Ann Bailey
Sitting there in the dentist’s office, the Reader’s Digest cover caught my attention. Smartly-dressed Michelle Obama grinned at me from the cover and the headline read: “Michelle Obama’s Family Values.” But it was the quote from her that really got me going: “Everything we do must be for our children.” But before I could snatch up the magazine, the receptionist called me into the back and into the dentist chair.
“Everything we do must be for our children.” I could not agree more! That’s such a lovely statement, but unfortunately, the policies that I see promoted by the occupants of the White House leave me wondering how much Mrs. Obama actually understands that statement. As I sat there with the man in the white mask trying to save my ailing tooth, I had plenty of time to make a mental list of policies and behaviors that are promoted in this country, that do anything but show that “everything we do is for our children.”
These are not in any particular order, but here’s my list:
- Readily accept and even promote cohabitation, including giving benefits to individuals who “shack up,” when we know that these relationships are unstable at best and downright dangerous for children at worst.
- Create policies that encourage individuals to bear children out-of-wedlock dooming many of these children to lives of disadvantage and poverty.
- Allowed same-sex marriage to gain a foothold, ignoring the fact that acceptance of same-sex marriage means unequivocally that marriage and child bearing are unrelated. Once again putting adults “needs” ahead of children’s.
- Use reproductive technologies that bless the lives of married men and women that wish to have children, but also allow children to be created to satisfy the whims of adults – many of these children being stripped of their right to have and to know both their mother and father.
- Disposable marriages and easy divorce that pretends to serve the needs of adults, but has brought enormous physical, emotional, and economic harm to children.
- One word: abortion!
- Allowed feminism to convince us that woman’s place is in the workforce and that daycare suits children just fine. Now we’ve built an economy built around this falsehood.
- Speaking of economy, we’ve consumed all that our parents bequeathed to us, lived a lifestyle beyond our means for decades, and now we’re consuming our children’s future as well.
This is certainly not an exhaustive list, but it is a sad one. Mrs. Obama and all of us need to take a closer look at that sentence and REALLY think through what it means. What’s best for our children should always be our primary focus– not just window dressing for a magazine cover.