Parenting

From www.time.com …

Superior Court Judge William Camarata of New Jersey, USA, has made the — to my mind completely amazing and crazy — decision to refuse a couple the right to adopt a second child. Why? Because "no person shall be deprived of the inestimable privilege of worshipping Almighty God" and the would-be parents are atheists. John and Cynthia Burke of Newark had already adopted a son, David, from a local (state) agency and two years later adopted a little girl, Eleanor. From the same agency. The first adoption went fine but the court has proclaimed that because the parents do not believe in a supreme being — ie. "God" — then this makes them unfit to adopt. Given that all us children don't choose our parents and are, almost without exception, brought up in the same faith as those parents (at least while we live at home), then surely this decision makes absolutely no sense at all. The judge stated ""the child should have the freedom to worship as she sees fit" yet no other child gets that 'freedom' at only 17 months old! So now this little girl — who has only known John and Cynthia in the parenting role — has to be sent back to the adoption agency to await new, presumably court god-fearing parents. Only in America …? Update: Originally I had thought the date on the Time article was an error — 1970 being a default date on many systems and Google showed lots of recent results for the topic. Further searching, however, has produced a court report showing that this judge was reversed by the Supreme Court of New Jersey on July 1st, 1971. Sadly I haven't been able to find any follow-up on the family concerned, so I shall hope that they weren't too traumatised by these events of nearly 40 years ago! The point about upbringing still remains though …

The Force is strong with these ones

From news.bbc.co.uk …

Back in the 2001 Census, some 390,000 people listed their religion as 'Jedi' in England and Wales, and a further 14,000 did so in Scotland. I recall it well as I too entered that as my 'faith'. It seemed a reasonable set of ethics and ideals and I have no problem in doing so, yet disliked that the Office for National Statistics decided off its own bat to reclassify all those who had indicated their support of the Force as just 'Atheist'. It now seems that a FoI (Freedom of Information) request submitted to Strathclyde Police Force has shown that eight Police Officers and two civvy staff have listed their official religion likewise. Yay!