Minnesota Boy's Court Battle Takes Unfortunate Turn

According to WKOW out of nearby Madison, Wisconsin, Brown County Judge John Rodenberg, the same judge who last week ordered 13-year old Daniel to undergo chemotherapy to treat his Hodgkin's Lymphoma, issued an arrest warrant for Daniel's mom Colleen Hauser after she—and Daniel—failed to show up for a hearing.

So now the family has reverted to taking their child on the lam. When will all this end? Or put more soberly, how will it all end?

Personally it's hard to see this with a happy ending, no matter what the resulting scenario.

Should Daniel die, it will be an avoidable tragedy. What will his parents say then? How will they be treated in the community? Will the state of Minnesota have the courage to carry through with prosecuting them? I wouldn't wish the horrific notion of losing a child on anyone, and I don't want to see it happen here.

Should he live, and seem to get better, I fear an entire sub-culture of quacks and bogus cure peddlers will seize on it as a victory over so mighty an institution of modern medicine as the Mayo Clinic (where he was initially treated). I fear this because they will claim it without the slightest bit of clinical evidence as to how his body recovered; I fear this because they will falsely win over populations of cancer patients and their families, who are already vulnerable, and who will stop ongoing treatments or cancel future ones and put their lives in extreme jeopardy.

To those who respond by saying that perhaps whatever kept the cancer from killing him is a true 'cure' that I would be advocating be squashed, I say simply this: OK, if it IS a 'cure', then allow it to be subjected to the rigors of the scientific method. Don't keep it tied up in spiritual hogwash.

Recently his mother who, like the entire family, claims to be both Catholic and part of the Native American Organization Nemenhah Band, made the following claim about their actions: "It is our religious freedom and right to do this."

This kind of rhetoric is standard among virtually all religious groups in America when they want to assert the kinds of rights that they themselves typically try to deny to other groups, with few displaying this repugnant morality more egregiously or consistently than the Catholics.

Bring this kid back, lady. Don't make him yet another victim of profoundly fatal religious ignorance.

Sources:
Story from station WKOW.
Lymphomainfo.net write-up on Hodgkin's Lymphoma
Summary of the story at The Huffington Post