Legislature’s Children at Risk/Faith Healing panel to take public testimony Monday
The Idaho Legislature’s Children at Risk/Faith Healing Working Group has released its agenda for its Monday meeting, and it consists solely of opening remarks and then public testimony, which is scheduled from 9:35 a.m. to 12:35 p.m., and limited to three minutes per person. At the panel’s first meeting in early August, it heard powerful testimony from an array of presenters, from an Ada County prosecutor who told of children suffering needlessly and prosecutors unable to act, to a faith-healing proponent who shared his deeply held beliefs.
Idaho is one of just seven states with a faith-healing exemption from its manslaughter laws, according to data submitted to the panel by legislative staffers. Many more states have faith-healing exemptions from civil liability for abuse, neglect or failure to report; smaller numbers have exemptions from misdemeanor or felony criminal charges for non-support, neglect or injury to a child. Idaho has exemptions in all four areas. Only one other state, Virginia, has all four exemptions.
At its August meeting, the 10-member joint legislative panel was given a copy of a July 1, 2015 report to Gov. Butch Otter from the Governor’s Task Force on Children at Risk, in which task force Chair Kirtlan Naylor reported that the task force had concluded that Idaho should amend its religious exemptions “to exclude them from application where a child’s death or severe disability is imminent.”
He calculated, based on comparisons between Idaho vital statistics and burials at the Peaceful Valley Cemetery in Canyon County, where members of the faith-healing Followers of Christ are buried, that the group had a child mortality rate of 31 percent from 2002 to 2011, compared to a statewide rate of 3.37 percent, “or about 10 times the Idaho pediatric population as a whole.”
Another state group, the Idaho Child Fatality Review Team, published its third annual report in August, this one reviewing child deaths in 2013, and it found that five Idaho children died that year because their parents’ religious beliefs prevented them from seeking medical treatment. That brought the total over three years of reviews to 10 Idaho children, although the report noted that not all such deaths are reported.
Gov. Butch Otter asked legislative leaders to form the joint committee, after legislation was proposed unsuccessfully for the past few years to lift or amend Idaho’s religious exemptions. Monday’s meeting starts at 9:30 a.m. in room EW 42 of the state Capitol; you can watch live online here.
