By Selwyn Duke

Imagine this: You mistake an alcoholic beverage for a soft drink and give it to your child.  He then imbibes a relatively small amount of it and is none the worse for it. 

You then get investigated by Child Protective Services (CPS) and lose custody of your children.

This happened to a man named Christopher Ratte, who gave his son Mike’s Hard Lemonade at a baseball game.  Ratte, a tenured archeology professor, was surprised when a guard at the game told him the product contained alcohol, as he didn’t even know that there was such a thing as alcoholic lemonade (OK, he’s a fossil, but that’s not a sin).  To lend this a little more perspective, nobody in the Ratte family watches much TV, which is to their credit.

The Rattes did get their children back after a couple of days, but this is nevertheless a perfect example of the tyranny of CPS.  We have lowered the threshold for government involvement in the family far too much, and the result is that the state increasingly treats our children as if they’re its own.

This story speaks volumes about the state of the West.  First, the state in which this took place, Michigan, actually prohibits parents from giving their own children alcohol.  This is insane.  There are many cultures in which kids might drink a bit of wine, and there’s nothing wrong with it.  Even when I was a boy, my parents allowed me to try their alcoholic beverages (they didn’t drink much) to satisfy my curiosity.  My reaction was  a typical one, "Yuck!"  And that was that.

Getting back to the story, the security guard who noticed Ratte’s son drinking the beverage reported the family to the authorities.  What kind of person does such a thing?  Is common sense completely dead? 

In fact, it seems that everyone involved in this sorry affair just mindlessly went by the book.  Now, I know that likening people to the Nazis has become the cheapest shot in the book, but c’mon.  A good person has to use discernment and know when "just following orders" is no longer an excuse.  God’s law takes precedence over man’s law.

Unfortunately, lamentably, human nature is such that most people will just follow orders  regardless of the morality of what is prescribed.  It much reminds me of the Milgram experiment, which found that most people would administer what they believed were fatal electric shocks to a subject when a researcher insistently told them to do so.

As for CPS, I absolutely despise it.  Quite frankly, many social workers are loathsome creatures, being as they tend to be godless people who worship the state.  They’re cut from the same stone as psychologists (here is my recent piece on psychology).  And, no, I’ve never had an encounter with CPS myself, but I’m aware of too many people — both those I’ve known personally and those I’ve read about in the media — who have been persecuted by its storm troopers.

If I had my druthers, I’d close down every CPS agency in the country.

                  Protected by Copyright