Sometimes the pursuit of life, liberty and faith runs into obstacles

As a mother, as a Christian, and as an American citizen, I have mixed feelings about the case of Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old with Hodgkin’s lymphoma who has been ordered by a county court in Minneapolis to undergo chemotherapy. The boy and his parents want to treat the disease with herbs and vitamins, since chemotherapy is against their religious beliefs.

Since the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion, a person in the United States is of course free to refuse medical treatment and die of a curable disease if he or she so chooses. When parents make such a choice on behalf of a minor child, however, the issue is far less clear-cut.

Mrs. Hauser claims that her son has freely chosen to reject treatment. Even so, his views have undoubtedly been colored by his parents’ religious teachings, and affected by his affection for them and his desire not to disappoint them by making the “wrong” choice, even if it costs him his life. Perhaps he believes it will not, and that he will recover with nutritional supplements and prayer.

In this case, I believe it would be a tragedy if that boy were allowed to die because his parents have the misguided notion that God doesn’t want doctors to use technology to help sick children get well.

Nevertheless, any time courts step in and make decisions for children because judges think they know better than the children’s parents, I get nervous. In this case, I believe the judge does know better. But I can imagine quite a few other cases where I wouldn’t.

Let us say, for example, that a teenage girl becomes pregnant, and then is diagnosed with cancer. Her doctors tell her she’ll die if she doesn’t get chemotherapy, but her baby will die if she does.

She decides to refuse treatment to save the life of her child, and her parents support her decision. But her doctor takes the case to court, and the judge orders chemotherapy, since the courts do not recognize her unborn child as a human being with a right to life. After all, any reasonable person knows it’s only a blob of tissue, and only a crazy religious fanatic could believe otherwise.

Or let us say, to take another example, that a troubled boy’s school psychologist becomes convinced that the child’s confused sexuality is the cause of his problems, and that if the boy does not get the sex change operation he wants, he may become suicidal. The boy’s parents oppose the operation on religious grounds.

The case goes to court, and medical experts testify that yes, the boy is indeed a suicide risk if he does not get the sex change operation, and the judge rules it a medical necessity, despite the parents’ objections — which are of course nothing more than homophobia, and based on ignorance and superstition.

Having read numerous scathing denunciations of Christianity in the letters to the editor of my local paper over the years, and having had them directed at me when I have written about my faith on my blog, I am well aware that many Americans agree with author Richard Dawkins that religion is a dangerous delusion.

If enough Americans come to share that opinion, it is conceivable that the free exercise of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment could become as hollow and meaningless to American believers as the right to life guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment is to American babies in their mothers’ wombs.

I do not want Daniel Hauser to die of a curable disease.  But I hope and, yes, pray that the legal decision to save his life in spite of his parents’ faith-based objections does not help pave the road of good intentions that leads to the weakening not only of parental rights, but of our right to the free exercise of religion.