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Sunday, May 27, 2018

Ignoring Victims For Political Reasons

If you follow politics at all, you have no doubt heard some Democrat or other leftist talk about how much they care about children.  The left paints Republicans as uninterested in helping the less fortunate especially children.  Democrats care, you see, or at least that is what we are told over and over again.  That's why recent events in Philadelphia are so important.

The city of Philadelphia has a crisis with regard to children who need care but who are without families to provide it.  The opioid crisis has taken a large number of parents out of the picture in Philadelphia, as has been the case around the nation.  Families have been destroyed.  Children have been left to fend for themselves.  Normally, as the children are discovered, they are placed with relatives, but if none are available, they are put in foster homes.  There are literally tens of thousands of kids in the foster system.

But here's where it gets crazy.  The single biggest agency providing foster homes in Philadelphia is Catholic.  That shouldn't be any surprise.  Something like 60% of the people in Philadelphia who identify as religious are Catholics.  Catholic relief agencies have been helping place children in foster care in the city for decades.  But now, the city government is ending all that.  That's right, the city of Philadelphia announced that starting in June, it will no longer place children in homes found by the Catholic agencies.  It's not a question of money; the Catholic agencies are charities and non-profit.  Nor is it a question of the city having too many foster homes; in fact, there is a severe shortage at the moment of such homes.  No, the problem is that the Catholic agencies are, well....Catholic.  They follow Catholic religious teaching.  They promote marriage and they discourage abortion, among other things.  Of course, these views have nothing to do with helping a child who is a victim of the opioid crisis, nothing unless you happen to be a liberal Democrat of the type that run Philadelphia.

The end result of the move by the city government in Philadelphia is that hundreds of thousands of children will no longer be able to be placed in foster care.  Just think of all these children who will be stuck in shelters rather than in homes where they have a good chance at a more normal sort of life with a family.  Clearly, the liberal Democrats who run Philadelphia don't care about the children or their fate when there's a chance to stick it to a Catholic organization.  Ideology is just so much more important than helping children in their minds.

It's worth noting that the move by the City of Philadelphia appears to violate state law in Pennsylvania.  Even that doesn't seem to matter to the city.  It's a disgrace.

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