Too Fat For Mr. Bureaucrat

In the UK, bureaucrats have decided that you can be 'too fat' to adopt a child.

The article is worth reading just for the witticism:

One morning you will wake up and the scary shovel-faced government minister Dawn Primarolo will be standing at the foot of your bed jabbing you with a stick, shrieking at you that your BMI is too high and there’ll be no breakfast today, you fat slattern.

In years past, I would have pointed out that drawing moral parallels between drinkers, fat people and black folk is absurd. Drinking and eating yourself to obesity is a choice. Skin color certainly isn't.

But that line of thinking is a rabbit trail to nowhere. Politicians will cheerfully divide smokers from Sikhs if it manufactures group dynamics that help them get or stay in power.

The question is this: What on earth gives one person the right to en-force what another person drinks or eats, where they go, what they buy, or the family relationships they choose to have?

It seems to me that the only way one person could force their will on another person in such distinctly non-criminal matters is if they believed they had a right to that person's very life.

I was under the impresson that sort of thing ended in Europe in 1833.