion drug to a teenager.

Religion Clause: Now however in the town of Morinville where all public schools are operated by the Greater St. Albert Catholic schools, it is the Catholic school board that is the subject of parental complaints about the ability to opt out. At least 5 non-Catholic parents have filed complaints with the Alberta Human Rights Commission claiming that their non-Catholic children were forced to receive religious instruction, without the ability to opt out.

Times Union – Class is over for Planned Parenthood: In October, a small group of parents raised objections after they learned some students were allegedly told that abstinence allowed for oral sex and that some high school classes had condom demonstrations.

Ovrom’s 12-page ruling stops short of declaring a constitutional right for same-sex parents to be named automatically on newborns’ birth certificates.

Education News: Parent organizers from San Diego and Lynwood on Wednesday rallied against what they called inaccurate and misleading union dispatches to teachers on the controversial parent trigger law, which allows parents at low-performing schools to force their campus to convert to a charter and hire new teachers, or change its administration.

LaTimes.com: The 5th District Court of Appeal ruled that the U.S. and Florida constitutions trump Florida law and give parenting rights to both women. State law, it added, has not kept up with the times. | D.M.H. v. D.M.T., No. 5D09-3559 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. (5th), Dec. 23, 2011)

ADF Attorney Michael Norton at Townhall: But now Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains (PPRM) has a put a new twist on this, and perhaps unintentionally demonstrated that those simpler times are gone. They’ve done this by showing that the way to a teen’s heart is through his or her cell phone: literally through texting about sexual issues and answering questions teens might have about their sexuality.

New Hampshire NEWS06: Beginning today, girls younger than 18 will have to notify a parent or guardian before they have an abortion.

“A county judge should not have decided a girl could not have an abortion simply because the teen did not tell her mother she was pregnant, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled Thursday as it clarified how minors can obtain the procedures.”

WorldNetDaily: Michael Donnelly, director of international relations at Home School Legal Defense Association, says this decision offers a glimmer of light in the case. “I am hopeful that this is the beginning of the end to the horrific treatment these people have suffered at the hands of Swedish authorities over the past two and a half years,” he said. “The Johansson family have endured unspeakable tyranny over their decision to homeschool their child and then to attempt to leave Sweden. Sweden’s behavior in this case has been shocking.” His organization and representatives of the Alliance Defense Fund are pursuing a case over the custody battle before the European Court of Human Rights

ADF Attorney Benjamin Bull at Townhall : All Domenic Johansson really wants for Christmas is his life back . . . In this season, as so many of us are thinking – as we should – of the children who don’t have toys or a turkey for Christmas, let us also remember those children who long not just for something to eat or play with, but for the freedom to honor the deepest convictions of their souls.

“She finally went over the head of the case worker, then over the head of a supervisor to the program director,” said Allen’s attorney Chris Branson. ” She was told in no uncertain terms that that was a bad move on her part and they were going to show her exactly what happens to people who make bad moves.”

HSLDA : Christer and Annie Johansson have won a small but hopeful victory in their quest to regain custody of their nine-year-old son Domenic who was taken from them over 2 years ago in a dramatic raid while the family was seated on an airliner departing the Nordic country. Ruby Harrold-Claesson, the couple’s attorney, reported to HSLDA that the Gotland District Court ruled in favor of the Johanssons, allowing them to retain their parental rights of Domenic . . . HSLDA continues to work with the Alliance Defense Fund and Harrold-Claesson at the European Court of Human Rights representing the family in their lawsuit against Sweden.

HSLDA: On Tuesday, December 13, the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Children and Families held a hearing on S. 1877, a bill to require all adults to be mandatory reporters of child abuse and neglect. HSLDA believes that this bill will create a police-state reporting environment that will lead to baseless investigations of innocent families, and actually hurt at-risk children. HSLDA opposes S. 1877.

NJ.com: On one side of the parental tug-of-war over the 5-year-old twin girls at the center of the long-fought court battle were Donald Robinson Hollingsworth and Sean Hollingsworth — a gay couple who married in California and live in Jersey City. On the other was Angelia Robinson, Donald Hollingsworth’s sister, who agreed to serve as a surrogate, ultimately giving birth to the girls through a donor embryo fertilized by Sean Hollingsworth.

Susan Brown Townhall : The Plan B pill debate has little to do with birth control and much to do with losing control. Parents, there is something strangely missing in this conversation. Shouldn’t we be talking about how 11 and 12-year- old girls are getting pregnant in the first place? Last time I checked, sex with a minor was a crime in every state in the union.

The Christian Institute: A new poll has found that two thirds of Britons think parents or guardians should be the main people responsible for teaching children about sex.

The Washington Post: A boy removed from his mother’s custody over health concerns when his weight ballooned to more than 200 pounds will be taken from foster care and placed in the custody of an uncle, a judge ruled Wednesday.

