[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 149 (Thursday, October 30, 1997)]
[House]
[Page H9784]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            ACLU AT IT AGAIN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Tennessee [Mr. Duncan] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN. Mr. Speaker, last Thursday in one of our Nation's leading 
daily newspapers, the Christian Science Monitor, was this paragraph:
  ``The ACLU is at it again. The organization that opposes school 
uniforms, obstructs teen curfews, fights metal detectors at airports, 
and challenges restrictions on child pornography is now turning its 
legal firepower against single-sex public schools.''
  As the headline in the Monitor said, ``Single-sex schools are a form 
of diversity.'' The Christian Science Monitor is not a conservative 
publication. Also, even many liberals like columnist William Raspberry 
and others have praised single-sex schools.
  People should be free to go to any type of school they want to go to 
or their parents want them to go to. But everyone should realize how 
elitist and left wing the ACLU has become, how out of step with the 
American people it is. It basically has become an organization that is 
supported by rich socialists.
  They fight against school prayer and in favor of child pornography. 
What a group. Then they try to portray themselves as a pro bono public 
interest group and then demand $6.7 million, $450 an hour, for legal 
work in their suit against the Citadel. The ACLU charged $105,000 just 
to prepare the bill in that case, so now all the students at the 
Citadel will have to pay higher fees for their college education, 
thanks to the ACLU.
  While I am speaking about the type of education our children receive 
and the choices or options they have, let me also mention last week's 
White House Conference on Day Care. Columnists Linda Chavez and Mona 
Charen both wrote about this conference and the harmful effects of 
placing small children into institutional day care.
  Linda Chavez wrote, ``From everything we know about child 
development, it's a good thing more children, especially infants, are 
not being cared for in institutional settings. Babies and very young 
children need the kind of personal attention and care giving that is 
impossible to find in a day care center no matter how well-intentioned 
or well-meaning the staff.''
  She quoted Dr. Stanley Greenspan, a professor of pediatrics and 
psychiatry at George Washington University, who wrote recently in the 
Washington Post, ``In the rush to improve and increase child care, we 
are ignoring a more fundamental reality: Much of the child care 
available for infants and toddlers in this country simply isn't good 
for them.''
  Among his reasons were a lack of continuity with one care giver and 
lack of prolonged interactions between child and adult. In other words, 
babies and small children need, desperately need and desperately want, 
much more individualized attention than is possible even in the best, 
most expensive day care center.
  Mona Charen went on to write: ``American families are creative. 
Though we hear endless calls for more and better child care, 66.7 
percent of mothers with children under age 6 are full-time mothers or 
are employed part-time. They are not crying out for more institutional 
child care. What they do need are tax breaks, flex-time, work-at-home 
options, telecommuting and job sharing.''
  She goes on to say this: ``The notion of a child care crisis is a 
myth. We now have expert testimony like that of Dr. Greenspan and other 
experts cited by the Clintons themselves to bolster the common-sense 
intuition that parents are the best guardians of young children. The 
goal of public policy ought to be to ensure that as many parents as 
possible are free to make that choice.''
  The thing that would help children the most, Mr. Speaker, would be to 
drastically decrease the cost of government. Today the average person 
is paying almost half of his or her income in taxes of all types, 
Federal, State and local.
  Thus, as several commentators have noted, today one spouse has to 
work to support the government while the other spouse works to support 
the family. Many families who would like to spend more time with their 
children simply do not have the option because of our big government, 
the Nanny State we have created. Our children would be far better off 
today, Mr. Speaker, if we drastically downsized our government and 
drastically decreased its cost and left more money for parents to spend 
on their own children and less on government bureaucrats. Our children 
will be far better off with less government and more time with and 
attention from their parents.

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