She died because her only “treatment” for illness was PRAYER.

There apparently were cases in Europe in the 19th century where some children were forcibly removed from non-Christian households and put in foster care so they could be brought up Christian… (or am I victim of an urban legend?)…

That might have been at least one of the reasons that aboriginal children were taken from their families in the Australian outback and raised by white, Christian families in the cities. I’m not sure how much religious belief was a factor in those cases.

But I’m sure I’ve read of some cases of Jewish children being taken to be raised by Catholics in Spain, for instance, and of Jews who converted forcibly and later hid their Jewish backgrounds. In fact, there have been a couple of high profile cases of this, among them Madeline Albright, secretary of state under Clinton. Her parents were Czechs who converted to avoid persecution and raised her Catholic. The Virginia senator George Allen, of “macaca” fame, also had a Jewish mother who was afraid to be identified as a Jew and either converted or hid her background.

Or perhaps the Judge actually is a rabid fundamentalist.

The nice thing, as Hemant notes happened in New Jersey, is that the appellate courts are more reliable, and more intellectually rigorous in their application of the law. You can get some strange decisions, mostly anomalies, at the trial level, but the higher courts tend to even things out.