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Just about every time one of our governments proposes
something truly draconian and stupid, the proposal gets
support because we need to protect our children.
Most recent of these imbecilities is the Communications Decency Act, which prohibits the computer transmission of racy images to any spot where a child might see them.
Both sides seem to agree that children shouldn't see
certain things, and the question is that of which mechanism
would provide the best shield for tender eyes. The question
nobody asks is so what if a child does see them?
Modern America operates under the theory that exposure to sex or violence irreparably damages children and causes them to grow up to be serial killers or water diverters.
In the course of other work, I often read from diaries and memoirs of people who grew up in 19th-century America.
Most children then lived on farms, where the barnyard couplings happened in plain view, where chickens were butchered daily, often with toddlers assisting.
Further, the children frequently shared a bedroom, or even a bed, with their parents, and families of eight or nine offspring were common. The typical 18-year-old of 1896 had seen considerable live sex and violence, and yet we keep hearing from our Republicans about how much better America was during the days of William McKinley.
And if that direct exposure did not send my grandparents' generation into hedonism or anarchy, why would indirect exposure via some electronic images?
The Communications Decency Act has nothing to do with protecting children, and everything to do with finding employment for more police, prosecutors and prison guards.
Another example of the inanity of child-protection laws appeared a fortnight ago here. Five girls, aged 14 to 16, were injured when their vehicle rolled over as they were leaving a woodsy.
Now, if we didn't have laws to protect children from buying alcohol, and they wanted to get loud and stupid, they could have just walked to a saloon, where they would have been under the supervision of bartenders and bouncers.
After all, in the days of yesteryear so beloved by our modern moral guardians, 12-year-olds were routinely dispatched to the tavern to fetch a bucket of beer for dad or to the drugstore to procure opiates for mom's neuralgia. Yet those children somehow grew up to be productive adults.
But in these protective times, the thirsty teenagers had
to sneak off to a keg party up a rough road, with
predictable consequences. We butcher hundreds of kids every
year in the guise of protecting
them.
Attorney General Janet Reno's decision to barbecue the
children in the Branch Davidian compound at Waco in 1993,
in order to save
them, is consistent with how
America in general protects children. We use it as a
justification for enlarging the Big Brother aspects of
government and we really don't care what happens to the
children we said we were protecting.
A society that truly worried about the welfare of children might have a minimum wage of such a level that one wage-earner could support a family, thereby leaving another parent with time and energy for the children, rather than the corporation.
Such a society might insure that every family had access to affordable and decent medical care. Or that kids didn't have to worry about getting shot on their way to or from school, or that the teachers in said school were competent and literate. It might insure that all children with the will and the talent would get higher education without indebting themselves for life.
That doesn't sound anything like America.
Since we really don't protect children, perhaps we
should observe the words of Thomas Jefferson: ...all Men
are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure
these Rights, Governments are instituted among
Men...
That is, a government exists to protect rights, not children. As matters stand, government destroys rights in the name of protecting children, and doesn't protect children from real threats anyway.
We'll never get rid of the people who make a business of
minding other people's business. But if we got rid of the
child-protection
laws, at least we'd get rid of some
pretense that gets more annoying by the day.
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