crashfrog writes:
And Canadian law has no standing whatsoever in the American judicial system.
No, it has standing in Canada. Does Canada not count as a country, or something?
Of course Canada is a country. So is Pakistan, Nigeria, and Argentina. They all have their own laws and legal standards, some of which are quite different from those of the United States. If you're going to argue about Constitutional rights and the First Ammendment, then you are by necessity limited to citing US statutes and case law only. Bringing up how they do things in other countries is irrelevant. As I pointed out, and you ignored:
It's apparently legal to beat your wife in Saudi Arabia. Do you want to try to use that as a defense in a court in Indiana?
Go look up legal principles. One of the more significant is that of jursidiction. In matters of state law, one state's laws have no force in another state, unless they conflict with fereral laws. Just because I can marry another man in Massachusetts, that doesn't allow me to do so in Georgia. You can't cite Wyoming's' speed limit if you get a ticket in New Jersey. Likewise, Canada has no jurisdiction over the United States, meaning Canadian law is controlling in Canada, not the US, and need not be considered in US courts of law.
crashfrog writes:
Zenmonkey writes:
No, he's reading them correctly.
Rahvin had not yet posted this, at the time you wrote, so perhaps you can be forgiven for not having read:
Rahvin writes:
I responded to what, the first three or four cases you copy/pasted.
He's not reading any of the rest. Just ignoring them! How am I supposed to present evidence to someone who openly announces their intention not to read any of it?
You yourself brought up this case as evidence to support your claim. In
Message 241 Rahvin examined this case, and showed quite convincingly that in fact this case,
which you yourself brought to the table, not only did not support your arguement, it
disproved it. You haven't offered any specific refutation of his analysis. Instead, first you back-pedeled and called it your weakest case, then you complained that Rahvin hadn't dealt with your other evidence yet, and now you're admitting you were wrong but that it doesn't matter because it's just one case. No, no, no. Rules of debate say, you have to either address your opponent's arguments and evidence with counter-argument and/or your own evidence, or you concede the point in your opponent's favor. What you're doing is the fabled Gish Gallop, and it's not going to win you any points.
crashfrog writes:
The courts are not, as you seem to believe, saying that a parent who "brainwashes" his child is committing a crime or is unfit per se.
Completely wrong. In Molko vs Unification Church, the court
did both define "brainwashing" and other means of coercive thought control, and determined that coercive thought control did violate the law.
http://trancenet.net/groups/law/molkotxt.shtml
In this case the court found that the First Amendment was not a blanket protection of coercive, deceptive, manipulative practices, even if they merely took the form of speech acts. Just as the First Amendment doesn't protect fraud, it doesn't protect coercive thought control or brainwashing.
Did you actually
read this case, or did you just Google "brainwashing" and "First Ammendment"? I read it. This is a case in which the Moonies effectively kidnapped
adults, kept them
separated from their families and imprisoned and through
coersion, fraud, isolation, and other unsavory means, attempted to turn them into virtual slaves of the Unification Church. All of the above were
explicity cited by the court in Molko as
necessary elements of brainwashing, as you yourself admit. Unless you want to assert that setting curfews, deciding to serve meatloaf instead of pizza for dinner, and insisting on homework being done before bedtime are can also be considered elements of brainwashing, then again, this case is irrelevant and fails to support your hypothesis.
Find me a case in which Nazi or Mormon or Green Party parents kept their child in a closet, denied him meals, and subjected him to hours and hours of coersive lectures about their beliefs, then you'll have valid case of brainwashing. That's also physical and emotional abuse, and certainly potential grounds for the loss of parental rights. But by themselves, lectures and "indoctrination" do not rise to the level of "brainwashing."
crashfrog writes:
At best, all the cases you've cited show is that in determining custody of a child in a divorce, one of the factors that a judge may consider in determing custodial rights is which parent appears to be the more stable and responsible.
Well, again, no. The Winnipeg case shows that a Canadian court of law will certainly consider intense racism, membership in racist organizations, and other racist factors when deciding whether to sever parental custody even outside the context of a divorce action.
Canada counts. It's a real country and everything! I know that comes as a bit of a surprise but it's true.
No, as I've pointed out, Canada
doesn't count in this discussion. If you fail to undertand that, then you don't know enough about the law to present a legal argument.
