So… you two aren’t married but have a daughter together…
FORNICATORS!!!
You two make the Baby Jesus laugh milk out his nose.
Uncle Aro, that was very interesting anyway.
Thanks, and I’m sure your sister appreciates your help and concern with the kids.
Would that this hypocrisy were true. The daughter is from a prior marriage.
You’re right, I apologize. Jerry Falwell is a saint among men. I shall eschew further criticism of him.
Similarly here. I should not speak ill of people who try to have their religion’s creation story taught as science on an even par with the established scientific theory, despite no scientific evidence that their creation myth is any more factual than the Babylonian creation myth, or anyone else’s. Nor should I speak ill of people who, despite believing that “not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts” want to use their political muscle to make state schools, courthouses, office buildings, parks, etc., give primacy to their prayers and to symbols and slogans of their religion. Nor should I speak ill of people who, having a religious objection to certain kinds of relationships, want to ensure that civil laws discriminate against the people involved in them.
And on and on.
I’d say ‘factual’. Good luck in showing otherwise.
I set up a dichotomy between holding something as property and holding it in trust. An owner of a property is normally responsible only to himself in his treatment of the property. A trustee is ultimately responsible to the beneficiary, and (if his handling of the trust goes wrong in a sufficiently serious manner) to the society as a whole. Much like being a parent.
As far as words like ‘protect’ and ‘nurture’ (that seem to offend you so much) are concerned, this is simply a minimal and straightforward job description, so to speak. You keep your kids from playing in traffic; you raise them and train them and give them what they need to eventually become competent adults.
The nature of the task is altruistic, as you seem to use the word here. People aren’t purely anything. Your ‘implication’ is the implication that a person entering the ministry must be a holy man. But feel free to run on like that anyway.
Hey, if Couple A is supposed to give up their child to Couple B if Couple B can raise the child better - your ridiculous mischaracterization of my remarks - you didn’t say that it had to be lots better. In fact, your point seemed to be very much along the lines that the altruism you attributed to me, morally required me to give up the child to another couple that could do the least bit better. It was certainly in keeping with your tendency to take one comment and extrapolate like crazy from some harebrained spin you put on it, to make your debate adversary look bad.
Well, no shit, Sherlock. You got my point for once. Congrats.
I agree with you, for once.
There’s one motivation you’ve overlooked. If a social worker has an unrealistically large workload, and doesn’t have time to really see what’s going on with a family situation, I would think there would occasionally be a CYA-type urge to pull the kid first, rather than risk seeing one’s face on the front page of the local paper as the social worker who left a kid in the hands of lethally abusive parents.
I think it goes without saying that the more underfunded child-welfare programs are, the more likely that the overburdened workers will make significant errors, regardless of direction. But the instinct for self-preservation would militate toward erring as much as possible in the direction of taking the child out of a possibly dangerous home.
OK, so you’ve now switched from denying that you have a contemptuous and hateful opinion of religious conservatives to merely arguing that it is justified. Progress is being made. But once we agree on what the facts are about this, the rest is tangential, so I am not going to argue it. (see below)
Not going to try, as mentioned. My point was true regardless – you should not be deciding that “Person X is a member of Group Y and so must believe in A, B, & C. I shall therefore assume that remarks about that person in a conversation about Issue D are really references to Person X’s beliefs about A, and attack other posters on that basis”. [In this case, A would be exploiting children and D would be breaking up families] I added that this is especially true if you have an antipathy to that group – you might just consider the possibility that you have some bias to your extrapolations. But apparently you are not inclined to consider that possibility, so I’m not going to argue it – the point stands on its own.
No go. We were not talking about the “job description” or the nature of “the task”. We were talking about the nature of the relationship between parent and child. Which includes the “job” or “task” of raising the child, but also includes emotional and possessive aspects. By your very characterizing of the relationship in terms of the “task”, you were already implying a lack of other aspects of the relationship. Which is the point I made.
I simply don’t understand this paragraph. I did not mischaracterize your remarks or extrapolate like crazy from one comment, AFAIK, but I’m unclear exactly what your accusations are so I can’t be more specific.
It is true that I did not say that it had to be “lots” better, and my point would follow even if it were only the least bit better. But that applies to my actual point, not to the RTFirefly version of my point.
Here’s a generalized presentation:
IzzyR: Assuming Hypothetical Case A in which a switch would be better, your attitude would still be negative, implying a possessive feeling.
RTFirefly: Aha! You’ve asserted that in Hypothetical Case A it would, in fact, be better. This means that in Case A1 it would also be better (after all you did not specify) which is ridiculous. Therefore, I have refuted your point.
This is the nature of your distortion here. I have not made any assertion at all that in a given case it would be better, nor was this related to my point. I was searching for a way to illustrate the possessive attitude that parents feel towards their children, and put forth a hypothetical case in which it would indeed be better, and made a point about what your attitude would be given that assumption. You changed my point into an assertion that switches can be better, extrapolated that I was also saying that a “utility infielder” type of existence could also be beneficial, denied that this was so, and thought you were making sense.
My objection to your insertion of the word “marginally” was because your entire point was built on the interpretation of my words as being a statement that transfers were indeed beneficial. And you were trying to insinuate that I had implied that even multiple transfers would be beneficial. So you cannot build your point by subtly changing my words so as to make your extrapolation fit better. Of course, in reality I was saying nothing of the sort, as mentioned. Still I thought it was worth pointing out what you were doing, as it highlights the underhanded technique that so typifies your posts to this thread.
Actually, no, I did not get your point. This because you have no point, unless you consider a rejoinder to an argument that has not been made to be a point. I don’t.
