Hillary really means: it takes a government

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 19, 1996 | by Eugene Narrett

Prior to the latest revelations on Travelgate and Whitewater-Castle Grande, Hillary Rodham Clinton's book, It Takes a Village... And Other Lessons Children Teach Us, was likely intended to burnish Hillary's image as a compassionate and caring advocate for children. This pose, carefully groomed for two decades, is an imposture as bad or worse as any lie related to the many scandals surrounding this administration. As Janet Scott Barlow points out in the February issue of Chronicles magazine, the first lady's use of language "isn't a means of communication but a vehicle of manipulation;" revealing "her messy mix of personal entitlement and political expediency." Behind the feel-good slogans about putting children first, the officious solicitude of the Clinton crowd is grievously dangerous to children and families.

Start with her book's title. A sub-Saharan proverb, it implies the superior wisdom and child-raising practices of Central Africa, whose lax attitudes toward illegitimacy and adultery our rulers would normalize, using the Rousseauian pretense of the noble savage as their excuse to reshape the traditional family beyond recognition.

More specifically, the book pulls together several dogmas crucial to lifestyle liberalism and the intrusive bureaucracies that are its operating method. First, as was insisted by feminists at the Beijing women's conference, the traditional family is the center of violence against women. Second, both men and childbearing are oppressive to women. Third, and following from this, abortion is an absolute right and matter of "reproductive health," an issue of privacy between a woman and her doctor. Consequently, children are sexual free agents with absolute rights to belief and behavior. Parents who oppose or fail to inculcate these notions in their children must be "assisted by the state." Obvious targets for such "education" are those parents in Falmouth, Mass., and elsewhere, who object to their children demanding and receiving condoms at school against parental wishes and without parental notification.

The theory behind such nanny-state practices has been articulated by the Clintons' closest associates. Attorney General Janet Reno, for instance, intends that "every child age 0 to 3 should have either proper parental supervision or safe, good, constructive `educare,'" according to New American magazine. Guess who will judge what "proper" means? "Government has got to ensure that parents are old enough, wise enough and able to care for their children." Left to the compassionate Reno, unmarried and childless herself, government will judge whether parents are wise or wealthy enough to be allowed to raise their kids. If not, the state will step in, "especially in the critical years between birth and age 31," an idea the first lady has pushed for two decades.

Where do such usurpations lead? In a speech at the University of Chicago late in 1991, Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala offered her vision of a typical kindergartner's day in 2001. "Renata doesn't know any moms who don't work," Shalala burbled, "but she knows lots of moms who are single. She knows some kids who live with their dads, and children who have two dads. There are lots of different kinds of families."

Sound familiar? After school, "Renata will play gender-neutral games in government day care and think of herself as part of the world, not just her town or the United States." Sometimes, folks, it takes a global village.

Current scandals have their pathetic and amusing aspects, with President Clinton complaining that he's broke; Hillary asserting, "I never threw a Bible or a lamp" at Bill. (It may have been a vase or an ashtray.) But even the Clintons' suspicious-looking finances, their cruel cronyism in the travel-office firings and apparent stonewalling on aspects of the Vince Foster case look small beside attempts to replace family ties with government intrusion.

Thus, new evidence of lying and coverups in the Oval Office, having long gathered in the alternative press, breaks like God's belated wrath on the arrogant reprobates who have sought to take His place. Such as they never learn.

Eugene Narrett is a professor of English at Framingham State College in Massachusetts.