Love, Joy, Feminism and Pro-CPS Bullshit

I have left a comment on an article posted on the "Love Joy and Feminism" blog, which I"m sure will get attacked from every naive, trusting and irrational angle possible, accusing me of every unimaginable thing, and all from people who don't have a clue as to what CPS does or how they actually operate.

Here's the link to the post as well as the first three paragraphs by the author on the LJF blog.  I encourage you to read it there.

Teddy Foltz-Tedesco and HSLDA’s Blindness

Last week an Ohio state senator introduced S.B. 248, a bill designed to prevent homeschooling from being used to hide child abuse. HSLDA responded predictably. It is true that this particular bill, which has already been withdrawn, went too far. It would have required the name of each homeschooler to be run through a statewide child welfare information database to flag those with a concerning history of social services investigations, which is good, but it would have also required each parent and child to have interviews with social services before beginning to homeschool. 

But what I find troubling is that HSLDA refuses to admit that bills like this seek to address a real problem and is apparently completely ignorant of the fact that they themselves have helped create this problem. And that is what I want to address here. 

S.B. 248 was introduced at the request of Shawn Tedesco, father of Teddy Foltz-Tedesco, a homeschooled boy was beaten to death by his mother’s boyfriend last January. Throughout their response to the bill, HSLDA placed the blame for Teddy’s death entirely on social services.

What I find concerning mostly in this blog post, as well as the following 130 or so comments, is the presupposition that CPS is a good and trusted entity.  What I find interesting is that practically all of these people would probably welcome a CPS Agent into their homes with no fear whatsoever, experiencing total shock when the rug is pulled out from under them.  These people have obviously never experienced the dark side of CPS as so many of my readers have.  Some are even foster and adoptive parents themselves who still don't get it.  However, the level of blind support for CPS and Pro-CPS Programs without the understanding of the reality of the system is the problem that we in family rights have faced since the beginning.

I'm sure that view would change when these people experience a social worker crawling up their ass.  It usually does.  That's when they find me.

This is the comment I left, in response to another comment where the person couldn't understand how such a bill would violate a parents rights.  Just keep scrolling, you'll find it:

You are totally leaving out one very significant factor by presupposing that social service agencies (CPS) are capable, adequately funded, honest, or competent enough or even have the available time to do the job which you are calling upon them to do when you expect every accusation to be investigated just to make sure or every recourse to be provided in absence of available funding or conservative ideologies which fight to keep such funding to be available. To say things like "the actual role of social services, which frequently works to heal at-risk families rather than simply either removing children or not being involved at all," is a completely incorrect and idealistic assumption, not to mention totally based upon what state you're in or who you get for a caseworker. 

Although I will fully admit that in some cases CPS workers do work to heal the family, in many more cases some little fresh out of college social worker with no kids of her own or real life experience shows up at your door on a power trip, coercing and manipulating her way into your home and personal life, jumping to conclusions, making mountains out of every possible mole hill and applying horrific scenarios of "what could possibly happen but hasn't" and flat out lying. You did not point out or even consider that the HSLDA has come across so many of these kinds of frivolous or unwarranted cases over they years that it's statistically safer to assume that an innocent family is being harassed by overzealous social workers rather than any actual child abuse going on. (I know, I know it's better to be safe than sorry. Not the point.) On top of that, you assume that it's perfectly okay to send a social worker or a nurse out just to make sure that hunky dory in every case, rather than focusing on the serious cases where the child falls through the cracks because social workers are off chasing shadows rather than spending their time where they are really needed. 

Also, prior social services involvement does not mean that there was any child abuse or neglect. It's almost as if from what I'm reading, you can't understand that there is any justifiable reason to want to fight against anything that CPS says or does at all.