Dear Neighbor,
It should go without saying we all want the best for our children. We want to keep them safe, nurture them, teach them and do our best to put them on track for success. It all starts at home, with parents who are present and involved.
But what if I told you House Democrats have a different idea, one that would replace our love and intimacy with clinical bureaucracy and tainted ideology? What if I said House Democrats want to take something beautiful and turn it into a machine – take something natural and automate it?
Welcome to 2023 and the extreme Democrat agenda infiltrating every corner of our existence – including our children’s lives.
In this particular case, House Democrats have a bill that establishes a new state agency called the Department of Children, Youth and Families. It’s a copy/paste of failed existing agency models built on a fundamentally flawed premise that government bureaucrats can value children in a communal family.
The House Children and Families Finance and Policy Committee, on which I serve, conducted a hearing this week for this bill (H.F. 2320), which creates a new state department to tend to something as personal as children and families. It’s predicated upon a faulty – and blatantly arrogant – premise that government and bureaucracy can enter a space where the proverbial square peg doesn’t fit into the round hole.
The currency of family, the reason why families work, is because they function with love and intimacy. You know your children and you know your spouse. You live with them. You care about them deeply. You have a tremendous and persistent intimate knowledge of their needs, desires and special considerations.
On the other hand, government doesn’t have those luxuries and never will. But Democrats still want to replace love and intimacy with bureaucracy and ideology.
There was a lot of talk in the committee hearing regarding streamlining decision-making power to a single accountable commissioner. But they are distributing self-governance of the family and consolidating it by empowering one person who doesn’t have that love or intimacy.
Bureaucrats might care about our children in a general, global sense. They might even have a philanthropic impulse, but they’re never going to love a particular child in the way that a parent loves that child. Therefore, because they’ll never have that relationship, it doesn’t matter how many laws we write or how much money we throw at this agency, it’s never going to function the way parental relationships function.
On the other side of that, of course, comes ideology. We heard in the hearing numerous references to equity, the distribution of resources, disparities and other such language. As a goal, addressing disparities doesn’t serve a particular child. Children don’t need disparities attended to, they need guidance. They need teaching, love and intimate concern.
But what the Democrats are constructing is a goal that’s going to be pursued by a bureaucracy that’s going to report on how well it’s doing to achieve its own goals regarding disparities and inequities in race, the economy, this that and the other thing. That’s going to create a push that focuses on the numbers rather than things like behaviors, culture, habits, and values. Those are the things that impact the lives of individual children, not aggregate statistics, which is what government will focus on because it always does.
Call me a cynic, but we all should be leery when Democrats want to build a new government monstrosity on a poorly constructed foundation by mashing up failed existing agency models, all under the guise of streamlining bureaucracy, increasing efficiency and improving results. Especially – ESPECIALLY – when it involves our children.
Have a good weekend,
Walter