This demonstrates the pernicious hold that religion has over some people, indeed even medical professionals. After one such near-death incident, it should have been eminently clear that the Struhs were more interested in adhering to their misguided faith than they were in being certain that their daughter had the care she needed, and that SHOULD have been the end of it. Yet once again, insulin was withheld from Elizabeth, and though this fact was obvious to those treating her, what she got was dithering and indecision because of Sincerely Held Religious Beliefs™ which ultimately cost this young girl her life.
I'll say it AGAIN: Religion Poisons Absolutely EVERYTHING.
“In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want good people to do wicked things, you’ll need religion.”
When you look at the kinds of things that have been justified [historically and currently] under the guise of religion, it's hard to argue against that premise, ain't it?
I suspect they started out as good people. I'm willing to grant that, although I'm open to opposing arguments. The father, at least, seemed remorseful after his daughter end up hospitalized for a month. But then, he joined the extremist cult, too, and that's when his daughter's fate was sealed. As you pointed out, religion poisons everything.
This must be one of the post birth abortions that the pro life people love to complain about. Absolutely disgusting and I am so disappointed that the parents weren't put in jail for life for this.
They were convicted of manslaughter instead of murder because of Christian Fucking Privilege. The one small comfort is that Ms Struhs will likely be postmenopausal once she is released, and unable to produce more children to abuse.
Yesterday, murdered children from religious indoctrination. Today, a murdered child from religious indoctrination. I hate this fucking timeline.
The Australian government had plenty of opportunity to step in and prevent the death. Why didn't they? Christian Fucking Privilege.
If the parents were so certain that type 1 diabetes could be cured by prayer, why didn't they take their victim (their own child) to verify that the prayer had worked? Probably because their indoctrination prohibited them from trusting a doctor's diagnosis.
It appears that Jason Struhs lied about feeling remorse. Liar for Jesus lying to get out of consequences his indoctrination says are unfair. That tracks.
I thought the same thing. Adults killing kids because religion. The level of delusion represented by BOTH incidents is staggering. I would give real money to be able to go up to the Struhs, point-blank and in my best command voice, "Your daughter is DEAD because of you, because of your stupidity and utter failure to properly care for her. No doubt, you think you're justified, because of your misguided faith. You are ALONE in that thought. If there were an actual hell, I would gladly send you there."
Did he lie? It seems to me his actions for the months when he was sole caretaker of the kid shows he was being truthful. It's more that he was either unable or unwilling to push back against his wife's wishes when she returned.
It is reasonable to assume he lied. It just comes down to which consequences he was more afraid of at any point, months jail or permanent isolation from his family.
If he promises in 2019 to give daily insulin, and he does so up through early 2022 when his wife comes back into the picture, that seems very inconsistent with the conclusion "he was lying in 2019 about giving his daughter daily insulin." That history seems much more consistent with the conclusion that the father was willing to make good on his promise, but was weak willed when his wife came back into the picture.
Note I'm not arguing for his innocence. He should go to jail for murder or accomplice to murder. I'm simply arguing that he changed his mind after his wife came back.
But yes, we are far too tolerant of people's religious beliefs that lead them to hurt others.
I am certain if her parents asserted that Bob the Space Weasel was telling them to pray for their daughter instead of take her to the doctor and give her insulin, Child Services would have removed her from the home. But somehow say "God" instead and they get the benefit of the doubt.
The Catholic Church subscribes to modern medicine and indeed, even to the theory of evolution. Less educated Christian sects have less regard for these things, supposedly because Jesus told them they could heal themselves with prayer or other equally useless actions.
I'm serious when I say that I look at that pic of Elizabeth and 1) I ache that her life was lost so uselessly and 2) I am positively ENFLAMED at her parents for their utter failure and the fact that the penalty they paid for their ignorance and stupidity hardly compares to what they put their child through.
Likely teachers, doctors, extended family, neighbors, etc wanted the government to step in and save Elizabeth's life. The government shrugged from Christian Fucking Privilege.
Are there any countries in the western world where Christian privilege has ended?
This kid would still be alive if they took the kid away. There is no way the kid should've been released back to her parents after the initial hospitalization.
That's with the benefit of hindsight. The fact is that after release back to the father, the father administered insulin daily to her for the next six months. After even a week of demonstrating he would give the insulin shot, there probably would have been no court in any western country that would have taken the kid away from him.
