Trapped Minor in the Sunshine State

It took a florida court to enforce her rights

When I was 16 I complained to my father about a perceived injustice. He told me, "Only a fool or a child believes in perfect justice." L.G., as she is identified in Florida court records, was a child of nine when she learned that lesson. It is what makes her now, at 14, so angry.

"Her anger colors everything in her life," says Maxine Williams, L.G.'s lawyer. L.G. is angry because for the past four years she has been shunted from foster home to foster home, shelter to shelter and courtroom to courtroom at the instigation of social workers, lawyers, judges, the ACLU, the Family Research Council, Operation Rescue, the Florida Department of Children and Families, the Palm Beach County Juvenile Court and Florida governor Jeb Bush, all of whom were making decisions about her life. L.G. profoundly disagreed with those decisions, which is not unusual for a child.

What is unusual is that in this case the child may be right. L.G. is a mixed-race child, with café con leche skin and greenish-gold eyes. When she was nine, the Florida Department of Children and Families took her and her two brothers from their mother, a single parent who was deemed by the court to be "neglectful and seriously abusive to all the children." The mother beat her sons and was described as having deep psychological problems. But according to Williams, the mother never physically abused L.G. Over the next four years, L.G. would be placed in foster homes and shelters against her wishes. She ran away a dozen times, always back to her mother. When L.G. was 13, DCF placed her in Brookwood, Florida, Inc., a home for abused girls in St. Petersburg. While there, L.G. met a 17-year-old boy who lived in a nearby hotel. The boy got her pregnant. Once a girl becomes pregnant, Brookwood director Pam Mesmer says, it's up to that girl and her court-appointed guardian to decide whether she will have the baby or an abortion. L.G. decided she would end her pregnancy. That's when even more adults began to meddle in her life.

Anti-abortion groups demanded the court make her have her baby. The ACLU insisted the court honor L.G.'s right to choose. Last April, DCF appealed to the court to stop L.G. from having an abortion because it was "the best solution for the child." DCF lawyer Jeffrey Gillen told the court that L.G. was not mature enough to make such a choice. Another DCF witness told the court that if L.G. had an abortion, she would suffer "post-abortion syndrome," a condition not recognized by most medical organizations.

Williams fought back for L.G. and received support from unexpected quarters, including a juvenile-court judge, a former assistant attorney general and a former DCF official. When L.G. finally appeared in court before Palm Beach County juvenile-court judge Ronald Alvarez, she said she wanted an abortion because she was "too selfish" to have a baby and let DCF take it from her and put it in the same system that had ruined her life. She also reminded the judge that she couldn't have a baby because "I'm 13, I'm in a shelter, and I can't get a job." To demands that she have the baby because she wasn't equipped to make decisions for herself, she returned, with the impeccable logic of the innocent, "If I can't make good decisions for myself, what makes you think I can make good decisions for the baby?"

Alvarez granted L.G.'s request to terminate her pregnancy. He says it was an easy legal decision, because it followed state law, but was a difficult moral decision. But, he adds, "this case became controversial because others got involved. Why pick that girl? A hundred girls got abortions under DCF care." Alvarez says he was outraged at DCF's sudden interest in L.G.

After L.G.'s abortion, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council said the state had "failed miserably." Governor Bush added that it was "a tragedy" but that he had to let the courts decide. After the Terry Schiavo fiasco, it seems Bush no longer has the appetite for controversial cases involving the state meddling in its citizens' lives.

Marginalia

From Comments Made by Representative Ginny Brown-Waite (R.-Fla.) when asked to describe her job: "I'm a hooker. That's right, I said I'm a hooker. I have to go up to total strangers, ask them for money and get them to expect me to be there when they need me. What does that sound like to you?"

From An Explanation by U2 singer Bono of why his new marketing brand, Product RED, which he hopes will generate money for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, is a for-profit venture: "Philanthropy is like hippie music, holding hands. RED is more like punk rock, hip-hop. This should feel like hard commerce."

From A Response by Lord Kenneth Baker, chair of the U.K.'s Cartoon Art Trust, to questions about the uproar over caricatures of Muhammad that appeared in a Danish newspaper last fall and were reprinted as a show of solidarity in other European papers in January: "Religions are a set of ideas reinforced by faith, and as a set of ideas they can be criticized and attacked, and sometimes one says very offensive things about them. The tradition in Western Europe is to, as it were, take the criticism on the chin and not worry too much about it."

From An Article published at globalresearch.ca on October 27, 2004: "It has become clear that yet another manufactured war or some type of ill-advised covert operation is inevitable under President George W. Bush should he win the 2004 presidential election. A potentially significant news development was reported in June 2004 announcing Iran's intentions to create an Iranian oil bourse. This announcement portended competition would arise between the Iranian oil bourse and London's International Petroleum Exchange, as well as the New York Mercantile Exchange. It should be noted that both IPE and NYMEX are owned by U.S. corporations. One of the Federal Reserve's nightmares may begin to unfold in 2005 or 2006, when it appears international buyers will have the choice to buy a barrel of oil for $50 on the NYMEX and IPE or purchase a barrel of oil for 37 to 40 euros via the Iranian bourse. The upcoming bourse will introduce petrodollar versus petroeuro currency hedging and fundamentally (continued on page 41) Marginalia (continued from page 39) new dynamics to the biggest market in the world--global oil and gas trades. A successful Iranian bourse would solidify the petroeuro as an alternative oil transaction currency and thereby end the petrodollar's hegemonic status as the monopoly oil currency. It appears increasingly likely the U.S. will use the specter of nuclear-weapons proliferation as a pretext for an intervention, similar to the fears invoked in the previous WMD campaign regarding Iraq."

From Rule 81 of the 100 rules issued by L. Paul Bremer, then head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, to guide Iraq toward stability. Rule 81 concerns, among other things, agri-business and patented crop varieties: "Farmers shall be prohibited from reusing seeds of protected varieties."

From "Understanding Madrassas," an article by Alexander Evans, who works for the U.K. Foreign ? Commonwealth Office, published in Foreign Affairs: "The Western consensus on madrassas assumes that some of them produce terrorists and many others contribute to radicalization in less direct ways. But the evidence of a direct link to terrorism remains weak. Indeed, according to Marc Sageman's recent study Understanding Terror

Networks, two thirds of contemporary Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists went to state or Western-style colleges. Like the terrorist Ahmed Sheikh (who was a contemporary of mine at the London School of Economics), terrorists today are more likely to have gone through the regular educational system. Many are newly religious rebels rather than regular ulama (clergy), created by modernity rather than by a madrassa."

From The Army's Field Manual 27-10, known as the Law of Land Warfare: "No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind. The fact that a person who committed an act that constitutes a war crime acted as the head of a state or as a responsible government official does not relieve him from responsibility for his act. The fact that domestic law does not impose a penalty for an act that constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law."