Bonnie (et al),

My comment was said with tongue fully in cheek (note smiley face)--meaning something like exactly what you say below--I don't think that we should care for our citizens by divvying out "benefits" to households, the logic leads to all kinds of absurdities.  The retirement worry (which is a real worry for folks who choose not to have children even as they/we contribute to society and the lives of children in other ways) was meant to highlight that point as well.  One should not have to have children (or a whole lot of money) in order to make sure that someone is there when one becomes vulnerable and/or infirm due to old age.

Apologies for other interpretations abounding...

GP




--- On Fri, 11/7/08, Bonnie Mann <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: Bonnie Mann <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Kids/Pets
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Date: Friday, November 7, 2008, 6:20 PM
> Folks, 
> 
> The posts suggesting that folks who don't have kids
> should get some equal benefit package as folks who do seem
> to me to be based on the same logic that is being
> criticized.  The history of these "family
> benefits" is that the one with the right to the benefit
> is the wage earning male (the one who matters to the
> society) who can bestow the benefit on his wife and kids by
> virtue of their relationship to him, instead of folks
> receiving benefits because they are human beings with human
> needs. Kids should be insured period, not only if they have
> parents with employers who provide benefits, or parents who
> can afford insurance...not, that is to say, by virtue of
> their relation to a parent at all.  To suggest that
> one's children receiving what should be a basic human
> right somehow needs to be made up for by bestowing an extra
> benefit on those who don't have kids is to continue to
> see the right to the benefit as accruing to the
> "productive" (i.e. worthwhile) adult, rather than
> to the ch!
> ild.  Call me species-ist, but to suggest that middle class
> pet owners should get their pet's insurance covered
> while thousands of poor children are uninsured, that to do
> so would be to somehow equalize a fantasized inequality
> between employees with kids and employees without kids, is,
> well I don't know what to call it....awful. Sorry for
> the tone of this, but as someone who came up out of poverty
> to my university job and has multiple nieces and nephews,
> not to mention sisters and brothers and cousins, without
> insurance, and sees everyday what this means in terms of
> their health, I am surprised by the suggestion that a parent
> receiving health benefits for their children somehow
> constitutes a "privilege" over other folks who
> have health insurance for themselves already but no
> children.  When I was fourteen both of my eardrums burst
> from an ear infection because my mother couldn't afford
> to take me to the doctor... once my father died and I was no
> longer related to a unionized e!
> mployee of the Oregon sawmill, I had no separate right to!
>   health 
> care and neither did my mother or siblings. Would it have
> seemed like a move toward "fairness" if the
> university employees in the next town who were without
> children got to insure their pets? 
> 
> Bonnie Mann