Parents are, with limited exceptions, best suited to make decisions about the welfare of our children. It is our inalienable right to decide what’s in their best interest, even if the child doesn’t agree.

Not many children eat their vegetables voluntarily, for example, and it’s our job to ensure they do.

Unfortunately, the trend both here in Canada and across the pond brings the very concept of parental rights into question.

Britain

Parents refused to allow their 14-year-old son to undergo hormone therapy as a prelude to a sex-change operation. They felt his desire “to be a girl” stemmed from his inability to cope with the stress of secondary school, primarily because of his Asperger’s and autism.

Authorities stepped in and threatened to take the child and place him in foster care. The parents eventually won their battle, but not before the State almost destroyed them.

This is the parents’ decision to make. The State has no place interfering yet, increasingly, the State believes it does.

And it’s a problem not confined to the shores of our Mother country.

Canada

In 2012, Jesse Sansone was arrested, strip-searched and locked up while police and school officials handed his daughter over to Family and Children’s Services. His daughter drew a crude picture of her daddy with a gun to “kill the monsters.”

Jesse Sansone did not own guns. Not one.

That didn’t stop Waterloo Regional School District Superintendent Gregg Bereznick from claiming “we do work hand in hand with these families because we co-parent…”

When asked to explain what he meant Bereznick said,

“By co-parent I’m talking about teachers and parents working together to support children as they grow up. And so those relationships are important to us, and we value them. But we also understand that within that context, it may be required for us to bring forward a disclosure because it is our legal requirement to do so.”

Scotland

On February 19, 2014, Scotland passed the Children and Young People Bill, allowing the National Health Service to appoint a government worker for every child up to the age of five. This State bureaucrat has the power to share information with a wide range of public authorities and to intervene in the child’s life without parental consent.

Not a single Scottish politician had the backbone to vote against this gross expansion of the State.

There are limited situations where government intervention in a child’s life is warranted, such as neglect, physical and/or sexual abuse and failure to provide the basic necessities of life.

Absent these circumstances, when the State demands control of all parental decisions for minor children it has grossly exceeded its authority.

In these cases, it is our duty, our moral obligation, to stand against the State’s interference in our lives.

Government bureaucrats don’t take kindly to “mere citizens” standing up for themselves. As the case of Jesse Sansone proved, they will do almost anything to get their way even when they’re wrong.

Especially when they’re wrong.