At the age of 10 and 7, two American children had their freedom of speech legally truncated. By an agreement made by their parents, Chris and Stephanie Hallowich, a Pennsylvania boy and girl apparently cannot talk about fracking, shale gas drilling, for the rest of their lives.
While the $750,000 settlement was made in 2011, the terms were just now made public after a request by the Pittsburg Post Gazette.
The agreement was made between the Hallowich’s and three oil and gas companies in charge of drilling in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale. The family, who lived near the drilling and were opposed to fracking, claimed the process harmed their family’s health. Apparently the parents did not want their kids gagged, but otherwise could not get a settlement.
While gag orders are common for adults in such agreements, how can they be forced down the throats of two young children?
Image adapted from “Young girl in Mauritania.jpg” by Ferdinand Reus from Arnhem, Holland. This image is under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. The original image is under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.
Oh well. No surprise here
This is very sad. The government should be helping children not taking away their freedom of speech. A corporation shouldn’t be allowed to do it either. Freedom of expression is one of our most precious rights.
Parents are responsible for their children when they’re children. When they are grown, they should be responsible for themselves. Their rights as adults should not be restricted because of what their parents did.
“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6.
This is ridiculous. How far will they push censorship? To where kids can’t even talk about their problems for the rest of their lives?
All kids should have their mouths sewed shut at birth. In a hundred years after everybody dies off, we won’t have to hear anymore stupidly like things posted on this blog. Guess we should sew their fingers together too.
Idiocy.