John Zmirak, senior editor at TheStream.org, joined SiriusXM host Rebecca Mansour and special guest host Sam Sorbo for a Friday interview on Breitbart News Tonight. He described recent events surrounding Alfie Evans as illustrative of state usurpation of parental rights and responsibilities over children.

Alfie Evans was a critically ill toddler who was recently removed from life support against the wishes of his parents by order of the British government, following a United Kingdom High Court decision on April 11. British authorities also denied the parents’ request to transfer their child to a Vatican-owned children’s hospital for treatment at the invitation of Pope Francis and Vatican officials who offered to cover the child’s healthcare and travel expenses.

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Alfie Evans died early Saturday.

Zmirak said, “What this is really about, the reason the government is fighting this so hard to the point that they’re threatening to arrest people for social media postings, they bullied the father Tom Evans into silence, they’re refusing appeals from Poland and Italy and the Vatican, they want to establish a precedent that the state, not the parents, have the ultimate control over the fate of a child,”

Zmirak added, “That extends into education — especially sex education — so-called transgender issues, they’re establishing a point of law that is similar to what you see in Germany. There’s a law that Hitler passed banning homeschooling and weirdly it’s one of the few laws Hitler passed that are still on the books and enforced in Germany.”

Zmirak continued, “It really is arrogant experts backed by the power of the state asserting their rights over the rights of parents, and we see the same thing with restrictions on homeschooling, with mandatory sex education, I don’t know how long it’s going to be in the United States before you can lose custody of your kids for not agreeing to let them to do a transgender transition based on what they say as a seven-year-old.”

Zmirak reflected on the modern excision of the original Hippocratic Oath’s prohibition on inducing abortion among medical graduates. “The hospital said they wouldn’t allow the parents to take him home unless they had a change of attitude towards the hospital,” he said. “It’s staggering, the abuse of power of life and death. This is why we had a Hippocratic Oath, because way back in the ancient Greek world they recognized that doctors wield an enormous power and they have a solemn responsibility, and I think that started to go south in the 1970s when they rewrote the Hippocratic Oath to take out its prohibition of abortion. … And now only at Christian and Catholic hospitals do they still take the original Hippocratic Oath.”

Zmirak said, “It’s not just a question of socialized medicine, because Alfie’s parents weren’t asking the National Health service to pay for extra treatment for Alfie. Instead, they were asking for a second opinion, essentially. … This hospital doesn’t want them getting a second opinion. Mind you, the hospital has not come up with a real diagnosis of the child. They don’t know what’s wrong with him, but they know he’s going to die and they’re going to make sure of it.”

Sorbo recalled the 2015 story of George Pickering II, who storm a Houston hospital with a firearm where his son, George III, was slated for euthanasia by medical authorities following a stroke. Despite being declared “brain dead,” George III subsequently recovered.

Mansour spoke of other instances where the National Health Service (NHS) rejected the requests of parents over healthcare choices for their children, noting the case of five-year-old Ashya King whose parents wanted an alternative treatment for their son’s brain tumour.

Zmirak invited listeners to consider if British authorities would have operated differently with a Muslim family in the case of Alfie Evans. “I was just wondering, if this weren’t a Catholic child whose parents wanted to bring him to the Vatican for treatment,” he said. “Imagine this were a Muslim’s child who wanted to bring their kid to Saudi Arabia for treatment. Do you think the United Kingdom would stand in their way? No. They’d be terrified.”

Mansour asked, “Do you think that they would stand in their way if this were Muslim parents who wanted to commit female genital mutilation on a little girl?”

Zmirak concluded, “In the gay activist judge’s opinion, he said that Alfie’s life was of no value to Alfie. That’s perilously close to the Nazi phrase, ‘life unworthy of life,’ and given the wave of euthanasia and the abortion of handicapped kids that flooding across Europe, sometimes I step back and wonder which side won World War II after all?”

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