MSNBC: A school district in Utah is defending its decision to “out” a middle-school student as gay to his parents in light of safety and bullying concerns.

Roger Graef at BBC News – Panorama – Should everyone be allowed to have children?: The care system is letting down a growing number of British children whose birth parents cannot or will not support them and who have little chance of successful adoption, argues the distinguished documentary film-maker, Roger Graef.

Telegraph: Parents of children who have been struck down with the sleeping syndrome narcolepsy claim that it could have been triggered by the swine flu vaccine.

The Christian Institute: Children as young as twelve should be taught how to gamble “safely”, according to controversial proposals which have been welcomed by the Labour Party.

LifeSiteNews.com (includes video): ParentalRights.org released a 36-minute docudrama on November 17th titled “Overruled: Government invasion of your Parental Rights,” featuring three reenactments of real cases where American parents lost their rights to parent their children as they saw fit.

Bioedge.org: One parent is good. Two parents are better. Three parents might be better still. So argues a researcher from Sweden, who published a paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics on multiparenting. Daniela Cutas, of the University of Gothenberg and the Karolinska Institute, challenged “the necessity of the max-two parents framework”.

News from The Associated Press: More parents are opting out of school shots for their kids. In eight states now, more than 1 in 20 public school kindergartners aren’t getting all the vaccines required for attendance, an Associated Press analysis found.

An eight-year-old Ohio boy who weighs more than 200 pounds was taken from his family last month and placed in foster care after social workers said his mother was not doing enough to control his weight, The Plain Dealer reported.

Daily Mail: Joe Pressil, 36, says he was unaware his girlfriend had taken his sperm to a fertility clinic and is now suing. She had twins, he has to pay child support and he claims no one from the clinic ever contacted him

CSMonitor.com: Adams maintains that he did nothing wrong, and the investigation could exonerate him, but the fact that the Texas court took this step is significant, says David Finkelhor, director of the University of New Hampshire Crimes against Children Research Center.

Swiss parents are not allowed to school their children at home via webcam. The Federal Supreme Court ruled that children’s social skills were not sufficiently nurtured by such an arrangement.

Anglican Mainstream: A lesbian couple in California who say their 11-year-old son Tommy who wants to be a girl named Tammy are giving their child hormone blockers that delay the onset of puberty — so that he can have more time that he can have more time to decide if he wants to change his gender.

Telegraph: Dozens of schoolchildren may be taken out of classes by parents concerned that plans for graphic sex education would sexualise pupils as young as four.

News from The Associated Press: A global vaccines group says it is working to buy shots to protect up to 2 million women and young girls in poor countries from cervical cancer.

Mark Walsh at the School Law Blog, Education Week: A prominent federal appeals court judge said in a recent speech that courts should defer more to school administrators, and that students today are “spoiled and coddled” and should “learn to roll with the punches” and not be hypersensitive about political or religious messages in schools they might find offensive.

Idaho Press-Tribune: But the Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund claims the school district was pressured by gay rights activists who don’t want parents to know if their kids are joining a club that promotes equal rights for homosexuals, bisexuals and transgender people. The Alliance Defense Fund has also sued the Idaho Public Charter School Commission on behalf of the now-defunct Idaho Classical Academy charter school in Nampa in an attempt to allow the school to use religious texts in the classroom.

Telegraph: ALL children could be vaccinated against flu in the future, the Department of Health has indicated.

Nichols, Joel A., Marriage and Divorce in a Multicultural Context: Table of Contents and Introduction (2011). MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE IN A MULTICULTURAL CONTEXT: MULTI-TIERED MARRIAGE AND THE BOUNDARIES OF CIVIL LAW AND RELIGION, Joel A. Nichols, ed., Cambridge University Press, 2012; U of St. Thomas Legal Studies Research Paper No. 11-36. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1957847

Garcimartin, Carmen, Education in the Secular State: Whose Right is it? (November 4, 2011). International Journal of the Jurisprudence of the Family, Vol. 2, 2011 . Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1954843

CNN: He occasionally got a spanking from mom, or a swat on the rear and a stern look from his dad. But he remembers one day when his kindergarten teacher, school principal and a social worker came to their home. They worried Ian wasn’t fitting in; they wanted to talk about the “abuse.”

Chuck Norris at Townhall: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 110 children have autism spectrum disorders, which is strikingly more than just two decades ago. (ASDs are a group of developmental disabilities that can cause communication, behavioral and social challenges.) The National Autism Association calls the 644 percent increase of ASDs among U.S. children since the early 1990s “a tragic epidemic of autism.”

