Now, the question becomes: where does a person's right to believe as they wish come into conflict with the right of the State to protect its citizens?

How about first degree murder?

" The family believes in the Bible, which says healing comes from God, "

Sorry. Biased article. It's their personal interpretation, or their sect's interpretation that says healing comes from God and their interpretation that they shouldn't consult doctors. Most sane Christians embrace modern medicine, whether as a beautiful science or as a science gifted by the Holy Spirit.

What they did is criminal. The "conflict" arises when parents don't persue the typically available means possible to treat their underage child due to their negligent reliance on some nutjob telling them to interpret scripture in a certain way.

Midleft - these people remind me of the primitive people found in far off places who rely on some shaman in a drug induced trance to chant for them & save them from the evil spirits making them sick. Even the fanatical zealots like these parents look at these practices & deride them, while they themselves are doing it in the name of their God.

The innocent child is the victim of this insanity & her death

did nothing to change this. Vigorous prosecution of these parents might.

very sad. i don't know why people forget that god can heal in many ways, through miracles, prayer, doctors, MEDICINE... hello!

should the parents be prosecuted? don't know... beyond my pay-grade... maybe child endangerment or recklessness... yeah that sounds right.

midleft, shame on you... happy that a child died. you should hope that NEVER happens to you.

Yep - these are probably the very same idiotic a-holes that march outside an abortion clinic calling THAT murder. Yet it's OK to effectively murder their own child. Sometimes I have a very difficult time believing just HOW freaking stupid some people can be.

Look at the $trillions being thrown down the drain for the churches, etc.

The question is not why are the parents such nut cases (we know that people get screwed up on earth, for whatever reason), but why is our society so judgmental and disparate that there was no one to step in and help them out. Diabetes does not happen overnight. It takes awhile for the body to stop producing insulin and for the sugar toxins to build up in the body. No one noticed she was becoming diabetic? There are pretty strong clues to that illness

I agree with the above comment, that these parents are not necessarily criminals, but we have let them down. How sad, very say.

The real question is would any of YOU call someone to step in when a child appeared to be in grave danger and how to you gentle explain to the parents how important it is to change their perspective.

If someone were mean and judgmental to you, would you change or listen? I think not.

Dionys: You obviously never studied law. Murder is the killing of a human being with malice. Malice includes not only intending the result, actual malice, but also acting with sufficient recklessness to make the result virtually inevitable, implied malice. The law gives both actual and implied malice the same legal effect. These parents may not have intended to cause their daughter's death, but their asinine beliefs coupled with their intentional refusal to submit her to medical treatment made her death a certainty. This qualifies as malice. Since the daughter died as a direct result of the parents' intentional and malicious acts, the death is a murder.

Poopypoop: what a wonderful world this would be if it were TOTALLY devoid of the worldwide cult of religion, especially Christianity. Let's see now, we have the FDLS and now this. Added to that are all the Christian nutjobs that want the US to be a theocracy. We'd all be better off without the religion of Christianity.

Anyone see "Idiocracy"? This story would seem to dispute that movie's central theme.

I don't think this is a problem with Belief, per se, but rather with zealotry, which is an aggrandizement, let's call it, of religious or other impulse.

I had an aunt who was, though "born" Jewish, a Christian Scientist. She believed that if you said no to disease (and implicitly yes to god's creation of man in his own PERFECT image, which did not include sickness), you could "abort" illness.

At one point she refused medical treatment for pneumonia; after a week of this, my father called a rabbi, who came to talk to her and convinced her that her Jewishness trumped her Christian Science-ness, and that she should get treatment.

She believed and did. I found the ease with which she substituted one faith for another very instructive.

Mid, CS was, as you may know, born in a time when people had begun to feel the need to reconcile belief and, well, science. CS was the daft, very imperfect, but in some (few) ways salutary result.

Sound like a familiar drama?

Another case of believers devaluing the one known life we have for the complete unknown. The child never had a chance. If these people have such belief in God why don't they believe he created the insulin to save her? She must have suffered horribly.

This is like Chuck Norris's belief that all illness comes from sin and that she was in fact demon-filled. Chuck, if there was a God why did he ever allow you to act?