Health Care or Child Care?

My intentions were to write something about my son’s spiritual curiosity as of late, but then I dared to open my emails and found this waiting there.  It is a piece written by Chuck Norris. . .yes, “Walker, Texas Ranger,” and it exposes a “dirty little secret” in the Obama healthcare bill that should be of utmost importance to parents especially.

“Health care reforms are turning into health care revolts. Americans are turning up the heat on congressmen in town hall meetings across the U.S.

While watching these political hot August nights, I decided to research the reasons so many are opposed to Obamacare to separate the facts from the fantasy. What I discovered is that there are indeed dirty little secrets buried deep within the 1,000-plus page health care bill.

Dirty secret No. 1 in Obamacare is about the government’s coming into homes and usurping parental rights over child care and development.

It’s outlined in sections 440 and 1904 of the House bill (Page 838), under the heading “home visitation programs for families with young children and families expecting children.” The programs (provided via grants to states) would educate parents on child behavior and parenting skills.

The bill says that the government agents, “well-trained and competent staff,” would “provide parents with knowledge of age-appropriate child development in cognitive, language, social, emotional, and motor domains … modeling, consulting, and coaching on parenting practices,” and “skills to interact with their child to enhance age-appropriate development.”

Are you kidding me?! With whose parental principles and values? Their own? Certain experts’? From what field and theory of childhood development? As if there are one-size-fits-all parenting techniques! Do we really believe they would contextualize and personalize every form of parenting in their education, or would they merely universally indoctrinate with their own?

Are we to assume the state’s mediators would understand every parent’s social or religious core values on parenting? Or would they teach some secular-progressive and religiously neutered version of parental values and wisdom? And if they were to consult and coach those who expect babies, would they ever decide circumstances to be not beneficial for the children and encourage abortions?

One government rebuttal is that this program would be “voluntary.” Is that right? Does that imply that this agency would just sit back passively until some parent needing parenting skills said, “I don’t think I’ll call my parents, priest or friends or read a plethora of books, but I’ll go down to the local government offices”? To the contrary, the bill points to specific targeted groups and problems, on Page 840: The state “shall identify and prioritize serving communities that are in high need of such services, especially communities with a high proportion of low-income families.”

Are we further to conclude by those words that low-income families know less about parenting? Are middle- and upper-class parents really better parents? Less neglectful of their children? Less needful of parental help and training? Is this “prioritized” training not a biased, discriminatory and even prejudicial stereotype and generalization that has no place in federal government, law or practice?

Bottom line: Is all this what you want or expect in a universal health care bill being rushed through Congress? Do you want government agents coming into your home and telling you how to parent your children? When did government health care turn into government child care?

Government needs less of a role in running our children’s lives and more of a role in supporting parents’ decisions for their children. Children belong to their parents, not the government. And the parents ought to have the right — and government support — to parent them without the fed’s mandates, education or intervention in our homes.”

Feel free to continue reading the entire article here.  Or see the 1000+ page bill from the government’s website here.  In addition, read up on the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.  Could this move by the Obama administration be a back-door way of reaching this ultimate end?

When I think of what is important to me as a wife, mother, Christian, and parent (things that are in play with myself and my family on a daily basis), these things come to mind:  my freedom to worship God, the sacred union of my marriage to my husband, my health and the health of my family, the choices I have in how to raise my son as a God-fearing young man, my schooling choices for him, the financial choices my husband and I make in order to have a worry-free retirement or send our son to a college of our (and his) choosing, and what we do with our hard-earned money. 

Then when I think of the ways that President Obama has threatened, weakened and in some ways destroyed some of those exact things (those things most important to me) in a matter of 6 months, I have all I can do to not be physically sick.  He’s threatening the union between husbands and wives all across the U.S., he is reversing the life-saving efforts others have put in place to save innocent babies from physical torture through abortion, he is squeezing God out of any and every public place he can get his hands on, he is driving my son so far into debt he will likely be owned by the government (think Orwellian) before he even graduates, he is tampering with health care in such radical ways that I can scratch my health and that of my family off my list as something I will have any control over anymore, and now he’s trying to mess with my son. 

Let me tell you, I’ll be darned before I let the government and their meddling hands, their anti-God values, and their bottom-line power-driven greed come into my home and take away those very things that I treasure so much–those things promised to me by our Founding Fathers, the Constitution of the United States, and my Heavenly Father Himself!

Go ahead and try, President Obama, but you will find that this otherwise shy and reserved housewife and mom will become a fierce lioness who has been backed into a corner one too many times by your socialistic agenda, and I will fight (legally and respectfully), but I will fight.  And based on all the town hall meetings across the country in which more people than expected are rising up and voicing opposition, I have a feeling I won’t be the only one.