Aug 08 2008
On the Accepting Criticism Entry…
If you commit a crime, you should be punished. No matter how “good” a person you are. See, the law doesn’t judge your morals, just your actions and your intentions.
All I know is if I asked my gma to let me sit on the roof of her car, she would have told me no in no uncertain tones and given me a lecture on how dangerous it would be.
Kids have plenty of time to do that crap with their friends when they get older. The last thing anyone needs to hear about is a kid who died when someone hit their grandmother’s car crawling slowly in a Publix parking lot and flung the kid from the roof.
I just think it’s funny that people think an adequate defense for breaking the law is to say, ‘I’m a good person,’ ‘a smart person,’ ‘a Christian.’ Like somehow that negates the fact that you screwed up.
Boohoo, breaking the law doesn’t make you a bad Christian or a bad person. Breaking the law in such a way that you could have killed someone you love does, in fact, make you stupid.
PS. I hate living in a country where people think making the excuse that they’re Christian should absolve them of wrongdoing and prove how good they are. Just because you’ve accepted Jesus as your savior does not mean if you do something wrong the law shouldn’t punish you. It also doesn’t mean that somehow you’re magically perfect. In fact, it means the exact opposite of that.
Maybe i’m just an oldskool asbestos munching old fart but I don’t see anything wrong with what they did. the chance of something going wrong is close to 0. safety is so overdone in most places now where bureaucrats spend their days making regulations for hypothetical disaster scenarios.
If you were on your own property, riding with your grandkid on the roof, nothing would have happened.
But if you’re on public property, you may end up with a ticket for not having your kid seated and wearing a belt. I might not support those laws (at least for adults), but they are the laws and they have been shown to save lives (many a relative of mine has died because they didn’t wear seat belts).
Most cops, in this scenario, will write you a ticket and let you go *unless* you argue with them. Chances are this woman pitched a fit and they took her in more for that than for the originating offense. I don’t think she ought to be tried for felony child abuse, but I also think she broke at least one law and the system has to decide the proper punishment to mete out.
And I think making excuses is weak. Always. Breaking a law because you think it’s stupid and accepting the punishment is a way to prove your point. Breaking a law because you think it’s stupid and defending your character only proves that you feel like you have to defend yourself. She should be arguing that the law is attempting to deny her valuable freedoms with no provable evidence of wrong-doing or harm. Not arguing that she wouldn’t do something bad or dangerous because she has Jesus in her life.
This is why “egregious stupidity” should be a citable offense. There’s really nothing that this woman should have been charged with. Seat belt laws, maybe, but most places have a very limited set of things you can be cited for on private property (a parking lot is not a public road).
I think the police screwed up big time on this one. No sane judge or jury will convict this woman of child abuse, but I also think she deserves some sort of public shaming.
You are probably right in guessing that she only ended up in trouble because she made a fuss.