Parents decry state 'tyranny'

It may have looked like 300 or so people rallying on the Capitol steps last Thursday, but it was a D-Day long in the making for the parental rights movement.

"And this is just the first wave," promised Terry Trease, a Salt Lake parental rights advocate who walked the flanks of the crowd arming them with fliers and encouragement not to stop now but to become part of Phase II of Accountability Utah's parental rights reform. People need to wake up, he said. "Child protection in Utah is state-run tyranny."

Saying such things isn't rabble-rousing, said Trease and other parents who are convinced that during the past 15 years the so-called protectors of the family have become the abusers themselves, lobbing "for the sake of the child" bombs into the family unit, then ducking behind the ramparts of self-serving government policy.

"The battle has begun," Davis County activist Dave Hansen said. "They like to say the Jensens are an isolated incident, but they're just one in a long train of examples of the state being out of control, so out of control people don't know for sure who their children belong to."

The state isn't trying to take anyone's children but to protect them from abuse and neglect, said Mollie McDonald, the court-appointed guardian for Parker Jensen, the 12-year-old Sandy boy who has become the poster boy of the parents' rights reform effort in the past two weeks. He has been diagnosed with cancer, and his parents have been court-ordered to get him chemotherapy. They don't believe the cancer diagnosis, and they don't want chemotherapy.

Despite a settlement reached Friday in the Jensen case, it is viewed as the latest mark in a battle line that started being drawn 15 years ago when the specter of child abuse was becoming a permanent resident in the American psyche, and government was organizing child protection services to root it out.

Everyone seemed to have an abuse story in the mid-1980s, and government in the early 1990s adopted the strongest possible tactics for protecting children. Utah lawmakers ranked the most serious forms of it in the same criminal class as murder by removing the statute of limitations for victims.

For years, no stance against abuse was too tough to take, said former Rep. Matt Throckmorton, R-Springville.

"The pendulum swung too far," said Throckmorton, who spent his two-year tenure toe-to-toe with the Utah Attorney General's Office over how deep that agency should be involved in child protection cases. "Certainly, no one wants to let abuse go on, but a lot of falsely accused parents got their families permanently wrecked over the years."