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March 13, 2006

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I worked for the Child Advocacy Institute here in California (regarded to be one of the better states in the above regard) and I could still tell you horrific stories.

"One was a boy who had the sort of slick smooth exterior normally found in con men over the age of thirty."

That phrase reminds me of the best bit of advice I can explicitly remember from my mother: "Beware someone is very charming. That is a skill they developed for a reason."

Yet my beloved home state has enough money to pass, & presumably defend in court, an anti-abortion statute that plainly violates Roe, as a bet on Alito/Roberts futures.

The problem, as usual, is that no Dem has the guts to campaign on TV commercials about dying kids, even though that is EXACTLY what we're talking about here. See also our terrible Medicaid cuts.

Race issues aside, Mississippi continues to be the poster child for a strong federal government.

How terribly sad.
We have/had a similar problem here in the state of Queensland (australia). About 2years ago, heaps of kids were falling through the safety net. It came about because children that were at risk or abused by their parents were now either at risk or abused by their foster carers. Something very similar about a little girl with an std started things.
Some say it has been fixed others say it hasn't.

Some say it has been fixed others say it hasn't.

Regarding foster care, I can only say this. My research included a bit of study of child welfare efforts in 19th century Europe. Lots of foster families. Lots of scandals. Some that still give me the willies, and the cases were from the 1860s.

The problem, though, isn't some old 19th century thing. It's still with us. How much money is the commune/city/state willing to spend to take care of kids without stable families? What resources other than money is it willing to allocate? How is the oversight going to be carried out?

It's never "fixed" for very long. It's a constant struggle. It's a problem of human society.

I seem to remember a Faulkner story where a boy is kept under the porch chained to a log (though now that I think about it, it may have been a true story in Laurel Mississippi that was noted as being Faulkneresque). This, coupled with the kind of notion that one's home is one's castle (As seen in Faulkner's A Rose for Emily) has always made me suspicious of libertarian argumentation.

And FTR, Mississippi is my home state as well. Yet almost everyone I went to University with has moved away, which points to one possible aspect of the problem. I'm not claiming I was a member of the best and brightest, but the out migration is pretty substantial.

Somewhere between heartbreaking and inspiring - recent New Yorker on the Nurse-Family Partnership in Louisiana.

lj, as the token self-identifying libertarian, I'll just point out that in my view -- and that of many libertarians -- cases of child abuse and foster care nightmares are absolutely within the realm of state power to intervene. In fact, it's incumbent upon the state to do so, because children, while having all the human rights that adults do, do not have all the legal rights nor can they often act on their own behalf. Please, don't try to tar libertarians with some bullcrap "What I do to my kid in my house is my bidness" argument, because it won't wash.

Julian Sanchez at Reason does a lot of writing on foster care, the state's responsibilites towards minors, how it fails at them and what to do about it. Much of it is directed at the elephant in the room here, which is the number of red states (which I'll bet $5 includes Mississippi) that won't let gays foster or adopt children.

Phil, Florida remains the only state in the US which legally bans same-sex couples from adoption (though not from long-term fostering).

FWIW, Jes & Phil, Dahlia Lithwick wrote the other day:

Only Florida categorically prohibits gay parents from adopting, although Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Utah, and North Dakota do so as a matter of practice.
Not sure what this means, but I'll trust her on it.

Point taken, Phil, I didn't mean to tar you, it's just that if the bond between parent and child can't be something that you can place trust in, then the whole notion that you can trust people when left to their own devices is a bit shaky. More about my own reason for not being a libertarian rather than a judgement.

if the bond between parent and child can't be something that you can place trust in, then the whole notion that you can trust people when left to their own devices is a bit shaky.

Eh, down that road lies authoritarianism, lj. At least as far down it as I can possibly see. What things, specifically, do you think people should not be left to their own devices to do in life?

Jes, true as far as it goes, but what happens is you run into sub rosa stuff like this, in which religious groups -- who insinuate themselves heavily into providing adoption and foster placement services -- get to exempt gays from the process as a matter of policy rather than as a matter of law.

I also have little doubt that, in addition to what Lithwick notes in the article linked by Anderson, many states somehow find themselves without a lot of gay adopters on the short list.

What things, specifically, do you think people should not be left to their own devices to do in life?

The snarky reply is beat and starve their children, but that's certainly not fair. However, I do think that the libertarian philosophy has been co-opted by those who want to remove government scrutiny for purposes not related to personal freedom. Along with this, you see the notion that somehow, the people who suffer from the absence of government regulation somehow had it coming, a la the Protestant concept of the elect. I don't have a scorecard, I don't want to accuse people of being libertarian without some firm proof, but when I see things like 'New Orleans was a failed city', there is the whiff of post hoc justification.

To me, authoritarianism starts when we try to limit what people think rather than intervening in shaping the choices they have (and any system of government is a way of shaping choices of the electorate). I admit that any system of punishment creates a presumption that those who commit those acts are wrong, thus telling us how we should treat such offenses, so there's no clear line here. But I do believe that libertarian principles are often used as a stalking horse for an anti-government agenda, and not being a libertarian myself, I tend to toss out that baby to get rid of that bathwater, at least in my own reckoning of things. Weighing in on that as well is the fact that I live in a nation that probably tolerates a higher degree of intrusiveness than anything that could be imagined in the States.

Also, I think that change has to be managed, and information technology coupled with the power of the business world automatically skewed playing field in terms of access to information. I think we have to come to grips that more and more of what we thought were our private lives are going to be public, and in this sense, libertarianism is a reactive stance rather than a forward looking one. This is one reason why libertarians have found a home with the 'conservative' side of the spectrum.

Again, this is my own attempt to come to grips with it, so please don't take this as a personal attack.

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