A lot of folk would believe that the family should be, primarily, private and that any interference in family matters should only occur at clear and present danger to family members. Some however argue that folk should have to get a licence to have a child…
Well, they are on the right side of the corridors of power…
Absent parents could lose not only their driving licences but also their passport, according to a report here. Now I’m not in favour of folk abandoning their children but if someone is so intransigent as to not pay up – how does taking a driving licence [which could then destroy whatever employment they have] bring them into the fold? Docking a proportion of pay is already a power the courts can wield so what need is there for the power of depriving someone of their driving licence and/or passport except to allow government bodies to be able to directly bully and coerce us?
On it’s own this move may seem reasonable and, to some, fair. My reply is that this is merely indicative of The State coming more and more into our lives as a whole. We may think it’s fair to deprive an absent parent, for whom we have not even the feeling that we should be sympathetic to their plight – but then once this goes by the board who else would we say deserves the bus or to be constrained within the boundaries of one country. Does this not make the case that the state is a huge form of tiers of felony – we, that is those who have not yet broken the law, can choose to wander around, virtually at will and if we have enough State Tokens through good honest labour [or otherwise] we can travel to other States, given that the particular State doesn’t mind. Then there are those who are limited, not by breaking any criminal law, to the one State, then there are those deemed to be a greater felon, having broken a criminal law or gone dangerously mad which have to be constrained within a fortified complex – we call them prisons or asylums and within these inmates we grade them to what level of liberty they should be reduced to.
Of course folk who wish to use their granted liberty of driving are being bled by cameras, which is a good way of making money for The State and to filter some drivers out of the loop. Which explains why the number of fines and prosecutions due to cameras has grown to such a high level, sevenfold is the number by which it’s risen. And if you’re a careful driver and keep a check on your speed but don’t wish to be smashed on the motoway so you travel at 80mph for a good length – then you could in future be caught out on an average speed camera system. This system would have to be even more sensitive than the present ‘eyes’ on the road. To start with they’d have to be able to read and identify the number plate…
But to get back to the family thing. Apparently, Edinburgh council has decided that a couple which were 57 and 44 were too old to raise their grandchildren in leue of their daughter who is fighting her drug abuse/dependency. Of course now they are two years older as the fight has dragged on leaving the kids, which were three and two in the limbo of foster care, which I’m going to just assume was loving and caring. Has not the fact that this ‘elderly’ couple was able to put up a two year legal fight show that they have enough pluck and stamina to care for their grandchildren? Has the fact that they were grand parents given the social services the necessary chink in the armour of the family unit to take the kids away? Does this mean that if they were the parents, lucky enough to have two bundles of joy in their ‘dotage,’ they would have been stripped of their children? They had the legal defence of guardians at the beginning of this traversty but so what? So nothing is the plain answer. And where was Legal Aid? Dare to Fight The State… On the rather odius detail that the press has decided to disclose about the homosexual couple who have managed to gain custody and adopt these pawns – no couple is rock steady in these days of divorce and seperation so all we have is speculation about this particular couple’s relationship. The Other Thing I’d say is that the whole thing about same sex ‘parenting’ is an interesting social experiment I’m sure folk will examine and until those results are in – we won’t know what effects or affects same sex ‘parenting’ has on the children.
[Why do I use the '...' because until we get cloning off to a grand start - a same sex couple cannot produce a child on its own.]
Of course if we start off with The State being able to take children due to age – what’s to stop them from deciding on other factors – income, social standing etc etc… To get back to the beginning – one argument made in exhorting by any means to get absent parents to fork out for their children is to raise a significant number of children out of poverty – but then so would taking the children away and giving them to middle class families who are on the adoption list… Where should liberty end?
Apparently it should end where sensitive inquests are to hand, which was, thankfully squashed, but then liberty for folk to choose who to inform of a loss of a loved one should be taken away, by, yes Dear Reader, you’ve guessed it, The State. No box to tick if you’d like some services to know, just a blanket selling off of the data of grief. Of course this is being considered to make our lives easier… And this information would not have to be kept confidential because its meant to be shared in the first place… But this piece of legislation is also an attempt, another one I’d add, to try to keep sensitive or embarrasing inquests quiet. Don’t the families have a right to know how their loved ones died?
And whilst we are talking about liberties there are a couple of bills going throught that would see my old issues of 200AD being deemed by the thought police to be illegal… One issue I purchased all those years ago had Judge Dredd sitting in a flat reviewing the illegal collection of comics of The Lawbreaker… which were, ironically, very much like the one I was reading in my own hands… It’s not so much that I think pornography should be/shouldn’t be restricted but that a police officer with a search warrant and an elastic view of the proposed legislation could find their ‘perp’ guilty of breaking these laws by using their kids collection of comics if they couldn’t find anything else…
We have had cencorship laws in the past and there were celebrated causes that were used to fight them. Now the government wants to return through a dingy area and re-establish cencorship that no-one may actually want – depending on who uses their view – or rather, how badly they want to find their ‘perp’ Guilty.
