Activist Judges on Steroids!
Oh my goodness! We’ve all heard complaints about “activist judges”, but this moron in Canada absolutely takes the cake. A judge in Canada has overturned a father’s decision to ground his 12 year old daughter from taking a 3 day school trip because she thought it was “too harsh”. I kid you not.
Apparently this sweet 12 year old 6th grader had gone online and put out personal information. When she refused to stop, the father forbid her from using the internet. So she went over to a friend’s house and put up pictures of herself (wearing what her father said were clothes inappropriate for her age) on an internet DATING site. So he forbid her from participating in an extracurricular event. Then the girl got into a big fight with her step mom (the girl’s parents are divorced and her father and step mother had custody). The father told her that she was grounded and could not go on a 3 day weekend field trip celebrating graduation from 6th grade with her class. So, of course, she stormed out, went to her mom’s house, called the court appointed attorney who had been assigned to advocate for her best interests in her parent’s custody battle and had her dad’s decision overturned. Because, why wait 20 years to cry to a therapist about how mean your dad was to you when you can just head to the courthouse and get a judge to side with you?
Now, leaving aside the fact that this school was actually taking a 3 day road trip to celebrate “graduating” from 6th grade. . . um, OK, let’s not leave that aside. WTF? We celebrate “graduating from 6th grade? Like that’s some sort of acomplishment? “Congratulations, you’ve sucked air continuously for 12 years now, can write you name, tie your shoes and do long division – let’s take you on an all expenses paid road trip with all the other hormonally addled little 12 year olds in your class!” Seriously. How dumb can you get?
The law in Canada requires agreement on parenting decisions and since the father made the decision without talking with the mother first, the judge thought that this gave her the right to arbitrate. If this judge had really wanted to help this family, she would have modeled proper adult behavior and refused to overturn the father’s decision, even if she personally disagreed with it. Heck, my husband and I do it all the time. Because missing out on a school trip or suffering through some other potentially unfair or even inadequate punishment is highly unlikely to be as damaging to a child as undermining her father’s authority to make decisions regarding discipline. This goes double for a troubled child, which any 12 year old who puts up pictures on an internet dating sight obviously is.
Crazy, crazy, crazy.