I share this only because I am quite confident that after dealing with me at home, my wife is not overly inclined to read my public columns and commentaries. So unless any of you betray me, I feel like my secret is safe to publish here. There have been more than just a few family gatherings through the years that I've managed to get out of attending by using our children. If one of them has a sniffle, a sore throat, or is misbehaving, I meritoriously volunteer to keep them at home while Jen gets to go enjoy "family time."
I'm not convinced she doesn't know what I'm up to, but so far she's yet to call me out.
I should clarify that I love my family on both sides of our marriage dearly, and we all live in very close proximity to each other. Given the fact that I see all of them regularly, missing a Saturday morning breakfast at my in-laws or a birthday party for my brother's dog doesn't riddle my soul with guilt. Neither does using my children to pull it off, because kids are the fool-proof, iron-clad, safe and effective excuse – every time.
That's why I'm maybe a little more attuned to the same trick being pulled when it comes to unpopular, unnecessary, or self-serving policy being advanced by lawmakers. For years, progressives have advanced some of their most tragically flawed legislative objectives – policies that threaten everything from bank accounts to individual liberty to livelihoods – by proclaiming their motivations are for "the good of the children."
If you don't believe me, here's Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi describing how you can best summarize the focus and heart of her party's policies:
Yes, that would be the same Nancy Pelosi who also justified political violence by telling a meeting of Democrat party officials that it's necessary to be ready to throw punches "for the children."
Behold:
Shortly after the 2018 Parkland school shooting, progressives began advancing a bevy of gun control measures in Congress. None of them were new or specific to the mass murder in that Florida school. In fact, not a single one of the policy proposals, bills, and new regulations they proposed would have done anything to stop the lunatic who stormed the school that day. These were promised political payoffs to special interests, but being repackaged and sold under the guise of "protecting our children."
Ditto that on so-called climate change. More than a few observers were grossed out by President Biden's reference to the perils of a warming planet in his recent remarks regarding the horrific tornado outbreak across the South last weekend. But truthfully, his comments were far more tempered than most members of the climate cult who regularly use natural disasters as justification for their radical policy proposals. Beholden to the same left-wing think tanks and interest groups, here are just some of the more amusing headlines:
- Why the climate crisis is a children's rights crisis
- The climate crisis is here, and we must act now to protect children and young people
- Born into the Climate Crisis: Why we must act now to secure children's rights
Of course, no discussion of left-wing hysteria being propagated at the expense of children is complete without a proper acknowledgement of this insanity:
Asked to denounce this absurd and pointless abuse of children, take a wild guess how White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended it:
Remember that these kids' parents, who are statistically far more susceptible to the disease, are allowed to unmask at indoor restaurants. Beyond that, there's little scientific data that supports the need for any of this kabuki-paint-bucket-theater. Whether it is driven by politics, fear, or some combination of both, kids are being used as justification for the enactment of the very policies that cause them to suffer.
Countless schools around America, including my own, have been without masks and social distancing from the start of this school year. None of those schools has suffered any paralyzing outbreak of COVID or any of its variants. In fact, since the beginning of the pandemic, there has been and continues to be no evidence of communal spread taking place in schools.
But standing athwart science is an unholy alliance of progressive activists in government and media pretending otherwise. Their actions have created a devastating mental health crisis in young people, helped foster dramatically increased suicide rates, and gutted academic performance.
I'm open to suggestions as to what is really motivating this behavior. But common decency demands we drop the "for the children" routine.
