Government Intruding in our Homes
I heard about this story of the “trailer trash” mother who was headed for jail because she violated the judge’s court order to stop smoking around her kids yesterday. My initial reaction was that this was a good thing. Anyone stupid enough to smoke around her kids and then violate a judge’s order to stop probably wasn’t someone who should babysit kids, let alone have custody of her own.
The more I thought about the case, the more it bothered me. While most people would agree that smoking around children isn’t a good idea, it isn’t illegal. This seems like the classic “slippery slope” argument. What’s to say that a future judge won’t decide that watching more than an hour per day of television, playing video games, eating twinkies, going to church or riding in a car driven by a sibling are equally hazardous activies and deterimental to the child’s welfare and thus should be included in custody decrees.
A friend also suggested that if the activity was OK when the parents were married, why is it suddenly a problem now that they’re getting divorced?
I’m sure we don’t know all the facts and perhaps the children have asthma or the mother is an incredible alcoholic or something else which would seem to justify the judge’s position. In this age of “politically correct” everything, I worry that we’re letting government, and in this case, the courts decide how parents should behave.
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