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Antivax Parents #fundie #ableist #conspiracy #psycho #quack independent.co.uk

Six weeks ago, Ethan was like most 7-year-olds — spending the weekend riding his new bike or playing Minecraft on his iPad on a rainy day.

Instead, since late January, the schoolboy has been confined to a hospital bed with measles encephalitis, a complication that causes swelling and inflammation in the brain. “He's pretty much as if he was paralyzed,” his devastated father, 41, told The Independent in a phone interview from his son’s hospital bedside.

Ethan’s parents decided not to immunize him against measles as they did with his three brothers. Three out of four of them contracted measles. Still, despite Ethan’s ordeal, his mom stands by their decision. “We’re not blaming God for this,” said 35-year-old Kristina. “Yes, it hurts, of course, it hurts. But God has chosen Ethan for a reason. God is doing something, and we're gonna glorify his name regardless.

“And we wouldn't change it any other way,” the mom continued. “If I knew this could be the outcome, I still wouldn't have given my son the vaccine.”

“Our biggest reason why we didn't do it is just with all the unnecessary stuff they add into it,” Kristina added, “With my own eyes, I have seen the damage it does to kids who are perfectly normal, and then once they get it, they're not the same anymore,” she claimed.

“Why do we need to add so much to our children’s bodies?” she asked.

The parents said that they hope sharing their son’s story might help other families going through a similar ordeal.

Matt Schlapp #racist #psycho independent.co.uk

A conservative lobbyist has sparked outrage for suggesting that the Iranian schoolgirls killed in airstrikes this week amid the joint U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign are better off dead than being “alive in a burqa”

Matt Schlapp, who heads up the Conservative Union advocacy group, which runs the Conservative Political Action Conference, made the remark Wednesday night on Piers Morgan’s Uncensored during a heated debate

A missile strike on the war’s first day, Saturday, killed 175 children and staff at an elementary school in Minab, southern Iran, according to the non-profit humanitarian group Iranian Red Crescent Society. Iran has pointed the finger at the U.S. and Israel, while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday that the administration was “investigating”

Journalist Peter Beinart, the editor-at-large at Jewish Currents, told Morgan that the U.S. and Israel were to blame even if an Iranian missile was responsible for the attack on the school

“We know that if the U.S. and Israel had not attacked a country that poses no serious threat to them – Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons, America has thousands – that those girls would be alive,” Beinart said

“They’d be alive in a burqa,” Schlapp interjected before he was cut off by Morgan, who spoke over him. “This is…a barbaric society,” Schlapp said, before Morgan told him to “hang on”

A few minutes later, Morgan invited Schlapp back to the conversation

“It's hypocritical to say that these attacks harmed women and children when those women and children, the young girls that you reference, would be...live a life in a barbaric, unequal society behind a burqa, with no ability to make career choices,” Schlapp said

“So just kill them?” challenged Cenk Uygur, a Turkish-American commentator who was also on the panel