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Parents, not states, had duty to educate children, Vatican reminds UN

The UN is not going to like the Vatican reminding them that children don't belong to the State.
The Vatican’s delegation to the UN has decried a “disconcerting trend” to “downplay the role of parents in the upbringing of their children, as if to suggest somehow that it is not the role of parents, but that of the State.”

At a UN meeting on population and development, the Vatican delegation called attention to the 250,000 Catholic schools around the world that “assist parents who have the right and duty to choose schools inclusive of homeschooling, and they must possess the freedom to do so, which in turn, must be respected and facilitated by the State.”

Related link: Parents, not states, had duty to educate children, Vatican reminds UN ~ Catholic Culture

Comments

  1. Paul Ryan: A Catholic we can all approve of.

    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100153879/paul-ryan-is-right-you-can-be-a-conservative-and-a-christian/

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  2. There was a recent story of the Waikato DHB promoting vaccinations to under 16s and then doing them without parental consent or involvement.

    Now, the age of infromed legal consent is not 12, 13 or 14, but the State seems to think it can break its own laws and over-ride the natural rights of the parent. Very dangerous, just as they allow abotions of 13 and 14 year olds, without parental knowledge.

    You'd think liberals would be alarmed at this violation of the concept of informed consent, (lack thereof in this case) which underpins their morality, but most of them seem to be revealed as complete hypocrites with an urge for state control of children.

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  3. Parents don't have unlimited authority over their children. If the right to withhold medical treatment from a dependent who wants to receive it wasn't a very limited one, then there'd be something wrong.

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  4. If the information is kept from the parents, then you don't even get to play the "parents don't have authority" card.

    Your conclusion of "then there'd be something wrong." offends me for the implication that there isn't anything wrong in the instances I posed.

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  5. It's not certain that there is anything wrong in the instances you posted. The claim that Waikato DHB is vaccinating under-16s without parental consent comes from the loons at the IAS, so I'm assuming it's a load of old cobblers until proved otherwise. And Judith Collins' attempt to require parental consent to abortion for underage girls was defeated in Parliament.

    And it is about parents not having unlimited authority over their children. If a child wants the fact they're getting vaccinated kept from their parents, there's really only one reason that might be - ie, that the parents would want the treatment withheld from the child. But children have rights too, and a medical practitioner's responsibility is to the patient they're treating as well as the state. If the patient doesn't want their parents to know about the treatment and the state says otherwise, that's an ethical dilemma the medical practitioner has to resolve for themselves. There are means of recourse for people who aren't happy with the decision.

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  6. PM, this isn't about unlimited authority, and vaccination skates on the edge of necessary medical treatment given that it is preventative (apparently) rather than treatment. Abortion is not medical treatment, it's much closer to amputation of a healthy limb. The fact that medical people are needed to ensure the baby being killed is done so safely is not a good reason to prevent parents from knowing in advance about it, just like if they were going to amputate my 15 yo 's arm, I'd want to know about it so I could talk him out of it, for instance.

    The problem is that the modern state has trouble seeing the boundaries of its own authority with regards to other people's children and is quite happy to break the parent / child ties, yet is incapable of being a proper parent itself.

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