I think drunk driving is terrible, but don't try to tell me whether I can go where I want to or not.
What, you want some kind of "police state" where we physically restrain people from getting in their car while trying to drive after drinking? Next you'll want them in handcuffs and hauled off to jail, right?
You are not making any sense. People who want to have the priviledge of driving must comply with drunk driving laws. Just like people who want to have the priviledge of sending their kids to public schools have to comply with public health laws. But that's not what we are talking about here (or not what some people are talking about).
Look, I believe in vaccinations, but people should be intellecually honest when they call people stupid. Which is what the anti-anti-vaccers are doing.
I hear everybody laugh at the anti-vaccers who say that "
parents should have a choice." Well, do you know what the opposite of "parents having a choice" is? It is the forced vaccination, using police-power if necessary, of every mother's child in the country. Are you ready to flippantly accept that? Say "sure, we can give the police the power to knock on people's doors and ask for their "vaccination papers," and if they don't comply, strap them down and inject them."
Because laugh all you want at someone saying "parents should have a choice to vaccinate," but what is the logical conclusion of saying that no, parents (or people for that matter), get no say in this? Its the forced vaccination against their will. I'm not saying I'm against it, but I wouldn't be so flippant and derogatory about it, because giving the state that kind of power is a big deal.
Authorities knocking on doors and strapping people down for their dose of medicine is nowherer near the 'logical conclusion'. When people like me say it should be the law that kids have to be vaccinated, I don't actually mean to suggest that we should do random sweeps of neighborhoods to guarantee compliance.
It's pretty intellectually dishonest to try to paint this as an either/or scenario. I think anti-vaccers are dumb. I think you should be legally obligated to vaccinate your child. I think you should not be allowed to attend a school if you are not vaccinated.
There are literally thousands of laws in practice today that do not result on people knocking on your door. You're being ridiculous in your assertion that this is anywhere near the natural outcome of a law.
If it's a simple misunderstanding, I get that. But I sure do wonder what people mean when they say: "parents should not have a choice on whether to vaccinate their children."
That is a HELL of a lot different from "if parents want to send their kids to public schools, they have no choice on whether to vaccinate their children."
So what you (and maybe others?) are saying is: "Yes, parents absolutely get a choice on whether to vaccinate their children. If they don't want to send their kids to public schools, they are free to refuse to get their kids vaccinated." Is that what you are saying. Because if it is, it sounds like you and the anti-vaccination nutjobs aren't actually too far apart.
Oh, and by the way: Don't say "parents should be legally obligated to vaccinate their kids," when what you really mean is "I mean if a parent wants to send their kids to public schools they need to have them vaccinated." Because those are two very different things.
I think your leap to a police state is the breakdown here. Parents are not given any choice with respect to lots of things when dealing with their kids, we just don't think about most of them because they seem obvious. Parents aren't given the choice to starve their children, for example. We don't send police in to houses to strap kids down and feed them, we don't go door-to-door randomly checking for evidence of malnourished kids either.
I can dig it.
I think the starving your kids is a good example. It may even be too skewed in my direction, so I'll try and think of another one. But you are right: Police don't go door to door to make sure kids are fed. However, if we get some sort of evidence that kids are being starved, Child Welfare Services may very well show up on the parent's doorstep.
The closest example I can think about is the Jahovah's Witsness example where the parents were forced to allow the kid to have a blood transfusion. Or more properly, they took the kid and performed a blood transfusion on him. But even that isn't a great example because there, we were only talking about saving that one kid. In our situation, we are talking about saving everyone else in the country (i.e., it isn't for the kids' benefit, but rather the "greater good").
The only other example I can really think to compare is registering for the draft (or showing up for the draft if you get called). Because in that case, the law make you do something against your will, for the greater good of society. And no, we didn't have police busting down doors to find draft-dodgers.
Anyway, I don't mean to get crazy with my examples. I just think that probably most people's response to "should a parent have a choice to vaccinate" probably depends on what we mean by "having a choice," and what the punishment for non-compliance was. That's all I was saying.
NOTE: again, this was not an argument that parents shouldn't vaccinate. They most surely should. I was really doing a thought experiment on what it means to give parents the choice to vaccinate.
