Time for These Parents to Look for Another Job

Well adults might have ‘triumphed’ here, but the children of this country certainly did not…

I have said this before and I’ll say it again: mothers have no right choosing occupations that take them away from their children for long periods of time and then think their childrens’ lives should remain on hold until they re-appear again.

Your priority is your children and that is your number one job. Unless you happen to be one of the rare individuals who is doing a singular job like discovering the cure for cancer or leading a force that is fighting off an alien invasion from outer space, you are very replaceable in any other job except being your child’s mother. Nobody else can do that but you.

I don’t see this as a victory for children, but rather as a victory for adults who want their cake and eat it too. You can’t have children and carry on like a single person with no attachments. Sorry it won’t work. Any occupation that mandates the possibility of years of travel/relocation; and, thus, separation from your child so that they need to be in the care of someone else is not for you. Additionally, Americans since WWII have overwhelming stated that they don’t want parents to be in the trenches during wars. They would rather have single women drafted then married men for this reason.

Perhaps US policies for allowing people to sign up in the armed forces needs to be re-evaluated and parents need to be phrased out from all the services. Anyway, it’s even more expensive benefits wise to allow people with children to be in the armed forces. As if they get injured or killed, the tax-payers are forced to pay benefits for these children until adulthood, not to mention the trauma to the children. So it will be a benefit to everyone involved to enforce a no-parent policy in all branches of the service.

Professional soldiering is an occupation for single people, not for those with families. Even the ancients understood this and the Romans themselves did not allow their professional soldiers or centurions to have families for this reason. Of course in a home invasion type of situation, everyone women, old people, children, everyone was involved in defense, but a professional army in a country of almost 300 million citizens (like ours is) does NOT need to include people with children within the professional military.

Sorry parents, but you need to look for another job.

http://www.daytondailynews.com/o/content/oh/story/opinions/columns/2008/05/25/ddn052508wehrmanweb.html

Turner triumphs in custody battle
By Jessica Wehrman
Staff Writer
Sunday, May 25, 2008

WASHINGTON — As a lawmaker, U.S. Rep. Mike Turner can be tenacious and stubborn, eager to convince others of the merits of his arguments, and unwilling to concede in a fight.

Maybe it's his Tae Kwan Do training — Turner has a second-degree black belt. Maybe it's something he picked during his years as a lawyer. A former aide once described as "Mike Turner" moments when Turner would get his way through the art of persuasion and by the chutzpah of being willing to ask for things other people are too shy to request.

Either way, those skills served him well last week as the Centerville Republican tried to convince four Democratic chairmen to pass a measure that would protect U.S. troops deployed overseas from having their children taken away.

Turner fought this fight last year, when he introduced an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill that would bar courts from taking away custodial rights of parents deployed overseas. That amendment, as originally written, would also have kept courts from using a parent's military deployment or possible deployment as a basis for terminating custody.

The amendment passed the House last year but ran into a roadblock in the Senate, which only adopted the part that kept courts from terminating custody while a parent was deployed.

In Washington, passage of even part of a bill is often heralded as a triumph. But Turner was not done.

"There are really two parts of this," he said. "Protecting men and women while they're deployed and then protecting them when they get back. What we got last year protected them when they were gone. We wanted to protect them when they got home."

So this year he tried to add the provision to the Defense Authorization bill.

That's when he hit another roadblock: The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee balked at including court-related amendments in a Defense bill, and asked that the Defense bill not include such amendments.

It was time for another Mike Turner moment.

Turner approached the chairman, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., on the floor, and pleaded his case. Then he went to the chairman of the Veterans Committee, Rep. Bob Filner, D-Calif., and argued for his amendment. Filner advocated for him, and Turner's bill passed the House by voice vote.

But Turner wanted to provide an extra level of security for his bill, which ran the risk of obscurity — and defeat — by heading to the Senate on its own. A sympathetic Democratic staffer with the House Armed Services Committee convinced the chairman of the House Rules Committee to include Turner's bill, already passed, in the final House Defense Authorization bill.

Now Turner's bill is going to the House folded into the Defense Authorization bill — a bill the Senate is expected to take up later this year.

Score one for Turner.

Score another for Lt. Eva Slusher of Kentucky, who had to fight for custody of her daughter Sara after Slusher was deployed to Fort Knox to help troops being sent to Iraq.

"The men and women who are serving this country should not have their service used against them," Turner said. "It's important that we honor their service to the country and not penalize them by taking away their kids."