On the priorities of this society...

Driving back from the grocery store today I witnessed a young mother with a young child in the front seat of her ragged-out car. The (presumptive) mother was casually smoking a cigarette and blowing smoke out of the window. 


Now, a rolled down window is hardly a remedy to the dangers and harm caused by second hand smoke. I felt bad for the young child. If a parent of a young child is going to smoke in a vehicle with his or her offspring, it seems likely that they smoke inside their home as well. Unfortunately, we also infer that such a parent routinely smokes with their child present in the vehicle. 


Such scenes are a sad and tragically all-too common part of life in Arkansas. What is instructive, however, regarding such instances of  child abuse? 


I direct our reader's attention to ARKANSAS CODE OF 1987 ANNOTATED TITLE 9. FAMILY LAW SUBTITLE 2. DOMESTIC RELATIONS CHAPTER 9. ADOPTION

SUBCHAPTER 2. REVISED UNIFORM ADOPTION ACT

" (3)  The court may terminate parental rights of the non-custodial parent upon a showing that: 

                        (i)  Child support payments have not been made for one (1) year "

The tragedy of the Arkansas uniform adoption act is, for example,  allowing heartless, corrupt judges like Christopher Williams to "terminate" parental rights without just cause.  In that it (potentially) punishes biological parents for poverty and unemployment is a consideration that is not examined or allowed to be valid defense in argument, even though it clearly is a (potentially) valid defense (exigency of circumstance, pressure from having to deal with the state w/o sufficient financial credits/resources/fiat dollars, etc).


When I see parents who are abusing their children by, for example, exposing them to second hand smoke, I am struck by the cruel irony and hypocrisy of Arkansas family law. 

From a medical stand point parents who expose their children to second hand smoke are committing de facto child abuse. Nevertheless, they retain the right to be parents which the state will honor and even defend.

Arkansas society has it's head in the sane and it's priorities all wrong. An employed parent who is addicted to tobacco and actively exposing their offspring to second hand smoke is certainly a worse parent than an unemployed parent who does no such things (all else being equal).

If you are like me and have grown up in the south, sadly, then you have probably witnessed the tragedy of the [employed] parent's abuse of their offspring by exposing the latter to second hand smoke. This [abuse/violence/neglect] not only harms the child, but also society at large as has been well documented. 

Yet despite this egregious mistreatment of children and Arkansas society at large [externality] there is no effort on the part of the legislature, the judiciary, or any element of government to protect children from second hand smoke exposure in the home, and only very weak laws lacking sufficient enforcement to protect young children from second hand smoke exposure in vehicles. 

It is the height of hypocrisy that Arkansas adoption and child support law allows judges to terminate a parent's relationship with their child often for no other reason than unemployment in a bad economy. Whenever we wittiness parent(s) who expose their child(ren) to second hand smoke are we not seeing a parent who is actually deserving of severe punishment, if not termination? 

Arkansas state's relative silence on the issue of children's exposure to second hand smoke is none other than duplicity with child abusers. That the legislative and judicial apparatus of Arkansas explicitly states poverty and unemployment as grounds for termination of parental rights while very often doing nothing about real child abusers is a sadness we as society must address. 

As a parent who is suffering at the hands of judicial corruption it is very difficult to wittiness such a bad parent as before me today. There are many  parents in the state of Arkansas whose relationship and "rights" to their children should-be-but-is-not-terminated-by-the-state. 

The remedy to this tragic state of affairs comes in the form of rational laws that protect children from negligent and abusive parents. Arkansas legal code needs to ccriminalize the exposure of children to second hand smoke. An amending of the uniform adoption code of Arkansas is also desperately needed, and on that note we shall blog further.