Conundrum

On Tuesday, poor planning left me having to ride the bus home from work.  It was a twenty minute reminder of why I switched from public transit to bike commuting.  I'll take rain, road grit and hostile drivers over the smell of wet wool and cheap whiskey any day of the week.

I did remember to come armed with protection, a barrier between me and the bus people:  a newspaper and my iPod.

The lead story in Tuesday's Oregonian was about parents that were found guilty of criminally negligent homicide. Their religious beliefs kept them from seeking medical treatment for their teenage son, who suffered from, in the words of the prosecution, "a treatable condition."  They instead trusted that their own faith would heal their child.  Tragically, they were wrong.

Here is the first paragraph of the article:

"A Clackamas County jury sent a clear signal Tuesday that parents who rely solely on faith healing to treat their children face prison if a child dies."

I am not sure this is the sort of precedent that should be set.  I'm not a religious person,  and by no means am I suggesting the death of a child is ever acceptable.   However, I do think  that if, as a society, we truly value freedom of religion, we have to think long and hard before condoning wholesale judicial solutions that interfere with deeply personal decisions of faith and medical care.

I'm not familiar with the individual details of this trial.  Perhaps the guilty verdict was justified in this case by facts above and beyond the religious beliefs of the defendants  But I see two significant problems with the mindset reflected in the Oregonian's article.

In law school, one of the oft-overused phrases in constitutional law and jurisprudence classes is "slippery slope."  It is a belief in the snowball effect of one bad decision, that a minor interference with civil rights will  justify larger interferences, which in turn will justify even larger interferences.  In this case, the concern is that this verdict could be used as justification to interfere with parental decision-making on non-life-or-death issues or to prosecute parents that choose to use Eastern medicine to unsuccessfully treat a sick child.

The second danger of the verdict is its power to frighten people into participating in the mainstream, Western, Christianized health care system, even when that system directly conflicts with their own spiritual and cultural beliefs. 

This tragedy now has my attention now, and I'll be watching the sentencing and appeals process closely.

If you are interested in more commentary on the American legal system, this time on the utility of jury trials,  check out this great article from this month's Portland Monthly.