Nowhere is political rhetoric more shameless — or more
dangerous — than in the pious names that politicians give to the
legislation they pass. Perhaps the most egregious example is the
so-called “Indian Child Welfare Act,” which callously sacrifices
the welfare of Indian children.
Time and again, children with some American Indian ancestry, who
have been adopted by families that are not of that ancestry, have
been suddenly taken by law from the only parents they have ever
known and transferred to some distant Indian reservation, to live
among strangers in a world they know nothing about.
You might think that the sight of bewildered, desperate and
weeping children in court, crying out for mommy and daddy as they
are forcibly removed from people who have cared for them for years,
might cause those who are seizing them to relent. But no! Such
children are routinely sacrificed on the altar to the Indian Child
Welfare Act.
The child might be two years old or twelve. But the legal rights
of a biological relative and tribal authorities trump the well
being of the child, even if that biological relative has been a
complete stranger to the child.
Some years ago, the chairman of the Civil Rights Commission
visited a 14-year-old girl who had been removed from her adopted
parents and was living on an Indian reservation, where she was
miserable. But when the story came out, outrage was directed not at
those who had ruined this girl’s life, but at the member of the
Civil Rights Commission who had dared to intrude on the sacred soil
of the Indian reservation.
Similar things have happened to black children raised by white
foster parents. There is no Congressional legislation in these
cases, but the dogmatism of social workers and so-called social
welfare departments can lead to the same results. However, the
absence of federal legislation enables those judges who have common
sense, and common decency, to prevent similar tragedies in these
cases.
What is behind such perverse racial policies? Theories,
ideologies and presumptions of superior wisdom and virtue. It has
been known for centuries that there are people, especially among
the intelligentsia, who love humanity in the abstract but are not
all that concerned about what happens to the actual flesh-and-blood
human beings who are subjected to their grand visions and
policies.
If the vogue of the times is that children should be raised in
their own racial culture, that overrules other considerations. As
T.S. Eliot said, long ago: “Half of the harm that is done in this
world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean
to do harm — but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not
see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless
struggle to think well of themselves.”
But the rest of us need to be on guard against their rhetoric.
Nor is the Indian Child Welfare Act the only legislation whose
effects are the direct opposite of its title.
The Obama administration introduced legislation called the
“Employee Free Choice Act.” What would it do? Destroy the free
choice of workers as to whether or not they want to be represented
by a labor union.
The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 gave workers the right
to a federally conducted secret ballot election, in which they
could vote to have a union or not have a union. But, as more and
more workers in recent years have voted not to have a union, union
bosses have pushed for a law to allow this decision to be made
without a secret ballot. This would allow union organizers to use
pressure and coercion on those who don’t want to have a union.
Since union bosses contributed both money and manpower to the
election of Barack Obama, it is hardly surprising that he was
willing to reciprocate with the “Employee Free Choice Act.”
In this case, the Act failed to pass in Congress. But President
Obama accomplished some of its goals by appointing pro-union
members to the National Labor Relations Board, whose regulations
tilted elections in the unions’ favor.
If you can’t be bothered to look beyond rhetoric to realities,
don’t complain about bad laws, or even about the degeneration of
law itself into arbitrary rule over what was once a free
people.
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