On her website, Idaho State Representative Christy Perry offers that she is ”a pro life mother and grandmother and emphasizes her honor and value of all human life, born and unborn.” She also claims she’s “an ardent supporter of defending each child’s right to life.” Interesting. Perry is also in the today’s news insisting that the state has no right to protect children from their parents who refuse them needed medical treatment in favor of faith healing.
“Children do die,” says Christy Perry.
A piece in AlterNet exposes Perry’s reasoning on this seemingly contradictory position:
… it’s fine with her if Idaho children die in the name of God. Perry’s district includes many followers of a religious cult, Followers of Christ, that eschews medicine. She says that the sect’s members are more comfortable confronting death when it happens to their children.
“I’m not trying to sound callous, but [people calling for reform] want to act as if death is an anomaly. But it’s not. It’s a way of life,” she says.
Perry says that a proposed ban on faith-healing would violate the religious rights of her constituents. The legislation, which would limit faith exemptions for medical care in the state’s child neglect law was proposed after a string of preventable child deaths in Perry’s district. The 12 who died were children of sect members. Most of the children died from causes like pneumonia, sepsis and easily treatable cases of food poisoning.
But Perry argues that it’s well within the Canyon County sect’s First Amendment right to refuse medical care for their children on religious grounds. She says those trying to reform the laws are denying the sect their religious freedoms.
I may laugh at the idiocy of Perry’s support for the religious zealots in her district but this article also suggests that some people are actually living their religion and not just making photo-ops at the church and then going about ignoring the teachings of Jesus and failing to honor the supremacy of their God.
Let’s face it: for most people religion is just a convenience justification or excuse to use when needed and, as such, is no more important than making sure your socks match before you go out of the house.
I have used the argument that if people were truly religious, insisting that abortion be banned since man should not interfere with the workings of God bring new life to the world, would have no problem when God sends death down on them by means of some sickness or injury. But that’s not what happens: these people use the knowledge of medicine developed by humans to thwart the will of God (and in most cases, some humans make an obscene amount of money on the transaction).
So my argument showing that religion is mostly for political or economic gain seems to be shown up in the religious cults of Christy Perry’s Idaho district. But I have noted this religious anomaly before. There are strong religious groups that do not believe in side-stepping God’s work through modern medicine. Of course, even the conservatives who battle against abortion and pro-life often take over politically when they expect to score more points defying God, as in the case of Terri Schiavo (a good example of why Jeb Bush is a self-centered idiot).
But since there is no God, why would compassionate human beings let innocent children die to perpetuate a primitive myth?
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