Fair point. It's almost an impossible balance to find the right point for parentals vs child rights and yeah, no western society would've done it, however based on the weight she was when she was hospitalized I feel like they did lasting harm and abuse, so it wouldn't have mattered if he did good care going forward, because they did such poor care and abuse in the first place. As it turns out the parents then stopped giving her insulin again and then refused to take her into the hospital for care. You can't trust people who abuse kids after they've shown such a high history of harm in the first place.
So again, we have to be careful about hindsight bias. In 2019, they abused their kid. But this is not uncommon; a bit of searching tells me that in Australia in 24-25, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare tracked over 53,000 "substantiated maltreatment events." There is probably no way to tell out of those events which of those parents will show remorse and behave after the state threatens punishment and removal of their kid next time something bad happens, and which will go on to kill their kid regardless of what the state threatens. The latter can probably be measured in tens.
So it's not a question of "should they have removed Elizabeth from the parents custody" because asking that question assumes you know which abused kid is going to be murdered. It's a question of "should the Australian government remove all 53,000 kids from those parents' custody, knowing that a few of them are going to murder their kid, with the calculus that stopping those murders is worth making 50,000+ kids into foster kids unnecessarily." Because right now, for the Struh case, we are using our hindsight to figure out that this one kid needed to be removed from her parents, out of tens of thousands of abused kids, while in real life nobody has that accuracy of foresight and the rules have to be made for all of the kids, all of the parents.
Best I can come up with is modifying the rules to recognize that in a case where parents are differently abusing the kid and you're going to release the kid back to the lesser abusing parent first, you do regular monitoring at first with parent #1 (with less to no monitoring as they demonstrate behavior...which was probably the procedure done here), AND THEN you re-institute regular monitoring for some time when parent #2 comes back in the picture (which was not done here). But this still may not have saved Elizabeth, since the mother could have simply waited a week or two for the monitoring to end.
It's really hard to create a perfect crime *prevention* system, without draconian big brother measures.
Christians who might harm their children due to their anti-science “beliefs” should be treated as mentally ill and removed immediately from the situation.
Remember Metallica singer James Hetfield wrote songs about his mom dying of cancer unnecessarily due to Christian Science beliefs?
It's just incredibly sad that another little child has died because of the idiotic beliefs of her parents. Even if we were to grant that people should be allowed to try 'faith healing' first [which I don't], if there's no improvement, faith shouldn't be allowed as an excuse to withhold treatment. People aren't relieved of their parental responsibilities because of what they believe.
Take away the religious woo, and what we're left with here are two parents who willfully neglected their daughter's medical needs and landed her first in the hospital for a month and then in the grave. They're guilty of murder. If they have any other children, all of them should be placed with non-religious extremist relatives, and neither of these parents should ever be allowed near them again.
It takes a truly screwed up belief system to think God (a) is perfectly benevolent, yet (b) will send you to hell for taking your kid to a doctor because doing so shows a lack of faith. If there is a god and it is good, it's going to understand that you have faith AND think the medicine will help, both at the same time. Or at a very minimum, that you have faith BUT ALSO want to obey the law so that your kid isn't taken from you.
From the Wikipedia article about Elizabeth's death:
"During the court case, Crown Prosecutor Caroline Marco stated that Elizabeth's death was preventable and that she would not rise from the dead, prompting laughter from the defendants."
I don't think 14 years in prison will be long enough to genuinely reform these people. They are most likely gleeful about the "persecution" they are suffering by being imprisoned. I doubt they will take the opportunity to reflect on the reality of what happened.
Immediately remove the other children from these religious psychopaths! How horrifying!
She could've been saved through science, technology and modern medicine.
Unfortunately, it's far too late now. Blind superstition took away what might have been.
Blind superstition, stupidity, pigheadedness, and what amounts to nothing less than purposeful IGNORANCE. DAMN, but this pisses me off!
You and me both. What a plague religion has been throughout the history of humankind.
This demonstrates the pernicious hold that religion has over some people, indeed even medical professionals. After one such near-death incident, it should have been eminently clear that the Struhs were more interested in adhering to their misguided faith than they were in being certain that their daughter had the care she needed, and that SHOULD have been the end of it. Yet once again, insulin was withheld from Elizabeth, and though this fact was obvious to those treating her, what she got was dithering and indecision because of Sincerely Held Religious Beliefs™ which ultimately cost this young girl her life.
I'll say it AGAIN: Religion Poisons Absolutely EVERYTHING.
“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion.”
― Steven Weinberg
Hitch said something similar
“In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want good people to do wicked things, you’ll need religion.”
