Imagine that you are the mother of a one-year-old son who you love and adore and that you're expecting one more bundle of joy any day now. You have a husband who cares about you and your baby more than anything else on earth. You and your husband are very much opposed to having the state get too personal or step in to "brand" your child with a social security number, making it possible for them to be robbed of one-third of their lives, through taxation or even drafted into unconstitutional and therefore illegal wars. So you decide to deliver your baby daughter at home with a midwife, to protect her from the "cattle branders" who want to claim and mark her as theirs.
But there are complications with the birth so you are forced to deliver at a county-run hospital. You, who have carried and nourished this miracle for nine months, go through the pains of giving birth to a healthy baby girl, and now your family is whole.
Then the state steps in. They want to give her a guinea pig blood test and pin her with that opressive number, which would make her subject to their surveillance and control. Feeling that its your duty to protect this child, you neither refuse the state's demands nor accept them, but ask for more information.
So what does the state do in the "land of the free"? They label you as "negligent parents" and take custody of your day-old baby. You are still in the hospital bed, and your baby is "ripped from your arms". What should be one of the happiest days of your life has been transformed in a split second into an unimaginable nightmare.
You call the police to assure these these people don't trample on your rights as parents. But the officers you called are intercepted by officials from the child welfare department, and from that point on there are two armed guards outside your hospital room to assure that you and your husband did not "kidnap" what they assume to be their property. If that isn't bad enough, there is the fear that they might take custody of your one-year old son as well.
This may sound like the plot of a police-state novel, but I am currently living with and working with the family I have just described. Their baby wasn't taken away because they would abuse her she was taken because they have been labelled as negligent and "dangerous parents for seeking to protect her and give her an opportunity to live the most fulfilled life possible. They might make her eat her peas and carrots or even substitute carob for chocolate, but does this really make them dangerous? Heaven forbid, they want to teach her morals and how to think they want to love her -- the negligent, dangerous criminals!
The sad thing is that this isn't just a fluke situation, tragedies like this happen every day. The Creator-endowed rights of so many are chewed up and spit out by our politicians. But was not the government founded to protect the rights of the people? Does not this family, like every other, have the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"?
By my definition, liberty is the ability to make choices and in this case, the choice to raise up your children in the way you believe best. The pursuit of happiness or your control over your own future happiness is also be trespassed. How much control over your future do you really have when your family is being torn apart? Or, when you are a child, having bureauocrats decide that moving you around from one foster home to another would be better for you than being in the "dangerous" clutches of loving parents?
The 4th amendment protects the peoples' right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures. Who, without even a twinge of guilt, could look a new mother in the face and tell her that the seizure of her newborn is reasonable?
If you volunteer into anyone's regulated enterprise, the regulations upon your person are not a violation of your rights this I understand. But if you decide that you no longer agree with what is going on within that institution, shouldn't you have the right to leave? Of course unless. that is, you are living under a dictatorship.
So why do politicians think they have the right to play God with our lives? OBVIOUSLY THEY THINK THAT THEY OWN US.
When you own a property, you don't have to ask its permission to act upon it. You can use it, sell it, put it up as collateral, or let it be sit without asks its or anyone else's permission. In this case, the politicians tried to make this baby research experiment and a co-signer to the National Debt, and when her parents refused, the state simply took what is considers to be its property away from them.
Fortunately for this family, they won their baby back before a judge on the condition that a child welfare agent inspect their home to insure that the state's little "work bee" is being properly cared for. But why should anyone be put in a position where they must "win" back their baby? Many other families have been stuck in this trap without the means or knowledge to fight back. If I ever doubted that the state has gotten completely out of control, I know it now!
Therefore, I make this plea "Pray for America." Not so that we can destroy "terrorists" (innocent women and children in Afghanistan), but that we can wake up and realize that if we arenšt sufficiently concerned with the power of our politicians, we will continue to slowly but surely hand all our freedom and our liberties into their ever-greedy hands.
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