Colorado Wants To Make It Easier For Kids To Spread Disease, Because America

As measles is spreading all over the place, including this latest outbreak in Chicago, Colorado has a great idea to make things even worse! Oh, sure, maybe Colorado already has the nation's lowest rate of vaccinations for measles, mumps, and rubella; just 82 percent of school-aged kids have had the federally recommended two-dose vaccine that provides adequate protection. But now the state legislature is considering a proposal to strengthen parents' rights to refuse to vaccinate their kids.

The proposed "Parent's Bill of Rights," which would give parents -- or at least, that one parent -- an absolute right to "direct the upbringing, education, and physical and mental health care" of their children. Colorado already has a broad option allowing parents to opt out of vaccination mandates, allowing unvaccinated children to enroll in schools. The "Parent's Bill of Rights" wouldn't actually broaden the existing law, but would prevent the state from attempting to tighten up exemptions from the vaccination requirement.

ThinkProgress notes that Colorado's 82 percent vaccination rate is far below the national average of 95 percent, as well as below the roughly 94 percent threshold necessary to provide "herd immunity." (Who lives in herds anyway? SHEEPLE, that's who!) And several parts of the state have unvaccinated rates that are even higher than the state average, so talk about a bastion of the freedom to get a highly contagious, sometimes deadly disease. It sounds like a libertarian paradise.

“We are going to have a large outbreak of measles,” Dr. Edwin J. Asturias, a pediatrician with the Colorado School of Public Health and Children’s Hospital Colorado, told the Denver Post this week. “For almost a decade we have been accumulating people without protection. We are like a forest waiting to catch fire.”

The bill's sponsor, state Sen. Tim Neville, doesn't want parents to be subjected to state power crushing families' freedom to be ravaged by disease out of some communist worries about "public health":

“As a parent, I probably know best for my children,” Neville told a local Fox News affiliate. “I already have the responsibility under law, I should make sure I have the right to make their decisions for their education, their moral upbringing and also to keep them safe with the medical decisions being made.”

And if, as parents, people choose to put other people at risk, that's those other people's lookout. Don't want to be immunosuppressed and vulnerable? Take some personal responsibility and don't go get cancer.

Also, in news that should gladden Tim Neville's heart, Fox News resident legal idiot Andrew Napolitano has written a WND column arguing that mandatory vaccines are the equivalent of the government owning your body, and if the government can force you to vaccinate your child, then

the presumption of individual liberty guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution has been surreptitiously discarded, and there will be no limit to what the government can compel us to do or to what it can extract from us -- in the name of science or any other of its modern-day gods.

Then again, we're pretty sure Napolitano says pretty much the same thing when the flight attendant tells him he has to buckle his seatbelt, too.

[ ThinkProgress / WND via RightWingWatch ]