If you haven’t heard the appalling news about 11-year-old Madeline Neumann’s tragic death of diabetic ketoacidosis last week, you can read about it here in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.  The gist of it was that her parents decided to pray over her body instead of take her to a fucking doctor after she had been sick for two weeks and, at ten or so days in, COULD NO LONGER WALK OR TALK.  Madeline was healthy before her episode.  At her death, she was emaciated, as the body eats it own fat to raise insulin levels during diabetic ketoacidosis.

Around the same time, the idiot parents of poor little 15-month-old Ava Worthington of Oregon were indicted in Ava’s death for their attempts to ”faith-heal” the baby of her bronchial pneumonia–which led to a blood infection that could have been treated with antibiotics. 

As the article about Ava notes, laws were passed in the 1990s that struck down legal shields for faith-healers after the deaths of several children whose parents were members of the fundamentalist church.  The Worthingtons were indicted on Friday on manslaughter and criminal mistreatment charges, but it is unclear whether the Neumanns will be charged.  According to a Chicago Tribune report, Wisconsin law says that a parent cannot be accused of abuse or neglect of a child if “in good faith” they selected prayer as a basis of treatment for a disease.  An investigation has begun into whether the Neumanns had a “a good faith belief” that their daughter could be cured through prayer.  

My thought is that if Madeline was FUCKING BEDRIDDEN, there’s no way in hell the parents could have had a good faith belief she would be fine if they lit some candles and said a few Hail Marys.  Fucking assholes.

I believe in God, and I pray.  I pray more when I need or want more, which sucks, but you can bet your sweet ass that I’d be praying to my God, everyone else’s God, the real doctors and the people that play them on TV if my babies were that ill.  If my babies were lethargic and wanted to stay in bed for a few days, and they appeared to be getting thinner, and they just wanted me to hold them, I would probably have a Civil Protection Order against me to stay AWAY from the doctor’s office because I’d been there too many times.  

My son had a five-day fever last year and the doctor’s office staff was probably referring to me as “Norm” from Cheers I had been there so many times.  I’m not saying I drugged him up with everything under the sun, but I wanted a professional medical person overseeing my child and informing me thoroughly so that I could make proper decisions about his care.

My son ended up losing five pounds with that fever and looked so thin that I burst into tears when I put him in the bath at the end of that week.  I called in my husband so I could run out and buy milkshakes. 

What about the Worthingtons and the Neumanns?  I wonder what they’re feeling now.  Milkshakes aren’t going to bring back their beautiful daughters, and I hope all their asses get locked up for so long they forget what ice cream tastes like.  

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As I was driving him to school today, my 7th grade son wanted to talk about science and what he was learning about the thinker and scientist, Gallileo. My son was amazed how this man and his new discoveries and his promotion of the Copernican doctrine had been met with hostility and mistrust from the tiny, threatened minds of the church and its subsequent Inquisition which, at the time, dictated what could and could not be called historical or scientific “fact”. His then-radical theory which proposed that while two dissimilarly-weighted objects, if dropped, might fall at different rates on Earth, the same objects, in an airless atmosphere, would both hit the ground at the same time.

The Church, incensed that Galileo would dare to challenge the “wisdom” of the day concerning gravity as well as his theory that the Sun– not the Earth–was the center of the universe, felt Galileo was nothing less than a heretic. After 18 days of formal interrorgation (and using threats of torture), Galileo confessed under duress that he may have worded his support for the Copernican case a little too strongly. Despite this, he was placed under house arrest in 1633 where he remained until his death in 1642.

At the end of the last Apollo 15 moon walk (1971), a live demonstration was performed before the television cameras by Commander David Scott using a feather and a geologic hammer. Because the atmosphere on the moon did not provide the same air resistance that one finds on our planet, both objects–released at the same time– fell at the same rate and landed at the same time. Despite this very public demonstration which is preserved on tape, the Church did not see fit to formally reverse its stance on Galileo’s theories until 1983. You read it right, people…1983!!

My son was aghast that anyone would be treated in such a manner for merely encouraging the broadening of intellectual thought and for daring to promote new scientific theories. I told him that this was why his father and I are such strong advocates of the Separation of Church and State. “No church, regardless of denomination, should have the power to decide what is or is not accepted or studied as scientific or historical fact or to censure those who promote such knowledge,” I said. “It would be tremendously naive to believe that what happened to Galileo could not still happen, in some form or other, in our country now.”

You think I’m being an alarmist? Then consider the following two things:

1) The steady encroachment of fundamentalism in this country. Make no mistake, fundamentalism means the death of intellectual growth, regardless of which religion it attaches itself to. There are people being elected to the highest of public offices who maintain that Abraham lived to be several hundred years old and that the world, according to their religious views, is only 6,000 years old. Especially worrisome are the words of Evangelical guru and former head hypocrite of the National Association of Evangelicals, Ted Haggard. Haggard, who “was asked to leave” his post after it was revealed that, despite his attacks on homosexuality, he had engaged in a three year sexual relationship with a male prostitute who also sold him methanphetamines. (Yes….THAT Ted Haggard!) The evangelist, in a taped interview, warned esteemed British ethologist/evolutionist, Richard Dawkins, that it wouldn’t be long before the majority of people understood the 6,000 year theory to be TRUTH. If that doesn’t frighten you, then I have a “science textbook” to show you that is used by fundamentalist homeschooling parents here in Texas. I hope I’m dead when the day comes that public school teachers are required to teach your child that there were pairs of dinosaurs on the ark and that Noah used bags of fireflies to light the dark lower chambers of his watercraft.

2) The present administration just made it legal for the government to torture people. The same government that is presently led by men who–if one believes the public boasts of Haggard–lend their ear to Pastor Ted (who claimed he spoke to George Bush on a weekly basis) and others like him.

NOW are you scared? You ought to be.

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