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Saturday, January 6, 2007
Best interest of child carries little weight
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
It’s a familiar story. A Marietta woman, headed to jail on theft charges, leaves her two daughters, one 3 and the other 6, in the care of her boyfriend. He showed up. And then vanished. When the adult female made bond three days later, the 3-year-old was unfed and unkempt; the 6-year-old was in a diabetic coma.
For three decades or more, the common reaction to the neglect of the two children is that it’s government’s fault. Some social worker should have been wise or prescient enough to anticipate their endangerment, and should have found a loving foster family until some other government agent could nurse, school or rehabilitate the woman into being a mother.
Enough. Stop.
A federal judge last October awarded $11.6 million to lawyers who sued the taxpayers of Georgia to revamp the foster care system — a sum legislators are forced to appropriate in this year’s budget. U.S. District Court Judge Marvin Shoob awarded the activists who brought the suit fees of up to $495 an hour. They had asked for $16 million. The commissioner of the state Department of Human Resources, B. J. Walker, said at the time: “Eleven million dollars could pay the salaries of every caseworker in Fulton County for a year, or it could pay for more than 1,800 children in foster care for a year. Children are the losers.”
That particular case was, for me, the culminating event in the liberal drift of recent decades by judges, tempted by special-interest groups, to arrogate unto themselves “solutions” to social problems — “solutions” at least within the narrow range defined by special-interest pleaders. That same temptation, incidentally, is now before a Fulton County Superior Court judge on education.
So what we get are a few bureaucrats fired or hired, a few lawyers made rich, a few do-gooders made righteous — and more dead babies. Why? Because the culture has changed — 25 percent of white babies, almost half the Hispanic and 70 percent of black — are born to unmarried women, creating a generation of children unlikely to grow up ever knowing commitment, or how “normal” husbands and wives treat each other, or how to form healthy relationships with the opposite sex.
What is really most shocking is the silence of most opinion leaders, politicians, entertainers and others who know how destructive this trend is to schools, to the criminal justice system, to child protection services, but more importantly to the children. A few do speak up. But when the numbers reach 50 percent and 70 percent, that becomes politically incorrect.
So we talk about the failure of ordinary social workers to be omniscient and insist they be fired when they aren’t — and yet on any given day, they are making decisions a mother and father should be making about more than 33,000 Georgia children. It’s insane social policy that allows adults to make babies and then effectively to toss them off tall buildings for government employees to catch.
We have pretended for an awful long time that protection of children is the primary concern of social policy. It really isn’t — and hasn’t been for decades.
The primary concern is to sexually emancipate adults from responsibility for children. Between a welfare system designed to devalue men by marrying women to government — except for the purposes of conception — and a fanatical 30-year abortion war to enshrine the absurd premise that, for some months at least, a woman is free to dispose of human life, no questions asked, the best interest of the child has been the least of policy concerns.
Nobody, neither man nor woman, completely owns the body that is used to create human life. This need not be an abortion debate, but from the moment of conception our interest, through government, is to protect the child from mental and physical neglect, abuse or other forms of mistreatment by adults, even in the womb.
Every child has a right to a mother and father. Every child has a right to know his mother and father, with paternity established at birth by law. Fathers would be held accountable for 18 years financial support. The obligation could be satisfied only by payment or death, with taxpayers devoting all resources necessary to collect in cash or labor.
We should stop using children as toys for adults and as ploys for expanding the government safety net that shields them from responsibility. If we expand government, it should be to give children back a mother and a father.
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