Saturday, July 12, 2008

When your TV viewing habits can get you into trouble

I read this story with a mild feeling of anxiety because I realized that it could so easily have been Marc and me who lost their children. I too would have purchased that lemonade as 1) the sign called it lemonade and 2) I had no idea until I read this article that there was such a thing as "hard lemonade".
if you ask Christopher Ratte and his wife how they lost custody of their 7-year-old son, the short version is that nobody in the Ratte family watches much television.
The way police and child protection workers figure it, Ratte should have known that what a Comerica Park vendor handed over when Ratte ordered a lemonade for his boy three Saturdays ago contained alcohol, and Ratte's ignorance justified placing young Leo in foster care until his dad got up to speed on the commercial beverage industry.
This is not the first egregious use of power that I've read about. It appears that there is a preponderance of CPS officials who park their good sense at the door to their offices.

2 comments:

Sherry said...

Oh that poor little boy must have been so scared and confused.

I do know about Mike's Lemonade, but I can see how someone might not realize what it is.

Sherry

Henry Cate said...

I don't know anything about hard lemonade, but I would have asked questions about why the lemonade was more expensive than the beer.

This last couple months I've been seeing more and more instances of overly aggressive CPS taking away children when there was no call.

I don't know if the number of instances has climbed, if the media is reporting it more, if I'm more sensitive to it, or if there is something else going on.