Where's the threat?

I present this article to you for your own consideration and thoughts.

Child abuse overwhelmingly occurs in single-mother homes – homes of divorce or unwed childbearing. Yet we do not find child welfare officials encouraging intact families or the involvement of fathers. On the contrary, a profession dominated by feminists, child welfare is characterized by a huge anti-father bias, to the point where spurious child abuse accusations are routinely used to remove fathers during divorce proceedings. Children are then confiscated from single mothers on similar accusations, valid or exaggerated, and fed into the foster care system. The mass child confiscations in Texas are just one more manifestation of what happens when we empower armies of officials with a bureaucratic mission to seize other people’s children.

This government-generated child abuse epidemic, and the mushrooming foster care business it feeds, have allowed government agencies to operate what amounts to a traffic in children. A San Diego Grand Jury reports that “the Department [of Social Services] is in the ‘baby brokering’ business.” Introducing same-sex marriage and adoption into this political dynamic could dramatically increase the demand for children to adopt, thus intensifying pressure on social service agencies and biological parents to supply such children. Massachusetts Sen. Therese Murray, claiming that 40 percent of adoptions have gone to gay and lesbian couples, rationalizes the practice by invoking “children who have been neglected, abandoned, abused by their own families.” But it is far from self-evident that these children are in fact victims of their own parents. What seems inescapable is that the very issue of gay parenting has arisen as the direct and perhaps inevitable consequence once government officials got into the business – which began largely with divorce – of distributing other people’s children.

These items are only the beginning. California court decisions criminalizing homeschoolers and excluding parents from their children’s public school education are further examples of state officials assuming family functions and replacing parents.

We need a much broader coalition of families prepared to resist the bureaucratic state’s appropriation of marriage and children on all fronts. Otherwise, this dual trend will worsen: Marriage will continue to deteriorate, and parents will continue to lose their children.

This commentary really nails the irresponsibility that has brought about a number of problems in our society, and how neutering the definition of marriage of its reference to "man and woman" only institutionalizes much of that irresponsibility. Completely uprooted from the natural foundation of where children come from, the need to provide children care puts the government in the position of being baby-brokers.

That is a grand usurping of many of our human rights. Perhaps needed in some circumstances, on the scale of altering the definition of marriage it is over reaching. It is like justifying putting everyone in concentration camps simply because some people deserve to be thrown in jail.

This link is fascinating. Oh, its right in many, many ways. I'm happy to see the subject treated so explicitly, to be honest.

I do, however, have one quick caveat about it.

The use of the term "child abuse industry" is language that is too strong and slanted in the wrong direction for me to accept. I appreciate how the article puts the impetus squarely on the heterosexual couples. The following should be read solely in reflection of heterosexual couples. Because it isn't the fact that same-sex couples want to have the same commitment they've seen in married couples that worries me at all. My worry is based solely in how a married couple might misunderstand their commitment as being solely adult based with no unique responsibility above and beyond what a same-sex couple would have. And by that I specifically mean with the fact they can or have created children together.

The danger, or problem, I see is how neglect of that responsibility harms children. And that is entirely a heterosexual endeavor.

Essentially we can solve any problem in one of two ways, and I like explaining this with a picture story. If there is a cliff, a danger or potential threat to harm, we can help people avoid that harm by putting up a fence along the cliff. The other way we can help is to mitigate the harm by putting an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. The fence helps people stay away from harm, and the ambulance helps people who've been harmed.

In my experience, parents do not intend to be child abusers, nor do they adopt or foster children in order to facilitate any evil child abusing tendencies or needs. Parents who have their children taken away by CPS can often struggle with their own perception of their own innocence in contrast to the perception of what people see when those parents are interacting aggressively with their children.

That teaches us that they not necessarily harboring evil motives, but that also shows us that naivete of the harm one is causing is no shield of innocence.

But the reason marriage factors so heavily in mitigating child abuse is in that it has been society's way of promoting the kind of preparation and commitment that directly address the circumstances that cause child neglect and abuse.

Foster children are more difficult to raise because of the very impact that happens when their world is shattered with divorce, abuse, and neglect from the people they associate as their parents. Adopted children also have issues that require a good deal of effort on both sides to help overcome. Divorced children have a harder time staying married when they grow into adults.

So I definitely see the same mechanism at work that the author calls a child abuse industry. However, I think that is looking at the glass half empty. I see people trying their best against an onslaught of sowing a bit of selfishness or thoughtlessness in exactly the wrong spot, and reaping the whirlwind of discontent and hurt as the children who are the victims of that selfishness take it to heart.

To say that amounts to a child abuse industry really paints the people taking the fence down at the top of the cliff as malicious, full of evil intent. I cannot read motives, which means there may be some who are that evil, and they may even be the most prominent in the push to remove the fence. They may be in the ambulance industry hoping to help get more need for their service, but I don't know and I don't care. The issue is either correct enough to have people see it on their own without ascribing evil motives, or they will have to find out for themselves.

And the vast majority of people I talk with simply see no danger by removing the fence. They feel the ambulance is sufficient, and the fence too constricting. And all we need to do is point out that the fence, an ounce of prevention, is worth many pounds of cure.

There is another theme in the article that needs to be highlighted. Keeping "man and woman" in the definition of marriage is not in and of itself sufficient to promote the kind of responsibility that will prevent, in many circumstances, divorce, foster care, and adoption.

That is only a means to an end. It is a required means to the end of promoting that the "man and woman" together equally share a responsibility to the children they potentially have together. You can't do that without calling out the "man and woman" explicitly, but you can't do that without calling out their responsibility too.

Marriage is not about loving whomever you want as much as it is about loving the people who most deserve it. It isn't about placing children with the best parents in the world, it is about helping the two people who create a child together realize they are the primary people who should be the best parents in the world for those children. Its about bridging the right a man and woman have to create a child together with the rights the children have to know and be raised by that man and woman in a low-conflict home of mutual tolerance and support.

And failure to recognize that, no matter how innocent or maleficent it is, puts more children in danger of neglect and abuse. I'm just putting it pragmatically.

The first place to fix this is in our own commitment to recognize those rights, in our own families. Prevention is much more economical than cure. Then with that stabilized we should reach out to help others understand it too.

I much prefer that stance to the emotionally and politically charged accusations of the article.