From a Google Image Search - Ashton DeGonzaque - Dead at 11 in America
We live in times when there is a push to separate society and government, and yet reconnect Christianity and government. We are being bombarded with a political party pushing for a small government that does not offer any support to citizens. We are told that we are being institutionalized by government handouts that are turning us into dependents who will not work but are depressed by the aimlessness of our lives. It is suggested that if Social Security, welfare, food stamps, Medicare, and unemployment are no longer budget items America's deficits will melt away, as will Americans’ ennui. How this will happen if we close the IRS is unclear.
If we replace benefits with a national religion and beef up the nation's morals, we won't need benefits, conservatives argue. If we "don't say gay" and deny that it exists, if we outlaw the use of health insurance to correct biological gender errors, and if we create tax structures that make it financially necessary to form nuclear families, we can get the 50s back, or is it the Reagan years of the 80s?
The small government argument is only about money, who spends it, and who gets it. A theocratic state will mean government policing of everyone's "morals," including intimate areas like sexuality and women's reproductive rights, so in that sense, we will have a bigger government that polices American lives. With the government in our bedrooms, we will lose any privacy we might still possess.
Since there is a push to increase the birth rate of "legal" citizens and abortions will not be allowed in a right-wing state, women will be forced to give birth. There is no suggestion that these women will be able to join the workforce in their fertile years. Women will be expected to raise their children until they are grown. If America adopts a small government ideology no laws will be passed or even written that will pay to send children to childcare centers or preschools.
Current laws that fund preschool may be discontinued, especially considering the right-wing goals to make schooling a state responsibility rather than continue our national system of public schools. Will working-class women even be able to go to college? If you "like the poorly educated" because they are more malleable, women will most likely be discouraged from attending college classes or earning college degrees. Since they will be raising America's children, children will have fewer skills because their moms will have lower educational levels.
Even now we see this ideological mindset being imposed on America through the actions of governors, media, conservatives, and the MAGA movement. The Fair Labor Standards Act ended child labor in 1938 but we are learning that child labor is back. The videos of young children working in meat processing plants brought shame to many of us.
From a Google Image Search - Child labor in America - Univ. of Rhode Island
We did not think going backward was an option until we ticked off conservatives by shunning their speaking engagements on college campuses and they decided it was time to take back America and make it Conservative America. Conservatives believe it is time to realize the right-wing vision of economic and moral control by those who are the proven leaders of America because of the wealth they have hoarded. It's time to learn that empathy and humanitarianism are harmful to humans, conservatives say. Time to "screw your sternness to the sticking place" (a rewording of Shakespeare). Tough love works better the right wing contends, as if they never heard of the Middle Ages, of the system of nobles and serfs. Been there, done that.
But last week in my hometown an 11-year-old boy, Ashton DeGonzaque was found dead in his home. Ashton, a 4th grader, was known to the police and the community because he was in the summer baseball program. How did Ashton die in a home so filthy, a home without plumbing that worked, with cocaine and fentanyl in his system and with the cards of social service workers stapled to the front door? Search the internet for "Ashton" or "abused children" and you will find the stories of other young children that our system has failed.
If we are to be a society that forces women to give birth, we will need a far better system to support families that are too poor to have so many babies, or too antisocial to raise healthy children. Even bad parents often want to keep their children and they stymie attempts by anyone to intervene. Given a social services system that invades someone's privacy to offer assistance and the bureaucracy and the stigma built into interventions, child abuse is already difficult to remediate. What kinds of abuses will we see if there is no social services system?
Conservatives want to take away birth control and abortion, but not spend government dollars on services that keep our poorest people afloat (or that take a child away from an unfit parent). We put children in foster care now, but we also know some of the horror stories about foster care. We know children get exploited, sometimes by birth parents, sometimes by the system. In this case, although all the signs of neglect were there this child was left in his feckless father's care to die of a drug overdose at eleven. Forcing women to give birth and abandoning children to the untender mercies of bad husbands, bad mothers, or worse will never be a recipe for a great society.
Why would we ever choose the Conservative Way as defined by the right-wing? If our government needs reform there is no way we can tweak it before November and, at the moment, conservatism is too self-absorbed to accept bipartisan Constitutional reforms. Vote! We have blown through all the institutional guardrails and only we the people can save our democracy/republic.
Thank you to my readers.