Care to state the law? Have references? While I do not let children play with loaded weapons, my own children began shooting at age five simply to begin learning gun safety. I'm sorry I did not meet your age requirement of four, but I would like to know if I am a criminal.
j) "Child neglect" means harm or threatened harm to a child's health or welfare by a parent, legal guardian, or any other person responsible for the child's health or welfare that occurs through either of the following:
(i) Negligent treatment, including the failure to provide adequate food, clothing, shelter, or medical care.
(ii) Placing a child at an unreasonable risk to the child's health or welfare by failure of the parent, legal guardian, or other person responsible for the child's health or welfare to intervene to eliminate that risk when that person is able to do so and has, or should have, knowledge of the risk.
Lots of kids suffocate on plastic bags found in the kitchen; they're poisoned by non-secured chemicals under the sink; they're burned by matches left lying about in the bedroom. What's next, in the "Serve and Protect us from ourselves" March, TBO?
Rich
Which picture bothers you more Frank?
As the father of my child my opinion is second only to God's, my wife's and the child 's once the child is grown. Your opinion and the state's opinion ranks right down there with Rosie O'Donnell and Hillary Clinton.
One of the major signposts of a growing Police State is the blurring of the line between simple common sense in human behavior and tacit acceptance that it is somehow the government's "mandate" to enforce that notion.
I believe it's generally "the people" who decide when the government must "accept" the responsibility of protecting them from themselves.
First you claim it's all about MY kids. But I don't hear you saying that you only pull over violators with minors in the car.
Then you claim that you're just doing your job.....but you've previously indicated that you're more than willing to allow violent crime to go unchallenged, if the risk is high that you won't be able to handle the situation (a position that I support you on).
but when it comes to enforcing a law that creates undue risk to MY personal freedoms, you're happy to "just follow orders".
Frank-You don't have the freedom to do whatever you want. When the law is ruled unconstitutional, I'll consider the enforcement of that law an infringement on your freedom.
I couldn't care less what the laws are while I'm at work, really. I just work within them.
In the end, we find you, like so many others before you, dutifully following any orders given so long as they're "lawful" (except, of course, those that violate your boundaries for "personal safety").
Your first oath is not to the "laws" but to the Constitution.
whether a Court upholds it or not still doesn't make it "constitutional"
I quietly reject many of your laws Frank.
In the end, we find you shirking any personal responsibility to THINK FOR YOURSELF.
Are you assuming that because I disagree with you about the reasonableness of the seatbelt law, that I don't "think for myself"?
If a law is upheld by the USSC, it's constitutional.
Thoughts? Is there any way to reconcile views of people in the first three camps -- which roughly agree that the Supreme Court should have constitutional decision-making authority but disagree precisely how the supreme court should make those decisions (or agree that the Court should have decision-making authority if they use the right decision-making process) -- with the views of people in the fourth camp?Robert A. Burt said:"When the Supreme Court interprets the Constitution, how can it ensure that its interpretation is unimpeachably legitimate?"
...
Roughly four different answers have been offered to this erroneous question. The "originalists" maintain that strict fidelity to the original intention of the authors of the constitutional document provides the only justifiable basis for interpretation. Judge Robert Bork is the most prominent exponent of this position.
The "interpretationists" claim that original intention is an unhelpful, and probably also unknowable, guide but that constitutional interpretation can be rooted in judges' reading of the "fundamental values" of American culture. [footnote: In current legal commentary, my designations of "originalist" and "interpretationist" schools have been labeled "interpretivists" and "noninterpretivists," respectively...] There are almost as many formulations of fundamentality -- from "republican virtue" to "morality" (transcendent or conventional), "truth" and "integrity" -- as there are members of this school.
Adherents of the "process" school claim that it is never proper for judges to invalidate laws based on "fundamental values," however defined, and that the only legitimate ground for judicial review is to ensure that access to influence in political institutions is adequately open to all contenders. John Hart Ely has been the leading proponent of this view. A fourt position has been staked out by the Critical Legal Theory school, whose members claim that none of the other schools provides a legitimate basis for judicial review because no such basis can possibly be provided. The Critical Legal theorists have not, as a group, focused their attention on constitutional law with the same single-mindedness that characterizes the advocates of the other three schools. Their impeachment of constitutional adjudication is part of their general criticism of the rule of law, which asserts that any claim to the legitimate exercise of authority is inevitably nothing more than question-begging verbiage trying to mask the unprincipled (or nonprincipled) social reality that the strong dominate the weak.
Three of these schools claim to solve the problem of constitutional interpretation, though by mutually inconsistent routes. The fourth, the Critical Legal scholars, agree with the others that the central question is "What gives legitimacy to the Supreme Court's interpretation of constitutional issues?" Their answer is "nothing." (This response is the basis for the fierce attacks on this group as "nihilists," even extended by some to argue for their exclusion from the legal academy and relocation in humanities departments such as political or perhaps even military science.)
Frank, honestly, if the USSC ruled tomorrow that the only religion in the US is Buddisim, that you have to have a permit to meet your best friend, that you had to have a permit to write anything, that guns are illegal to own, that the police have the ability to come into your home at anytime and search, that you have to tell the police or anyone everything even if it implicates you in a crime, that you had to house, clothe, and feed members of the federal government, would you uphold those laws?
Does that mean that if the USSC decided tomorrow that owning brown-hued people is constitutional again (remember, the USSC thought so at one point), then you'll not only agree with the law, but enforce it?
I don't live in MI wherever that is. No, I'm not going to look it up, I suppose it's Michigan, but Michigan law does not wash in Louisiana.Part of the child protection law in MI:
This is not what I said. Perhaps your thoughts are so colored that you cannot see any other way, but you should try to read a person's post before twisting it. Let me tell you something Frank, every time my child gets in a car she is exposed to danger. It is only two feet away in the opposite lane. Every time she goes to school she is exposed to danger. Everytime she plays her guitar on the back porch at twilight she is exposed to danger. In fact, everytime she goes to a parade that has the barriers guarded by cops who barely qualified with thier weapon she is exposed to danger. Danger is all around us. I do not advocate placing any child in a safety deposit box until they are eighteen. I don't advocate children selling crack, pimping or commiting crimes. Your statements are pretty insulting if that is what you garnered from my statements.So you should be able to expose your kid to any danger you feel appropriate without government intervention? Your kid is yours to do with whatever you want until he's 18 years old? If you want him to sell crack cocaine and run a stable of whores for you at 15 years old, that's your business and the government has no business stepping in? There should be no standards that people are expected to adhere to in raising their kids?