Obama's War on Children

With the Democrats ramping up their rhetoric about the Republicans' war on women, their war on the poor, their war on people of color, and their war on seniors (promoted as their attacks on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security), is the president waging a different war -- a war on children?  Why is no one yet talking in any significant way about his campaign to destroy our children -- intellectually, economically, spiritually, and literally?

Don't think that this administration is antagonistic toward children?  Well, consider the following actions by Obama and his administrative and legislative cohorts:

Destroying children inside and outside the womb

Whether or not you believe that life happens at conception or at some later point during pregnancy, the destruction of children due to partial-birth abortions is despicable and a literal war on children's lives.  A number of times, Obama castigated the Supreme Court for its decision to uphold the 2003 Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act.  At a 2008 fundraiser on the 35^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Obama had this to say: "Last year, the Supreme Court decided by a vote of 5-4 to uphold the Federal Abortion Ban, and in doing so undermined an important principle of Roe v. Wade: that we must always protect women's health."

Michael Gerson, in an April 2, 2008 article in the Washington Post, highlighted Obama's advocacy when it came to abortion:

But Obama's record on abortion is extreme. He opposed the ban on partial-birth abortion -- a practice a fellow Democrat, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once called "too close to infanticide." Obama strongly criticized the Supreme Court decision upholding the partial-birth ban. In the Illinois state Senate, he opposed a bill similar to the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, which prevents the killing of infants mistakenly left alive by abortion. And now Obama has oddly claimed that he would not want his daughters to be 'punished with a baby' because of a crisis pregnancy -- hardly a welcoming attitude toward new life.

As reported by Peter Kersinow on February 12 of this year ("Clarifying Obama's Vote on Born Alive") in National Review Online, Obama even goes so far as to allow babies born after an unsuccessful abortion to die from maltreatment and neglect.  As a state senator in Illinois, he fought and voted against the Illinois version of the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, which was designed to protect those children.  The federal version of that law was supported by every senator in Congress, and even NARAL did not oppose it.

Limiting educational reform

There is an unholy alliance between Obama's administration and the teachers' unions in America that stifles any kind of creativity and efficiency when it comes to educational strategy.  And Obama and his bureaucrats at the Department of Education want to control the educational system to ensure that the Democrats will get those union votes.  Take the onerous No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law that has been creating distress because it requires local school boards to acquiesce to the federal government's burdensome regulations.  Well, instead of moving that responsibility to the states and localities, Obama's changes to the law increased federal control, thus inhibiting effective programs for the kids.  Here is Lindsey M. Burke, senior policy analyst in domestic policy studies at The Heritage Foundation, on Obama's waivers to the No Child Left Behind law:

When national organizations and the Department of Education dictate standards and tests, they effectively control what can -- and can't--be taught in local schools. The degree to which these critical decisions are about to be centralized and nationalized is unprecedented in America.

By circumventing Congress to grant strings-attached waivers, the White House has demonstrated disregard for the legislative process and determination to further tighten federal control over education.

If the Obama administration were truly interested in providing relief to states from NCLB's mandates, it would be supporting Congressionally-borne alternatives like the A-PLUS proposal, which would fundamentally reduce the federal role by allowing states to completely opt-out of NCLB - no strings attached.

Educational control rightly belongs to parents and teachers and to state and local officials responsible for assuring that the children under their care get [an] education. If decision-making is to be restored to its proper place, states must resist this latest federal power grab, resisting the siren call of waivers and, instead, demanding genuine relief from Washington.

When you control education policy, you control the teachers, and you will probably control their votes.  But what about the kids?  What about the kinds of training that they will need to make it in this increasingly technological world?  In the last competition (2009) among the world's fifteen-year-olds regarding reading, math, and science sponsored by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), America fared average among 65 countries in reading and science and below average in math.  We need to do much better, but our children have been -- pun intended -- left behind by Obama, all in the interests of control and votes.

Preventing children from gaining independence

Making children and young adults dependent on government for everything -- the proverbial nanny state -- plays a huge part in the ideology of this president and his administration.  Ken Blackwell and Ken Klukowski put it well in an article entitled "Obama's Nanny State Socialism" for the Huffington Post on November 21, 2011:

There are two components to socialism. It's a philosophy that government owes to everyone in society a certain standard of living. It includes government-provided or subsidized food, housing, education, and healthcare.

Socialism provides entitlements through massive taxation, and also believes that heavy government regulation leads to a better society. It does all this in the name of 'social justice.'

No honest person can deny that President Obama's policies fit these criteria. Government-run healthcare (and calling it a fundamental right, despite the fact that it's nowhere mentioned in the Constitution). Federal control of education. Government picking winners and losers in the economy.

Obama's presidency keeps children dependent and burdened with an entitlement mindset.

Destroying their hopes for economic success

The debt and the deficit expanded by Obama's actions as president have eliminated the hope that children now will have it better than their parents did.  A March 18, 2012 article entitled "The U.S. Economy: Soul Crushing Total System Failure" on theeconomiccollapseblog website had this to say about our economic condition:

No matter how often the pretty people on television tell us that the U.S. economy is getting better, it isn't going to change the soul crushing agony that millions of American families are going through right now[.] ... [T]he percentage of working age Americans that are actually employed has stayed very flat since late 2009, and the average duration of unemployment is hovering near an all-time high. Sadly, this is not just a temporary downturn. The U.S. economy has been slowly declining for several decades and is nearing total system failure. Right now, many poverty statistics are higher than they have ever been since the Great Depression. Many measurements of government dependence are the highest that we have ever seen in all of U.S. history. The emerging one world economic system (otherwise known as "free trade") has cost the U.S. economy tens of thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars of our national wealth. The federal government is going into unprecedented amounts of debt in order to try to maintain our current standard of living, but there is no way that they will be able to sustain this kind of borrowing for too much longer.

Considering Obama's controlling actions regarding our children and grandchildren and his promises to have government "help" them at every turn in their lives, do we not understand that he is waging a war on their liberty?  The recent "Julia" re-election ad campaign is a prime example of this, where a fictional child grows up accessing the myriad government programs available.  As Connor Boyer explains in his article called "Why Obama's 'Julia' campaign will be a success" on The Daily Caller:

At age 3, 'Julia' enrolls in Head Start, which Obama has expanded but Romney wants to scale back. At age 18, she qualifies for up to $10,000 under Obama's American Opportunity Tax Credit, which Romney wants to let expire. As she ages, she takes advantage of Obama's preferred health care plan, capped student loan payments, free birth control and medical screenings, government business loans and welfare programs  --  all things that Obama claims Romney either wants to reduce or eliminate.

In short, Julia is an irresponsible woman dependent upon an increasingly large nanny state, and how dare anybody prevent her from getting the money and services she thinks she deserves. Obama's campaign messaging, then, celebrates the entitlement society the president is helping to foment. Sadly, that message may be enough to win him the support he needs.

When the campaign rhetoric reaches fever pitch in September and October of this year about how the Republicans are evil and how they want to destroy the rights and benefits of women, the poor, people of color, and senior citizens, realize that Obama and the Democrats are fixated on keeping children enslaved by government.  They are systematically destroying the values of initiative and accountability that create success and are implanting the DNA of government entitlement that ensures failure.