Some Hope Liberty.
And talking about cencorship – whilst I’ve been writing this an article has been pulled from the Telegraph’s website. It doesn’t conform to the norm re the evolutionary debate here is the link that doesn’t work anymore [just in case it suddenly reappears...] – www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/4368715/Blushing-biggest-gap-in-evolutionary-theory.html where problems in evultionary theory were mentioned. And whilst we are talking about cencorship we should also mention responibility – the telegraph still lists this page where Sir David Attenborough speaks of how badly some of my brothers and sisters treat him. Hardly responsible behaviour but then is that an excuse for cencorship? Attenborough is, and let’s not mince words here, one of the best naturalists that we have on tv and his view is an informed one – whether or not he ‘credits’ God or not. Attenborough gave me a love for the study of nature alongside Gerald Durrell and I shall be grateful for that no matter what else…
Great post Free to think, free to believe…
I have to admit that if you’d asked me several years ago about these sorts of laws, I would have been firmly in the ‘Well, if you’ve got nothing to hide camp,’ now however I have changed my opinion. The laws are becoming more and more powerful and their purpose less and less clear (at least official purpose).
I was horrified by the story of the grandparents, but for me it all comes down to points and in the bizarre Government agenda that we have at present, a gay couple is worth far more than those grandparents or any typical family unit (if even such a thing exists in modern Britain). This of course despite the Government pumping millions into primary schools to ensure that enough men are teaching so that young boys have male role models, yet at the same time pushing same sex adoption that does precisely the opposite for male and female role models.
In my view we should never allow same sex couples, if for no other reason that the psychological damage to the poor children of them having homosexual relationships shoved down their throats, whether intentionally be their parents or not. All children strive to please their parents and make them proud, but if they don’t fall into the 5% of homosexuals in Britain, they may feel forced. Not to mention that their idea of normal will be warped, they will be teased for being gay throughout their school life, whether they are gay or not, and this will all do serious long term damage to their well being.
Ironic then that whilst the Government is pushing things that will do long term psychological damage to children and that they will pay for, for the rest of their lives; they are also making other changes such as ensuring that parents that smoke cannot adopt, parents that are overweight, parents that are considered too old etc. This social experiment has gone too far. In my view there is a reason why they cannot physically have children and we should not be experimenting with the lives of children to put right what evolution has decided on.
As for the laws and the censorship, we already know that the more powers that we give this Government, the more it will abuse them. The so called anti terror legislation that councils now use to spy on dog litterers and those that put their bin out on the wrong day and of whom 90% are innocent, demonstrates this perfectly.
I agree about the censorship issue, whilst I was initially pro such legislation I am now seeing it being used as nothing more than a smokescreen. Take the Australian website blocklist, an example that I am sure our Government is following carefully, the idea was to block child porn websites, yet when the list was leaked fewer than half of the websites on the list were child porn websites, the rest were either standard pornography or just plain old sites that people disagreed with, such as Christian websites or Satanic websites. To combat this the Australian Government has decided to add its list to the list, so that it is now illegal in Oz to even link to the list of blocked websites!
As for the Telegraph, I don’t think that it was censorship, the story is still there:- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/4372231/Blushing-biggest-gap-in-evolutionary-theory.html
Just the annoying habit newpapers seem to have of changing their headlines for stories and therefore the page link without thought for those that link to it.
But see how this erosion of our civil liberties is making us more and more suspicious of everything?
Well, a belated thanks for the comment, Charlie…
I did try to repeatedly ‘refind’ the page that I had cut from the Telegraph’s website… I suppose Dawkin’s would have thought it a grand success if they had pulled it. Attenborough’s treatment was/is deplorable and he should be allowed to say what he thinks without insult or fear of hell – though that does grant that a good argument is legitimate to post to him…
Same sex couples, hmm, well if they can get a kid they can have it – although this does make it easier for a couple of lesbians that just need a sperm dona than for a couple of blokes… but to say that they have a ‘right’ to children is dangerous. And I mean that in the sense to say that every adult part of a couple has a ‘right’ to children is dangerous because rights are things we hold over other folk – as in the tale above about the couple in Edinburgh – don’t they have a ‘right’ to children? and if not is age a good enough reason to deny it, because if so what next?
SO far, and I have read the good childhood report, or whatever it was called, there is no evidence that damage is done to kids brought up in a same sex couple – but this could change as more studies are done over greater time… Then again it might not. What I find terrible is the idea of a couple of Lesbians who decide that they’ll programme their ‘daughter’ to be a lesbian as well – and this goes back to a memory of an interview with a same sex couple where they said that they would do just that. True their argument was that their folks had brought them up to be hetero – so much for the sins of the parents…
But civil liberties is getting to the point where you have nothing to fear if you have an alibi but that’s another post.
[...] that we should never have to face but in Endinburgh as reported here and explored by me in a post it seems that de facto the socail services won their case that it was illegal for an elderly couple [...]