'No Place for Kids'
LABASH, MATT
'No Place for Kids' by Matt Labash The Heritage Foundation s Kenneth Weinstein was talking trash about your mother. Or so it seemed shortly before Marian Wright Edelman's 200,000-strong "Stand for...
...Though People for the American Way isn't typically thought of as a children's advocacy group, representative Galen Nelson made it clear that everything is a children's issue...
...Like children, yeah, that's what we're doing...
...There were Girl Scouts and grandparents and C-list celebrities of yore, like The Fall Guy's Heather Thomas (known as "the other Heather"-meaning, not Locklear) and Dallas's Morgan Brittany (known as "the other Morgan"-meaning, not Fairchild...
...Even with some cuts and reduced growth, social services funding would still increase by 35 percent by 2002...
...choir, with their veins pumping Yoohoo as they danced the stilted boxstep one sees in Jacques d'Amboise chorus lines and the very worst Elvis movies...
...Instead, there were those who express vociferous concern that there are too many children-groups like Zero Population Growth and Planned Parenthood...
...Cleghorn, a young blind boy at the post-ceremony press conference...
...Or so it seemed shortly before Marian Wright Edelman's 200,000-strong "Stand for Children" at the Lincoln Memorial on June 1, which Weinstein called the "Last Stand for Big Government...
...Cynics may charge that Edelman is the Garry Kasparov of the children-as-pawns movement, a case buttressed by E.Z...
...This was still a cough and a spit compared with her orgasmic refrain: 87 references to the "children" (excluding "infants," "babies," etc...
...Like those chipper rascals in the 2,000-voice "America Sings...
...They strode hand in hand with people like Mike Golash, selling his Communist newspaper with the headline, "Capitalism: No place for kids...
...Children were indeed the focus of many groups in evidence on the Washington Mall-though that focus was not quite what was advertised...
...That's a private issue," an event staffer chided...
...And then, of course, there were the children...
...But if all the indignation seems a bit misdirected, we can find solace in the words of Malik Yoba, preeminent welfare policy expert and star of New York Undercover: "The idea is to get together and stand for something...
...But there were early reasons to doubt the ecumenical intentions of the organizers, like that abrupt cut-off at the press tent when I asked a lineup of celebrities if there were any registered Republicans in the bunch...
...As for Edelman's speech, it contained no less than 11 barely masked references to the evil Congress...
...Blasphemer...
...IT IS TIME the American people took a stand for children...
...In the most recent Republican budget, the states would get $2.9 billion more over six years than current law permits for cash block grants replacing current federal welfare supports as well as for child care and child welfare...
...After all, Harper's Bazaar coronated the dear woman, honcho of the Children's Defense Fund, as "America's universal mother...
...Republicans have cause to take umbrage, having advocated a $500 per child tax credit, school vouchers, student-loan interest deductions, and the Crimes Against Children Act...
...And the Women's Legal Defense Fund said protecting our children means "rejecting punitive and shortsighted welfare reform...
...He may well have been coached by Edelman, who commented earlier that "the social safety net is being destroyed" and the current "morally indefensible" welfare proposals are "fatally flawed, callous anti-child assaults...
...Over the last two years, there have been spending increases for foster care and adoption assistance, Head Start, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, even school lunches...
...All of this, of course, sounds as unsexy as it does irrelevant when Edelman floats from the dais her daunting statistics like the number of children killed, dropping out of school, or reported abused or neglected-problems that would seem better solved by good parenting than by a jihad against Republican lawmakers...
...The Sierra Club was protecting America's environment from the 104th Congress "for our families" and "for our future...
...And indeed, the day started innocuously enough...
...Edelman promised the march would be "a non-partisan call to action" and "our only agenda is our children"-not kicking the slats out of the welfare-reforming 104th Congress, as some said was her wont...
...Not that he's poisoning the bipartisan spirit of the day, but, after all, "look at which party is hostile to working families and children right now-it's the Republicans...
...Just who is Kenneth Weinstein to call the mother of us all a liar...
...Confused pause...
...With the body of a nine-year-old but the pipes of a Harlem preacher, Cleghorn ranted like a wound-up automaton: "It is time that America stops not allowing every child to have health care and welfare funds...
...All our issues-civil rights, civil liberties, and separation of church and state-certainly are important to children and affect their lives...
...in a 25-minute speech...
Vol. 1 • June 1996 • No. 39
