(no subject)

So Wisconsin Pentecostalist Dale Neumann has, like his wife Leilani earlier in the year, been found guilty of second-degree reckless homicide for declining to consult a doctor over the protracted period during which his 11-year-old daughter died of undiagnosed diabetes, instead praying over her in the misguided belief that God would do the job: "If I go to the doctor, I am putting the doctor before God. I am not believing what He said He would do."

When sentenced in a few weeks' time, Dale and Leilani could each be sent away for as much as 25 years.

This seems to me complete imbecility -- and barbarous imbecility at that. The two Neumanns are quite clearly, by any rational definition, batty as fruitcakes. With normal people one might feel that the loss of a child would be a harsh enough lesson that no further human intervention would be necessary; to judge by Dale's cocky, validated grin in court, losing a daughter has been a price well worth paying to curry favour with Him Up There. This is an evil born not of the calculating mind but of the severely deluded one. To send this deeply insane man to prison would not only do him no good at all -- if anything the sentence would merely confirm him in his rightness, permitting him to vaingloriously identify with someone else who was sentenced -- but would also be an act of abominable cruelty: tormenting the insane for their insanity is surely a piece of sadism that began dying out from about the mid-19th century onwards . . . at least in civilized societies.

Sentencing Dale Neumann to a long spell in prison would also allow others to play the card that he is being martyred for his faith.

What the Neumanns really need is psychiatric care -- oh, boy, do they need psychiatric care. And this is surely what the judge, if possessed of any compassion at all, will prescribe: that the Neumanns be detained in a mental-health facility until such time as, presumably through confronting the crime they have committed, they can become mentally competent enough to be allowed back into society in the certainty they'll do further harm to neither themselves nor others. (It's of course possible this time may never come.)

A secondary benefit would be that, rather than sending the message that the Neumanns are martyrs for their faith, the judge would be indicating that people who stand back and watch their kids die are not noble martyrs but nutcases.

We could do with a bit more, in this society, of nutcases being told (in the kindest possible way, but forcefully nonetheless) that they're nutcases rather than everyone being forced to pussyfoot around the issue for fear of upsetting others' sensibilities. Dale and Leilani Neumann's daughter died in large part because no one told her parents long ago to stop being such selfish, egotistical dimwits and start showing consideration for those outside their cozy self-congratulatory cocoon. It'd be kind of nice if we didn't have too many other kids dying unnecessarily because all of us were too cowardly to risk upsetting their parents' iddy-poo boats.