it's for whose children?

“It’s for the kids”! “We are making tough choices, only for the kids.” “Think of the children”.

It seems adults love to hide their own hate, bigotries, and fears in the guise that what they do and say has only one goal…to save the kids. The tough decisions are not made because any reason or rational was used, nope it is done with the purist intentions of saving the children. Saving them from what from whom?

It seems adults like to mask their own personal agendas, irrational remarks or behavior in the cloak of “a better human is a religious human”. The supposed laws we learn from the many books of virtue and ethics, (the New Testament, the Torah, the Koran, the Book of Mormon), comfort our bias’s and permit us to pretend what we do on Earth is from a higher power nature. We do God’s work. But we only do God’s work if we can make it fit our human weaknesses.

*In Utah, a Mormon and state senator, Chris Buttars ( R ) told the Utah Public Education Appropriations Subcommittee earlier this month that many students squander away their senior year, making it unnecessary expense and a way to alleviate the large Utah budget shortfall. He said eliminating 12^th grade altogether would have saved $102 million.

“You’re spending a whole lot of money for a whole bunch of kids who aren’t getting anything out of that grade,” he said. It comes down to the best use of money.

It’s for the kids, so don’t spend the money because the kids aren’t learning. Don’t try and use the same amount of dollars to institute a more suitable curriculum, or a plan to motivate seniors from floundering, or an infusion of the same dollars to establish an innovative and relevant curriculum. Nope when the budget bottom line is more important, blame the kids, and punish them for being kids.

*The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington D.C. has ended its 80-year tenure as a public foster care provider because of a same-sex marriage bill in the nation’s capitol that allows children to be adopted by homosexual couples. The move by Catholic Charities and Archbishop Wuerl came to fruition since the D.C. Council bill, among other things, would require foster care groups under contract with the District to allow and facilitate adoption of foster-care children by homosexual couples.

The policy violates the moral teaching of the Catholic Church, which says that only one man and a woman can be untied in marriage and that together with their children they form a family.

But Priests violating the bodies of girls, women and young boys is not immoral. The morality of finding loving, caring adults who want to make a home for “the children”, who will comfort many who otherwise will flounder aimlessly without a true family, is not valued. Dogma has a more valuable moral even when it does not permit a child a sense of primacy with loving adults. Compassion for the children is unimportant as long as bigotry reigns.

In the state of California local education officials warned state legislators, you know those who claim family values (be they Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Evangelical Christian), that proposed state budget cuts could force schools to squeeze more kids into classrooms and prompt massive layoff of teachers.

One option by the California legislature would mean-increasing K-3 classroom sizes to 30 students instead of the current 20. In addition to class size reduction, textbook purchasing would be cut, tutoring to low-income students would end, free or reduced-price school lunches would be slashed and perhaps a school week of 4 days.

The budget crisis is real, and has left a dramatic imprint in the state of California. But if all we hear is that to “help our kids… we must include education… and that quality education is the key item to success as an adult…” why even consider some of the cuts toward “the children”?

We as a nation have been lectured to that what we do is “for the children”. The Congress shouts atop a mighty soap box that they can not allow the deficit to haunt their grandchildren, yet refuse to do much about it but politic. We hear the Family Value vultures yell and scream that the only reason why they are anti same-sex marriage is for the protection of the innocence of the children. We hear church leaders pontificate about their morals being greater than the gay or the abortionist, or the adulterer, or the next perceived anti-Christ bad guy. They are doing God's business in God’s name to save the children.

When it is beneficial to camouflage bigotry, uneducated heresy, hatred, contempt in a “it’s for the children quilt, all the demigods rally round and revel in their good deeds. When they all can actually make a difference a direct and measurable difference in the lives of the children, they look the other way, find excuses, they blame finances, they forget God's name, and they do nothing productive.

Hypocrisy reigns! And for whose children is it?