Slippery slope, no doubt. 

But I’m on the side of the WA Supremes here—abridgement of free speech and privacy is a dangerous precedent.  Particularly in an era of Bushian judges.

Now, thinking of Linkmeister’s comment on H. juvenilis in your holiday-lights entry, had the kids been a bit younger, I might change my tune.  That’s a different slippery slope.

On the other hand, it seems that every few years another law or decision occurs which removes one more tool from a parent’s grasp to keep their kids on the right path. Infringing on freedom of speech and privacy or infringing on parental rights to raise their kids the best way they know how?

As I said...dunno. Makes me uncomfortable though.

Yep, competing positive values.  What to do when two goods are in conflict with each other?

Well heck, throw me in jail then. I have to admit if Amanda spends the night at a friends or goes to hang out at the mall and a movie for an entire day. I READ HER JOURNAL. And I have to say I am very glad I do. I have a wonderful daughter, no drugs, alcohol etc… and I know this for sure because on an occasion I READ HER JOURNAL! I caught something in there once and nipped it in the bud right away without letting on how I found out. I would NEVER have known if I didn’t read it.
But hey, I have never listened in on a phone conversation. One needs their privacy ya know!

Jennifer you are a brave soul for admitting that. You know, it took me quite a long while to figure out how my mother knew so much about me. For the longest time I attributed it to that all-knowing eye in the back of her head.

I think this may be a time honored tradition between mothers and daughters.

LOL, yup. Except my mother didn’t have to. My sister did and told her everything. So my mother didn’t even have to be discrete about it!

Sometimes I wish that I’d had a sister. And then other times I’m glad I didn’t. ;)

There’s some other threads talking about how this article makes it SOUND as if mothers will be thrown in jail for eavesdropping on their teenagers.  But that’s not at all true.  It’s just that her testimony is not admissible in court because the boyfriend had an expectation of privacy.  The article was very vague on that… And some thing it was to deliberately “frame” the article in such a way as to convey a certain message.

here is the thread I was talking about

I linked this page there, so I’ll do the other way

Anyway diary reading willy-nilly is not a tradition for those who don’t keep diaries.  heh.  I’ll probably never be in the position to make that kind of decision, because somehow the dangers of writing anything personal down were instilled in me as a kid, and I suspect I’ll instill that in my own children as well.

see this thread (particularly my quote from a book - hehe)

Oh, I almost forgot… on the topic of that LJ girl who ordered the hit on her mother…

On a thread on Glassdog (dot com) a post called “Heavenly Creature”, someone not only claimed it a mother reading a daughter’s diary is tantamount to the FBI keeping tabs on people’s library usage, he also claimed that reading someone’s PUBLIC WEB SITE was the same as a mother reading her daughter’s private diary.  LOL.
Now given, the internet would have provided an insight into that girl’s mind for the mother, but you can’t justify her mother peering over her blog entries any more than reading her diary, or any more than the FBI monitoring library reading lists.

(Sorry, can’t post the link because it’s blacklisted.)

While I might be personally uneasy about reading kids’ diaries willy-nilly without grounds for suspicion.  I can’t imagine someone defending a PUBLIC web site’s privacy.  Regardless of whether the mother was given the URL or not, it’s not anything akin to snooping if she reads it!  It’s on the world wide web for all and sundry to see, after all!

I don’t get it.  Since the 1990s there have been logical essays written on the facts and delusions of on-line journaling.  Strange that in the age of a blog a minute, there’s still people who hold to the notion that on-line public journals are somehow private and secret.  hehe.