What does count is that these are all, so far as I can tell, divorce cases. Pay attention to this: in a divorce, neither parent is going to retain full custodial rights over his or her children. {ABE: What I meant to say here was that both parents are not going to retain full custodial rights over their children. It could go all to one, all to the other, or they could be divided somehow. But you can't have
both parents retaining 100% of their custodial rights in a divorce. The math doesn't work out.} A judge must necessarily limit one or both parent's rights.
Someone has to lose. And in limiting those rights, that judge is going to take a lot of factors into consideraton. Some are fair (dad is in jail for selling crystal meth) and some less so, depending on your point of view (mom is Wiccan). In the cases you've cited, being a nutjob racist has been part of a pattern of undesirable behavior, and
that's what cost a parent custodial rights. As has been pointed out, the courts have the ability to deny
both parents custody of their children. In no
relevant case that you've cited has a judge denied custodial grounds on the
sole basis of a parent being a racist asshole. You have no case in which parents, absent a determination of custody in a divorce case or absent a finding of physical abuse, have lost custodial rights over their children simply because of "indoctrination."
crashfrog writes:
You've been claiming that it's illegal to "brainwash" your children, a demonstrably untrue statement.
It's quite true, as I've demonstrated.
No you haven't. Not yet, anyway, and it doesn't appear that you're likely to.
crashfrog writes:
Canadian legal standards have no effect whatever on American statues or legal opinions.
I never claimed that they did, but we're not specifically talking about American statutes and legal opinions. (Frequently, however, foreign law
does inform American legal decisions; judges may consider foreign statutes when attempting to determine natural, universal human rights.)
Yes, we
are talking about US law. If you start bringing in the legal standards of other countries, then the conversation becomes too unbounded to be meaningful anymore.
And while US courts have on occassion consulted the laws of other countries in rendering decisions, they have never held any other country's laws as determinative or controlling. Now you want to claim that you're talking about "universal rights." That's moving the goalposts, friend. Please come up with an international treaty or agreement that forbids "brainwashing" of children, and I'll consider it.
crashfrog writes:
Just because you and I both find these inbred Hitler-wannabes and their beliefs more nauseating than being served a week-old cat corpse for dinner, that doesn't mean that they don't have a right to teach their kids how important racial purity is.
Again, we're talking about brainwashing, not teaching.
As you yourself are about to admit, brainwashing
by definition must contain elements of coersion. You don't spell them out, but I will: threats, physical abuse, isolation, sleep deprivation, etc. Without those, then you are indeed just talking about teaching.
Telling your child that Jews are subhuman or that flouride in the water is a Communist plot is teaching. Slapping him if he doesn't say "Heil Hitler" before breakfast, or making him spend the night in the garage until he has memorized all of Mao's Little Red Book can be considered "brainwashing." There's a significant difference between the two that you're not seeing, or at least you're not admiting to.
crashfrog writes:
Let me repeat myself, and this time address the entire statement,
No need. I've repeatedly addressed the entire statement, and I'll do so again - "brainwashing" is not a judgement about the veracity of the belief being communicated, it's an objective description of acts of mental coercion that violate an individual's federal civil rights. Teaching somebody something you don't agree with isn't "brainwashing";
coercing mental behavior towards
any belief, even a true one, is brainwashing, and doing it to anyone - adult, child, anybody - violates their human rights.
Well, I think that you're moving the goalposts again, but let's set that aside. You yourself now admit that coersion is a necessary element of brainwashing. Indoctrination
by itself does not meet the standard of brainwashing. Can you provide evidence that parents have used any of the techniques I've mentioned in order to force their children to believe as they do. If you can, then you have elements of physical and emotional abuse that I agree are grounds to curtail or limit a parent's custodial rights. If you can't, then you don't have brainwashing, you have parents raising their children to be just as vile as they are.
crashfrog writes:
Children are human beings with human rights. Not a single one of you has deigned to speak to that point. Why is that?
I absolutely agree that children are human beings with rights. They should be raised with love and understanding, and taught to respect the dignity of other human beings. I despise parents who raise their kids to be racists, or to believe that men have ownership rights over their wives, to take another example. But just because something is wrong, that doesn't alway make it illegal.
Edited by ZenMonkey, : Added a clarification, probably unnecessarily.
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