Government Schools, Forced Immunization, and the Police State

It's bad enough that parents and children are subjected to tyrannical compulsory education laws. Now, parents in a Washington, D.C., suburb are facing fines and jail time for failing to immunize their children so that they can attend school. From the Washington Post:

The parents of more than 2,300 Prince George's County students who failed to get needed vaccinations could face fines of $50 a day and up to 10 days in jail if their children do not meet the state's immunization requirements, county officials said yesterday.

The threat of legal action is a last resort after months in which Prince George's has struggled to get its 131,000 students immunized for chicken pox and hepatitis B, as mandated by the state. More than 2,300 students have not been immunized and have been barred from attending schools, almost two months after a Sept. 20 deadline for meeting the requirement.

"We can do this the easy way or the hard way, but it's got to get done," Prince George's State's Attorney Glenn F. Ivey (D) said at a news conference in Upper Marlboro. "I'm willing to move forward with legal action."

But what's even more disturbing is that it isn't the health of children that these bloated bureaucrats are worried about. They simply don't want any child to slip through the cracks and somehow escape being assimilated into the collective:

Schools officials said they were sorry the crisis had gone this far, but that it needed to be solved immediately.

"This has really, really been a difficult time for us," said Betty Despenza-Green, the school system's chief of student services. "It hurts us when any child is out of school because he needs to be immunized, and so we felt we needed to be creative. We need those students immunized. We need them in schools."

This is exactly the kind of draconian measures we can expect when you give up your rights to a group of arrogant fools who think they know better than you how to raise your kids. What more evidence do we need that these government indoctrination centers, along with their brutal intimidation techniques, are tools of the police state?