Twelve-Year-Old Girl Gets Court-Appointed Lawyer To Sue Her Dad Over Grounding
And she wins, of course, with the court overturning the father’s decision to ground her.
A Canadian court has lifted a 12-year-old girl’s grounding, overturning her father’s punishment for disobeying his orders to stay off the Internet, his lawyer said Wednesday.
The girl had taken her father to Quebec Superior Court after he refused to allow her to go on a school trip for chatting on websites he tried to block, and then posting “inappropriate” pictures of herself online using a friend’s computer.
The father’s lawyer Kim Beaudoin said the disciplinary measures were for the girl’s “own protection” and is appealing the ruling . . .
According to court documents, the girl’s Internet transgression was just the latest in a string of broken house rules. Even so, Justice Suzanne Tessier found her punishment too severe.
Beaudoin noted the girl used a court-appointed lawyer in her parents’ 10-year custody dispute to launch her landmark case against dear old dad.
So this girl is disobeying his father. Dad, being a concerned parent, is trying to keep tabs on what she’s doing on the internet. When his daughter disobeys him he grounds her in a perfectly reasonable manner. So what happens then? Her daughter goes over his head to a flippin’ judge who overturns the grounding as “too severe.”
And Canadian taxpayers footed the bill for her lawyer, no less.
What right does the government in a free society have to step in and tell a parent how his/her child is to be disciplined? Outside of abuse, which I’m sure Canada already has laws against, does the government really have any room to butt its head in? Canada is not America, and has never enshrined individual rights to the same extent as America has, but even so is not the ability to live our lives and pass our way of life on to our children one of the most basic freedoms we can enjoy?
