Recently
by Thomas Sowell: A
Political Glossary

Nowhere is
political rhetoric more shameless – or more dangerous – than in
the pious names that politicians give to the legislation they pass.
Perhaps the most egregious example is the so-called “Indian Child
Welfare Act,” which callously sacrifices the welfare of Indian children.

Time and again,
children with some American Indian ancestry, who have been adopted
by families that are not of that ancestry, have been suddenly taken
by law from the only parents they have ever known and transferred
to some distant Indian reservation, to live among strangers in a
world they know nothing about.

You might think
that the sight of bewildered, desperate and weeping children in
court, crying out for mommy and daddy as they are forcibly removed
from people who have cared for them for years, might cause those
who are seizing them to relent. But no! Such children are routinely
sacrificed on the altar to the Indian Child Welfare Act.

The child might
be two years old or twelve. But the legal rights of a biological
relative and tribal authorities trump the well being of the child,
even if that biological relative has been a complete stranger to
the child.

Some years
ago, the chairman of the Civil Rights Commission visited a 14-year-old
girl who had been removed from her adopted parents and was living
on an Indian reservation, where she was miserable. But when the
story came out, outrage was directed not at those who had ruined
this girl’s life, but at the member of the Civil Rights Commission
who had dared to intrude on the sacred soil of the Indian reservation.

Similar things
have happened to black children raised by white foster parents.
There is no Congressional legislation in these cases, but the dogmatism
of social workers and so-called social welfare departments can lead
to the same results. However, the absence of federal legislation
enables those judges who have common sense, and common decency,
to prevent similar tragedies in these cases.

What is behind
such perverse racial policies? Theories, ideologies and presumptions
of superior wisdom and virtue. It has been known for centuries that
there are people, especially among the intelligentsia, who love
humanity in the abstract but are not all that concerned about what
happens to the actual flesh-and-blood human beings who are subjected
to their grand visions and policies.

If the vogue
of the times is that children should be raised in their own racial
culture, that overrules other considerations. As T.S. Eliot said,
long ago: “Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to
people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm –
but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they
justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to
think well of themselves.”

But the rest
of us need to be on guard against their rhetoric. Nor is the Indian
Child Welfare Act the only legislation whose effects are the direct
opposite of its title.

The Obama administration
introduced legislation called the “Employee Free Choice Act.” What
would it do? Destroy the free choice of workers as to whether or
not they want to be represented by a labor union.

The
National Labor Relations Act of 1935 gave workers the right to a
federally conducted secret ballot election, in which they could
vote to have a union or not have a union. But, as more and more
workers in recent years have voted not to have a union, union bosses
have pushed for a law to allow this decision to be made without
a secret ballot. This would allow union organizers to use pressure
and coercion on those who don’t want to have a union.

Since union
bosses contributed both money and manpower to the election of Barack
Obama, it is hardly surprising that he was willing to reciprocate
with the “Employee Free Choice Act.”

In this case,
the Act failed to pass in Congress. But President Obama accomplished
some of its goals by appointing pro-union members to the National
Labor Relations Board, whose regulations tilted elections in the
unions’ favor.

If you can’t
be bothered to look beyond rhetoric to realities, don’t complain
about bad laws, or even about the degeneration of law itself into
arbitrary rule over what was once a free people.

June
29, 2012

Thomas
Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other
Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators
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