What catches your eye when you’re skimming through a newspaper? Me – the headlines. A good headline should introduce you to the story and arouse your interest to the point that you feel compelled to read on.

Yes, I am guilty. If the headline and lead paragraph are not captivating, chances are I will not be intrigued enough to read the article. This is newsroom blasphemy, but I admit it.

So, you can picture me on Sundays. I read the entire paper, advertisements included, in about an hour unless it has some real good headlines and leads in it.

Thumbing through a Monday paper, some headlines burst with potential. “Warning sought for ibuprofen”—Wow. “Easter hunt for UFO ends up goose eggs”—Ooh. “Trial of couple in son’s death called attack on Christian Science”—Oh, boy. This has got to be good.

OK—here’s the gist. This couple, the Twitchells, had a two-and-a-half-year-old son who died from complications due to a bowel obstruction. The Boston couple is going to trial and being charged with manslaughter on account that they did not seek medical attention for their son’s illness, but rather relied on “the power of prayer” to heal him.

Other incidents of similar deaths were cited in the article. One dealt with a seven-year-old girl who died from diabetes while her parents prayed night and day but refused to seek medical attention for her.

Two other incidents involved meningitis deaths of a toddler and a 15-month-old baby; not because their illnesses were so severe, but because their parents refused to let a doctor interfere with the work of God.

Geez. Those people are still around? I thought we got rid of them after the Salem witch trials were over. I guess we couldn’t be that lucky.

“(Religous) practice is subject to regulation by the state. Belief is not… There’s a whale of a difference, particularly when dealing with a baby,” said the Boston district attorney in the Twitchell case. He further commented that the state has an obligation to protect children and he couldn’t be more right.

Sure, we have freedom of religion in this country, but this is stretching it. No one has the right to knowingly deny a child needed medical attention. These people say their faith is being prosecuted and they couldn’t be more wrong. It’s not their faith, but rather the way they practiced it.

ere’s a simple example – holding the beliefs of Satanism in this country is not a crime. However, Satanists are said to practice human sacrifice which is a crime because it involves the murder of a third party.

You need a license to carry a gun, drive a car, fly a plane, and run a business, but they’ll let any two lunatics have a kid. That’s exactly what the Twitchells are. They have the nerve to bring a life into this world and then allow it suffer and die for no reason.

And, how are these people so sure that God doesn’t want them to send their child to a doctor? How are they so sure that medicine wasn’t actually sent by Him to heal people? But they’re more than willing to risk the lives of their children instead.

Currently, there are 2,600 Christian Science churches in existence. This is a scary thought.