Cleveland Plain-Dealer

If parents want to decline cancer treatment for their child in favor of herbs, is that religion news?

It’s a decision that even Solomon might find challenging.

On one side is a 14-year-old girl with a life-threatening brain tumor and a hospital that wants to save her. On the other are the girl’s parents who also want to save her, albeit through naturopathic methods instead of chemotherapy.

Then take it all to court and you have a fascinating story in the Cleveland Plain Dealer about doctors versus parents and a 14-year-old who’s going irreversibly blind in the meantime.

But there’s one huge hole in this narrative. See if you can spot it:

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- On the last Tuesday in March, in an eighth-floor courtroom high above a dense fog hiding downtown Cleveland, Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court Magistrate Ginny Millas faced a weeping mother and a father so anguished he struggled to speak.

During two days of testimony, Millas had listened to people argue the fate of a 14-year-old girl with a brain tumor.

Cleveland Clinic specialists say chemotherapy is the only way to treat Zara Ali's tumor, save her failing eyesight and possibly her life.

Her parents have resisted. They've been doctoring their daughter with "natural and holistic medicine," gentler remedies they believe will heal her. Herbal cures have long been part of Zara's family life and are in keeping with their religion, said her father, who came to court each day wearing a red fez, as many Moorish Americans do.

What religion, you might ask while perusing this story. And therein lies the problem. We’re not told. Can we agree that this is a rather essential fact to leave out?


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Hey reporters and critics: Please add a dose of reality to coverage of The Handmaid's Tale

I’ve never read The Handmaid’s Tale but I could not miss the recent PR blitz about the Hulu version that has been running on TV nor the fact that the wait list for borrowing the book is in the hundreds (at least in Seattle’s King County library system).

I’m not sure how long Hulu has been developing the series, but the timing couldn’t have been better for folks who feel that this is how the country will end up if Donald Trump has his way. Looking at trends in modern America, many still see our nation poised to become a theocracy.

Published in 1985 during the Ronald Reagan administration, the book was the Hunger Games of the 1980s; a description of a dystopian universe in a future post-cataclysmic America. For those who think this is just a TV series, with zero impact on the news, take a look at this June 13 piece that ran in The Cleveland Plain-Dealer:

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Sixteen women dressed as handmaids from the novel and TV series "The Handmaid's Tale" walked the halls of the Ohio Statehouse on Tuesday to protest an bill that would restrict abortion here.
The women donned red robes and white bonnets and sat in silence as the Senate Judiciary Committee heard initial testimony on Senate Bill 145.
"The Handmaid's Tale," a Margaret Atwood novel turned Hulu series, takes place in a not-so-distant future where the United States. has become a totalitarian society led by men and plagued by infertility. To solve that problem, child-bearing women are forced to become "handmaids" and birth babies fathered by men leading the regime.
"The handmaids are forced to give birth and, in so many cases, because of all the restrictions on abortion access, women in Ohio and across the country are being forced to give birth," Jaime Miracle, deputy director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio said.

The article did have one reference to an opponent who felt demonstrators “were making a mockery "of the issue, but that was way down in the article.


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