When you look at the kinds of things that have been justified [historically and currently] under the guise of religion, it's hard to argue against that premise, ain't it?
One can find exceptions to the premise but they aren’t common enough.
Are the Struhs all that good? I'd debate THAT point all day!
I suspect they started out as good people. I'm willing to grant that, although I'm open to opposing arguments. The father, at least, seemed remorseful after his daughter end up hospitalized for a month. But then, he joined the extremist cult, too, and that's when his daughter's fate was sealed. As you pointed out, religion poisons everything.
That little girl was murdered.
This must be one of the post birth abortions that the pro life people love to complain about. Absolutely disgusting and I am so disappointed that the parents weren't put in jail for life for this.
They were convicted of manslaughter instead of murder because of Christian Fucking Privilege. The one small comfort is that Ms Struhs will likely be postmenopausal once she is released, and unable to produce more children to abuse.
Yesterday, murdered children from religious indoctrination. Today, a murdered child from religious indoctrination. I hate this fucking timeline.
The Australian government had plenty of opportunity to step in and prevent the death. Why didn't they? Christian Fucking Privilege.
If the parents were so certain that type 1 diabetes could be cured by prayer, why didn't they take their victim (their own child) to verify that the prayer had worked? Probably because their indoctrination prohibited them from trusting a doctor's diagnosis.
𝐽𝑎𝑠𝑜𝑛, 𝑤ℎ𝑜 𝑒𝑥𝑝𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑒𝑑 𝑟𝑒𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑠𝑒, 𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑣𝑒𝑑 𝑛𝑜 𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑙 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒 𝑏𝑒ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑑 𝑏𝑎𝑟𝑠.
It appears that Jason Struhs lied about feeling remorse. Liar for Jesus lying to get out of consequences his indoctrination says are unfair. That tracks.
I thought the same thing. Adults killing kids because religion. The level of delusion represented by BOTH incidents is staggering. I would give real money to be able to go up to the Struhs, point-blank and in my best command voice, "Your daughter is DEAD because of you, because of your stupidity and utter failure to properly care for her. No doubt, you think you're justified, because of your misguided faith. You are ALONE in that thought. If there were an actual hell, I would gladly send you there."
Did he lie? It seems to me his actions for the months when he was sole caretaker of the kid shows he was being truthful. It's more that he was either unable or unwilling to push back against his wife's wishes when she returned.
It is reasonable to assume he lied. It just comes down to which consequences he was more afraid of at any point, months jail or permanent isolation from his family.
If he promises in 2019 to give daily insulin, and he does so up through early 2022 when his wife comes back into the picture, that seems very inconsistent with the conclusion "he was lying in 2019 about giving his daughter daily insulin." That history seems much more consistent with the conclusion that the father was willing to make good on his promise, but was weak willed when his wife came back into the picture.
Note I'm not arguing for his innocence. He should go to jail for murder or accomplice to murder. I'm simply arguing that he changed his mind after his wife came back.
It is reasonable to assume he was lying about being remorseful.
Yet xtians will continue to insist that it is LGBTQIA+s that are unfit to be parents/raise children.
It's stories like this that amply demonstrate who the real dangers to children are.
You don't see faith healers working in hospitals in the same way that you don't see psychics winning the lottery every week. --Ricky Gervais
Even the Pope has doctors.
But yes, we are far too tolerant of people's religious beliefs that lead them to hurt others.
I am certain if her parents asserted that Bob the Space Weasel was telling them to pray for their daughter instead of take her to the doctor and give her insulin, Child Services would have removed her from the home. But somehow say "God" instead and they get the benefit of the doubt.
The Catholic Church subscribes to modern medicine and indeed, even to the theory of evolution. Less educated Christian sects have less regard for these things, supposedly because Jesus told them they could heal themselves with prayer or other equally useless actions.
I'm serious when I say that I look at that pic of Elizabeth and 1) I ache that her life was lost so uselessly and 2) I am positively ENFLAMED at her parents for their utter failure and the fact that the penalty they paid for their ignorance and stupidity hardly compares to what they put their child through.
Religion poisons everything. -- Christopher Hitchens
I am a foster parent and my heart is breaking. This girl should have been safe. I've seen kids be removed from their parents for much less.
𝐵𝑢𝑡 𝑎𝑓𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑒 2019 𝑖𝑛𝑐𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑡, 𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑤𝑖𝑡𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑒𝑠 𝑠𝑎𝑖𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑦 𝑡𝑜 𝑒𝑙𝑒𝑣𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑖𝑠𝑠𝑢𝑒. 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑢𝑛𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑡𝑢𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑙𝑦 𝑠𝑡𝑦𝑚𝑖𝑒𝑑 𝑏𝑦 𝑖𝑛𝑣𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑔𝑎𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑠...
