Actually, it *is* murder. You do not have the legal right, in most jurisdictions, to deny live-saving care and certain governmental administrative functions to your children. Further, you absolutely do *not* have the right to give birth without filing a birth certificate, to live without paying or at least filing for taxes on a yearly basis, to refuse to submit to local governance and regulatory processes, or, for that matter, to construct residential properties in a landed area zoned as a wildlife preserve instead of a residential zone.
For the record, the Amish are required by law and court rulings to submit to local governmental authority; among other requirements, they must allow their children to attend school until the 8th grade, where they will of course be watched for abuse, malnutrition, and medical observation as are all children in the public school system. While it is true that they are given a remarkable, and unreasonable, amount of leeway to construct their little dystopian existence, they are neither unfettered nor autonomous.
These people are murderers and lunatics, and they've killed their children out of selfish, irrational fear of the modern world. Most separatist societies in fact hypocritically, and humanely, take medical care for their people in spite of it being an obvious violation of their moral codes, for precisely these reasons.
Finally, it is hardly nitpicking to point out the huge, ridiculous, glaring problems with both the plot of this film and the actions of its characters, including their laughable and obviously criminal, immoral conduct. We are presented with a story that lauds, through facetious and blatant methodology, a flawed and critically unbalanced moral philosophy, whether as a joke or as propaganda, it is hard to say. It is only natural as thinking people to reject this philosophy as the sort of mind-virus that it is.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2004-08-09 11:55 am (UTC)For the record, the Amish are required by law and court rulings to submit to local governmental authority; among other requirements, they must allow their children to attend school until the 8th grade, where they will of course be watched for abuse, malnutrition, and medical observation as are all children in the public school system. While it is true that they are given a remarkable, and unreasonable, amount of leeway to construct their little dystopian existence, they are neither unfettered nor autonomous.
These people are murderers and lunatics, and they've killed their children out of selfish, irrational fear of the modern world. Most separatist societies in fact hypocritically, and humanely, take medical care for their people in spite of it being an obvious violation of their moral codes, for precisely these reasons.
Finally, it is hardly nitpicking to point out the huge, ridiculous, glaring problems with both the plot of this film and the actions of its characters, including their laughable and obviously criminal, immoral conduct. We are presented with a story that lauds, through facetious and blatant methodology, a flawed and critically unbalanced moral philosophy, whether as a joke or as propaganda, it is hard to say. It is only natural as thinking people to reject this philosophy as the sort of mind-virus that it is.