I suspect that many good, loving parents who were completely 100% convinced that their child would be better off with somebody else actually would at least give serious consideration to giving them up.
But in the real world I can’t envisage such a situation. The same good, loving parents would probably place things like the existant parent-child bond ahead of any material gain on the part of the child. They couldn’t be certain that they new parents would love the child as much as they do, nor could they guarantee that the child would love the new parents as much as themselves. And this would be their primary need for any carer of the child.
Anyone that did put materiality foremost would not be a good parent in the first place, so the example fails.
So I think your example, Izzy, is simply so abstracted as to be meaningless. Your axiom is flawed. I can’t assume X because I can’t envisage a situation where X could ever be true. To put it simply, a child’s best place is always with the good, loving parents it has always had. Postulating 1 = 0 will allow you to prove anything you want.
pan
I could quibble with you over whether X could ever be true. But even if it’s not, you should understand that the purpose of my hypothetical scenario was not to “prove” anything - rather to illustrate. So at most you are saying your mind can’t relate to the illustration because you can’t envision the actual scenario. I can live with that.
Possible, in some cases. I thought of this when I wrote my original post on the subject, and inserted the word “gladly”, in “gladly give them up” etc. Point being that even someone who did give them up would do it with a heavy heart and a sense of loss. And that the giving them up would be a sacrifice of something of their own for the sake of the child. So the feelings of possessiveness would be present even in such a case.
(This is all, of course, unconnected to my subsequent discussion with RTF, which concerns what it was that was being said - your point bears on the validity of my point. Of course you are free to argue the latter issue, but I just thought I’d point out the distinction).
Christ, I get tired of saying the same thing over and over again. Social workers don’t “pull kids.” Judges pull kids. Social workers present evidence, substantive physical evidence such as that listed above.
The “CYA” principle works the other way around. Malpractice in social work is dealt with swiftly and harshly. SW’s have a strict code of ethics, and the default position is to try to to use other family members or other social services to help preserve families before they try to go to a judge. If a child is actually pulled, it is because THERE IS SUBSTANTIAL EVIDENCE OF ABUSE OR NEGLECT. It is not and cannot be done at the whim of an individual SW, and the word, alone, of a SW is not enough to get a judge to sign removal papers.
Since when did love equate to possession? I would feel a loss at losing my parents too. So do I possess them even as they possess me?
Just because I want something, doesn’t mean I feel ownership over it.
pan
Something in that. The question then would be if indeed people do feel that they have a right to the bond and to not suffer the loss. So that suppose someone - say, another sibling - would edge you out of your relationship with your parents, would you feel that you had been deprived of something that is rightfully yours? If so, you would feel some degree possessiveness. Remember, what we’re (or at least I’m) talking about is a person’s attitude regarding a social worker breaking up their family - I’m trying to find equivalents for such a scenario.
Well I certainly agree that the break up of a family is extremely hard for everyone involved.
If I were edged out of my relationship with my parents (tough concept to visualise, that) I should imagine it would be similar to being ousted from a relationship with a spouse. Betrayal, rejection, despondancy etc. It would be hard to identify feelings associated with possession exactly in amongst that lot.
pan
Well I would consider possessive feelings the feeling that you have a right to the relationship, as opposed to merely happening to be in it. FTM, I think most people feel that way about a spouse to. If your spouse voluntarily left you you might feel betrayal, rejection, despondancy etc. But if someone else deliberately won over your spouse and convinced her to leave you, you would probably feel robbed and cheated as well. That being because the guy “took” something that was rightfully “yours”.
CPS/CWA etc organizations are poorly funded and tend to be staffed by a fairly inbred bunch of social workers with a deplorable organizational culture*. The court systems and the available service systems for abused /neglected children are also the victims of bad funding and low prioritization. I think many children are subjected to very tight and coercive control within these systems, and are occasionally abused there as well. As for the circumstances under which children are removed from their abusive families, I’m under the impression that they screw up a lot, leaving behind 10 abused children in situations they should have been removed from for every not-really-abused child they take away from families for no valid reason.
None of which indicates that it is a bad idea to report observed or suspected child abuse. As bad as the system is, it’s what we’ve got and it does save lives.
- To elaborate: child welfare orgs tend to hire social workers who have worked in that field before, or brand-new fresh-out-of-school social workers; there seems to be a “corporate culture” attitude among them that the rest of social work (and the rest of the world for that matter) is composed of people who just don’t understand the issues. They tend to have a stronger-than-usual ethic of emotional detachment (they probably need it to keep from going postal, dealing with what they have to deal with) and they tend to be conservative about policy, defending the status quo and resisting proposed changes. Many of them believe the ideal pattern of intervention is to take away children from abusive situations temporarily, counsel the abusive parents, then return the children with some continued monitoring. The policy of the sanctity of the biological family is cast in stone and they are generally very resistant to the idea that people should lose custody of their children permanently. They tend to be completely oblivious to issues of authority and its abuses–child abuse consists of physical acts (or non-acts in the case of neglect), so stripping children of all vestiges of self-determination is not an issue for them; their own authority with regards to suspected abusers is not seen as a possible area of abuse on their own part, nor are the rights of suspected victims to make any decisions or to be treated as much more than property-bundled in need of protection given much attention. They tend to be rather anal about doing things by the book in a very automatic fashion.
All these comments are from my experience as a social worker in elder abuse, sitting across the table from other social workers at various conferences and training sessions at which child welfare social workers were present. This took place in NY City. These observations may not reflect a representative sample of the sub-profession, especially in other venues, and is entirely subject anyhow.
property-bundles.
subjective.