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Catholic teenager, Protestant foster parents
Filed under: Teens
For nine years, a teenager, identified only as AR in court documents, lived with foster parents in Scotland. Now she is suing Highland Council for it. It seems that she was placed with Protestant families, despite being Catholic. According to papers filed by her lawyers, "The council failed to facilitate her continuing to follow her religious persuasion throughout the period she was looked after and accommodated."Now, I understand that Protestants and Catholics don't get along over in that part of the world as well as they do here, but still, this seems a might petty. Would a "thank you for taking me in and feeding and clothing me" be too far out of line? On the other hand, if the foster parents tried to force her to convert or somehow treated her poorly for being Catholic, then perhaps she has a complaint.
I'd like to think that in such a situation, I'd nod politely at the whole religion thing and be damn thankful for their assistance. Heck, I'd even have no problem with going to services with them -- I grew up going to mass every Sunday and now I'm a champion thumb twiddler. Sometimes, that's just what you do. What do you think?
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ReaderComments (Page 1 of 1)
3-11-2007 @ 11:48AM
Ann Adams said...I suppose she had to wait until she was 18 to file a suit but I do wonder why she suffered in silence for 10 years. Here, foster kids have advocates and recourse.
I'm more concerned about the other part of the story - that she didn't received the accommodations she needed for her education. If that's true, it shouldn't have happened.
I would probably trotted along to church with them too until I was old enough to attend services by myself if I wanted to.
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3-11-2007 @ 5:35PM
Nancy Toby said...It sounds like religion was just one of many issues in this lawsuit, but a lot of folks would have problems with not being able to routinely practice their religion for 9 years.
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3-12-2007 @ 2:41AM
Mom said...As a mom whose children were wrongly taken into state custody, we fought long and hard to have them at least placed into a home that practiced our religion. Our written requests were ignored, repeatedly. Our children were returned to us repeating horrible protestant cant about Jesus dying, Jesus dead on a cross, death, death death. Not one word of resurrection or any breath of the gospel crossed my babies lips on their return home. We spent more than 18 months getting them back to a healthy focus on the sacrifice of Christ balanced with a far stronger focus on the resurrection and reality of a living Savior. Oh, they were sexualized and abused while in the tender care of the state, too. We have the paperwork from the state's attorney stating that the children were removed due to a 'procedural error'. Have we been able to find a lawyer willing to go up against the state on a contingency basis? No. My six yr old daughter still has nightmares; our two middle children still occasionally see a therapist for issues. Foster care is not what the public has been led to believe it is. Children in foster care are FAR more likely to die at the hands of their 'caregivers' than children left in their birth homes - and those are the gov'ts statistics. I have no problem believing that the girl in this story was damaged in ways that Americans simply cannot understand. Catholicism and Protestantism present far different faces, and are far more pervasive societally in the U.K. I hope she wins her case with a vengeance.
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3-12-2007 @ 5:13AM
Sandyone said...Yes, it would be great if she were just grateful for the food and shelter and just kept quiet. Then everybody could go on believing that religion really isn't that important. Maybe she's spiritual enough that she knows that food, education and shelter really aren't important when you're being kept from the most important things.
For Catholics, mass isn't just about the Word of God and questionable singing. We go to receive the actual Body and Blood of Jesus. It's really, really, really important. Really important.
I don't know if this girl is serious about her faith. I know next to nothing about her. I hope her case gets some serious changes made. Kids should be placed with an appropriate faithed family.
She's petty because she was denied basic care in the foster system? Ok.
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