1.....My first impulse is to relocate “moral” from the second clause to the first: Is health care for children a moral responsibility of parents? YES!

2.....But as private morals continue to erode (partly as a cultural afterburn from the ‘60s), and the media rivet the public’s attention on the doings of government, the electorate’s measure-weight has been sliding on the responsibility bar from private to public. “Why doesn’t the GOVERNMENT do something about...?”

3.....The Republican side of me says that pain is a gift of God, and immoral people should suffer for their immorality. I have seen lepers with no toes or fingers: their disease removed the feeling of pain, and rats ate off their fingers and toes during the night. A child touches a hot stove—once. Morality is not optional, and government should do nothing to encourage the illusion that irresponsible behavior does not necessarily entail unpleasant consequences. If government protects children from suffering caused by parental immorality, immoral parents feel less pressure to shape up to their responsibilities. So, life isn’t fair and the children should suffer.

4.....The Democrat side of me says that society, by the arm of the state, has moral responsibility for protecting children from immoral, irresponsible parents. Some Democrat wrote this week’s question: “moral” is in its second clause: society should feel “a moral imperative” to act, through government agencies, for the good of children, who belong to society and not just to their parents.

There now, I’ve taken care of both the political and the moral dimensions of this week’s question.

Which brings me to RELIGION. “On Faith” is a religion blog, but the wording of this week’s question tempts us panelists to sound off on morality and politics and feel that we’ve done our duty to the question. Secularists will feel that we’ve done our job without mentioning religion, which they consider irrelevant or worse.

Down to business: What have I to say to the question from the religion angle?

1.....God the Creator—and not parents or society—is children’s fundamental owner. As our U.S. Declaration of Independence states, they are “endowed by their Creator....”

2.....Children are not born “clean slates” but with tendencies to good and evil: they need the guiding (directing, correcting) judgment of God, their parents, and society. Here’s the wry way that great public intellectual, Reinhold Niebuhr, often put it: “The only provable biblical doctrine is original sin.”

3.....Because of the Bible’s influence on America’s founding fathers, that realistic wisdom about the human condition is built into the structure of American government. Not all the fathers were church members, and some even disavowed biblical religion; but all had formed within them this biblical realism about human nature. It’s most severe form was Calvinism, which James Madison mastered as a student of theologians at the College of New Jersey, which was to become Princeton University. God as Judge of nature, history, and the human heart was and is the religious base of America’s historic realistic doctrine of human nature.

4.....As American public education no longer teaches that God is the Judge and that children are both evil and good (i.e., the biblical realistic doctrine of human nature), American morals have become (like our children’s fat bodies) increasingly flabby. The European Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason was welcomed into American public education, but not—at first—it’s romantic-Rousseauean notion that children are only good, not also evil. The West’s autonomous individual had sturdy morality, including the dignity of taking responsibility for self and family. The senses of must-pay and can-do were conjoint. The disciplining of children—by parents and teachers and officers of the law—was as severe as was necessary to produce this kind of adult. The motives were the glory of God and the good of the child (in light of, as the Bible puts it, “the kindness and severity of God” [Romans 11:22]).

5.....Many forces have compromised the Western autonomous individual’s ability to take full responsibility for self and family. For human good, government intervention has increased with the increase in societal complexity. The irony is that while moral muscularity has been becoming more necessary, American public education—now captive to the romantic nonsense that children are good—has been making it less likely. Result? We are sliding down out of our freedoms into a new techno-socialism. Increasingly, government (including the public schools) is lifting responsibilities from parents. “Family” no longer carries the plain and simple meaning of father/mother/child. And the declining moral level of the populace may soon make the American way of life, with its panoply of freedoms, unsustainable.

6.....No one who has read me thus far will be surprised at my prescription from this diagnosis. It is a return to our roots, the formative influences on America’s founding fathers—the Bible and the Enlightenment.
In 1941, I heard American philosopher Elton Trueblood give a lecture which became famous. It’s title so signals its content that I need not bridge from it to the burden of what I have been saying: “Our Cut-Flower Civilization.” (In our home, Loree and I have only potted flowers. We believe in the whole plant.)