Likely teachers, doctors, extended family, neighbors, etc wanted the government to step in and save Elizabeth's life. The government shrugged from Christian Fucking Privilege.
Are there any countries in the western world where Christian privilege has ended?
I hope we will be the first!
This kid would still be alive if they took the kid away. There is no way the kid should've been released back to her parents after the initial hospitalization.
That's with the benefit of hindsight. The fact is that after release back to the father, the father administered insulin daily to her for the next six months. After even a week of demonstrating he would give the insulin shot, there probably would have been no court in any western country that would have taken the kid away from him.
Fair point. It's almost an impossible balance to find the right point for parentals vs child rights and yeah, no western society would've done it, however based on the weight she was when she was hospitalized I feel like they did lasting harm and abuse, so it wouldn't have mattered if he did good care going forward, because they did such poor care and abuse in the first place. As it turns out the parents then stopped giving her insulin again and then refused to take her into the hospital for care. You can't trust people who abuse kids after they've shown such a high history of harm in the first place.
So again, we have to be careful about hindsight bias. In 2019, they abused their kid. But this is not uncommon; a bit of searching tells me that in Australia in 24-25, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare tracked over 53,000 "substantiated maltreatment events." There is probably no way to tell out of those events which of those parents will show remorse and behave after the state threatens punishment and removal of their kid next time something bad happens, and which will go on to kill their kid regardless of what the state threatens. The latter can probably be measured in tens.
So it's not a question of "should they have removed Elizabeth from the parents custody" because asking that question assumes you know which abused kid is going to be murdered. It's a question of "should the Australian government remove all 53,000 kids from those parents' custody, knowing that a few of them are going to murder their kid, with the calculus that stopping those murders is worth making 50,000+ kids into foster kids unnecessarily." Because right now, for the Struh case, we are using our hindsight to figure out that this one kid needed to be removed from her parents, out of tens of thousands of abused kids, while in real life nobody has that accuracy of foresight and the rules have to be made for all of the kids, all of the parents.
Best I can come up with is modifying the rules to recognize that in a case where parents are differently abusing the kid and you're going to release the kid back to the lesser abusing parent first, you do regular monitoring at first with parent #1 (with less to no monitoring as they demonstrate behavior...which was probably the procedure done here), AND THEN you re-institute regular monitoring for some time when parent #2 comes back in the picture (which was not done here). But this still may not have saved Elizabeth, since the mother could have simply waited a week or two for the monitoring to end.
It's really hard to create a perfect crime *prevention* system, without draconian big brother measures.
Christians who might harm their children due to their anti-science “beliefs” should be treated as mentally ill and removed immediately from the situation.
Remember Metallica singer James Hetfield wrote songs about his mom dying of cancer unnecessarily due to Christian Science beliefs?
Yeah, "The God that Failed" from the 1990 Black album.
It's just incredibly sad that another little child has died because of the idiotic beliefs of her parents. Even if we were to grant that people should be allowed to try 'faith healing' first [which I don't], if there's no improvement, faith shouldn't be allowed as an excuse to withhold treatment. People aren't relieved of their parental responsibilities because of what they believe.
Take away the religious woo, and what we're left with here are two parents who willfully neglected their daughter's medical needs and landed her first in the hospital for a month and then in the grave. They're guilty of murder. If they have any other children, all of them should be placed with non-religious extremist relatives, and neither of these parents should ever be allowed near them again.
It takes a truly screwed up belief system to think God (a) is perfectly benevolent, yet (b) will send you to hell for taking your kid to a doctor because doing so shows a lack of faith. If there is a god and it is good, it's going to understand that you have faith AND think the medicine will help, both at the same time. Or at a very minimum, that you have faith BUT ALSO want to obey the law so that your kid isn't taken from you.
From the Wikipedia article about Elizabeth's death:
"During the court case, Crown Prosecutor Caroline Marco stated that Elizabeth's death was preventable and that she would not rise from the dead, prompting laughter from the defendants."
I don't think 14 years in prison will be long enough to genuinely reform these people. They are most likely gleeful about the "persecution" they are suffering by being imprisoned. I doubt they will take the opportunity to reflect on the reality of what happened.
Care to wager that these folks probably think themselves to be "pro-life" when it comes to abortion? Freedom for me but not for thee?