Prayers from a jail cell

I was overjoyed to find out yesterday that two parents serial child abusers over at the Followers of Christ Church in Oregon City were charged with manslaughter and criminal mistreatment for watching as their young daughter slowly died of treatable illnesses. I've been at home, scouring through the Bible, trying to find the part about God's approval of murder by proxy. Didn't really find any of that, but I did see plenty in here about healing the sick:

And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people. And his fame went throughout all Syria: and they brought unto him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatic, and those that had the palsy; and he healed them.
-- Matthew iv, 23—24.

You'd think this would be an open-and-shut case, except for one hitch: The parents were praying as their toddler suffered bacterial pneumonia, a blood infection and a benign cyst in her neck that was never removed. Because these parents bowed their heads in prayer instead of, say, doing meth in their garage as the child succumbed, every religious-rights sap in the nation will be screaming injustice at the charges.

It's mind-boggling how backward this country's legal system can be when it comes to religious rights. For instance, several people have been shot down by the courts when they tried to argue that drugs were an essential part of their religious beliefs, and thus they have the Constitutional right to use them (marijuana for Rastafarians, for instance). Yet for years these religious zealots in Oregon have had free reign to refuse even basic medical attention for their dependent children -- resulting in excruciating deaths in the name of religion. For a society that is so divided on abortion, it's strange that we have allowed a church to devalue life so much.

As for the religion-Constitution connection, Dmitri Tymoczko has some interesting tidbits in the Atlantic:

The reasoning behind decisions that uphold the right to use drugs in a religious context is obvious: drugs play an important, even essential, role in the practice of many religious groups; the Constitution protects the free exercise of religious belief; therefore the Constitution protects the use of drugs. The reasoning behind decisions that reject the same right is that religious action, unlike religious belief, is not absolutely protected by the Constitution. The distinction was definitively articulated by Justice Owen Roberts in Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940). "The [First] Amendment," he wrote, "embraces two concepts--freedom to believe and freedom to act. The first is absolute but, in the nature of things, the second cannot be." Thus the law, though it does not seek to prevent people from having certain religious beliefs, may prevent them from acting on those beliefs. Courts have held, for instance, that prohibitions on polygamy apply to Mormons, and that even Christian snake-handling sects are subject to regulations controlling the treatment of dangerous animals. Since taking drugs is an action, it is thus subject to government regulation.

Basically, as the article states, anybody can subscribe to a religion. But that person can't have eight wives (Mormon) or violate animal-rights laws and sacrifice a goat to the devil (Satanism). And he damn sure shouldn't be able to willingly kill a child. And besides, this is a toddler we're talking about. She was far too young to independently fulfill basic needs, let alone worship a God.