NYTimes.com: The pastoral mood in the hills of Tennessee offered a stark contrast to the storm raging around the country over the Pearls’ teachings on child discipline, which advocate systematic use of “the rod” to teach toddlers to submit to authority. The methods, seen as common sense by some grateful parents and as horrific by others, are modeled, Mr. Pearl is fond of saying, on “the same principles the Amish use to train their stubborn mules.”

LifeNews.com: Governor John Kasich of Ohio has signed into law a bill meant to strengthen the parental consent law in place that prohibits teens from getting an abortion without their parents’ consent is moving along in the legislative process.

OneNewsNow.com: But as Jeremy Tedesco of the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) points out, such incidences are happening in schools all across the country. “They’re just bypassing parents, especially on some of the most controversial stuff that students are exposed to — sex education, the battle regarding the homosexual agenda,” he laments. “The school districts are starting just to say, ‘Well, we know what’s better for your kids. We’re not even gonna tell you what we’re doing.’”

WorldNetDaily: hat word had come from officials with the Home School Legal Defense Association, which along with the Alliance Defense Fund already has elevated the dispute involving Christer and Annie Johannson and their son, Domenic, of Sweden to the European Court of Human Rights.

Idaho Statesman: The Alliance Defense Fund, an Arizona-based firm that presses faith-based cases in court, issued a statement Monday saying the district was “duped” by gay rights activists into ditching the proposed parental consent policy. “School districts do not need to give in to activist demands that parents be left ignorant about what their children are exposed to,” said Jeremy Tedesco, an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund, in a statement.

Lambda Legal provided inaccurate legal information to officials so students can join sexually focused clubs without parental permission

Lambda Legal: Lambda Legal and the Idaho Safe Schools Coalition today applauded a Boise-area school district for approving a student club policy that eliminated a new requirement that students get parental permission to participate in clubs and other restrictions that would have harmed lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students and violated their rights.

ADF Attorney David Cortman at Speak Up Movement University Blog (10/21): The Latin phrase in loco parentis literally means “in the place of parents” and has been referred to loosely by courts as the place held by local schools when students are in attendance. But this concept is being taken too far by public school officials.

News from The Associated Press: A government panel wants young boys as well as girls to get the controversial HPV vaccine, in part to prevent them from spreading the sexually transmitted virus to girls.

In other words, the woman carrying the embryo physiologically shapes the resulting baby’s DNA . . .

Beliefnet News: Members of the football team stomped out of a Hartford, Connecticut, high school assembly when a pro-homosexual advocacy play featured two boys kissing on stage.

The Christian Institute: Smacking will not be banned in Wales during the lifetime of the current Welsh Assembly which ends in 2016, the Welsh Government has said.

The Christian Institute: The “appalling” content of sex education resources which are being used with children as young as five has been criticised by a Conservative Peer.

Should the government force parents — at least those not rich enough to afford private schooling — to send their children to classes that may contradict their moral and religious values on matters of intimacy and personal conduct?

JURIST: Melanie Lazarus, St. John’s University School of Law Class of 2012, is the author of the ninth article in a ten part series from the staffers of the Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development under the direction of Professor Leonard Baynes. She writes on the need for New York to update the way it defines “parent” for custodial and childcare purposes…

OneNewsNow.com: Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) attorney Roger Kiska is defending the family in the European Court of Human Rights, which has not been friendly to the couple so far. “We’re asking the court to immediately reverse … Sweden’s decision, saying it’s highly illegal to take away the parental rights for this family, and it’s also very damaging to the best interest of the child, to Dominic,” Kiska reports.

Crosswalk Religion News Summaries: The Home School Legal Defense Association and the Alliance Defense Fund have been working to bring attention to the case and encourage the Swedish government to release Domenic back to his family. “The government shouldn’t abduct and imprison children simply because it doesn’t like homeschooling,” said ADF legal counsel Roger Kiska. “That’s bad enough. But now the state is going even further by attempting to get the parents out of the way altogether. This simply cannot stand.”

NCRegister.com: California governor authorized the measure on Oct. 9; children as young as 12 can receive vaccinations and other medications to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, including HPV, without their parents’ notification.

HSLDA on Christian Newswire: Both ADF and HSLDA are currently asking for letters to be written in an attempt to renew attention to the family’s case and to encourage Swedish officials to release Domenic back to his family. “The government shouldn’t abduct and imprison children simply because it doesn’t like homeschooling. That’s bad enough. But now the state is going even further by attempting to get the parents out of the way altogether,” said ADF Legal Counsel Roger Kiska. “This simply cannot stand. We will do everything in our power to help reunite this family.”

WorldNetDaily: That word has come from officials with the Home School Legal Defense Association, which along with the Alliance Defense Fund already has elevated the dispute involving Christer and Annie Johannson and their son, Domenic, of Sweden to the Europe Court of Human rights.