TX Repub To Take Child From Mother Due to Lack of Insurance!

I've seen a couple of stories on this now. Evidently, if you are a single mother that can't afford insurance for your child you are at risk of losing him or her to a Republican lawmaker that has made sure you couldn't afford insurance.


http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/casey/2747708

Aug. 19, 2004, 11:30PM

Heflin takes on 'burden'
By RICK CASEY
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle

State Rep. Talmadge Heflin has moved the concept of "the white man's burden" from the 19th to the 21st century.

Rudyard Kipling memorialized the term in an 1899 poem urging Americans to colonize the Philippines in the wake of the Spanish-American War, to fulfill our responsibility to civilize the world's "sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child."

Maybe, under the name of "nation building," that's what the Iraq war is about.

But Heflin has updated the concept. He's privatized it.

In asking a judge to authorize him and his wife to take a U.S.-born baby away from its African immigrant parents, who are so unenlightened as to want to keep their baby themselves, Heflin testified: "We all know the terrible problem that black male children have growing up into manhood without being in prison."

It's good to know that the Heflins would instill in the boy a positive sense of his heritage.

Recalling Zoe Baird

And the Heflins' lawyer argued that the child's parents couldn't afford health insurance, and the boy suffered the long waits that Medicaid coverage brings.

That raises a question. As the powerful chairman of the Texas House Appropriations Committee, Heflin presided over a budget that cut about 7,000 children from the Children's Health Insurance Program. CHIP covers children of parents who cannot afford private health insurance, but who make too much to qualify for Medicaid.

I wonder if Talmadge proposes, next session, to pass a law putting all those children up for adoption.

The state also knocked tens of thousands of children off welfare and rejected millions in federal matching grants for childcare for working mothers.

The hearing raised other questions.

The baby's mother, Mariam Katamba, testified that after the Heflins offered to provide housing for her, she worked for them as a maid and was paid in cash.

That's a touchy issue for a politician, ever since Bill Clinton nominated Zoe Baird for attorney general. She withdrew under a stormy cloud after it came out that she hadn't paid Social Security taxes on her housekeeper.


Their word against parents'

Janice Heflin testified Katamba wasn't a maid, but a "house guest," and the only cash she gave her was to help her obtain a green card so she could legally stay in the United States.

But that only raised another sensitive issue for Talmadge. Would his conservative Republican constituents countenance the notion that he had harbored an illegal immigrant?

Not to worry. Whatever his wife's efforts to make Katamba legal, Talmadge was, he testified, unaware of the immigration status of the woman with whose baby he was bonding.

In fairness, the Heflins argued not simply that the baby's parents were poor, but that they were bad parents.

They said Katamba told them the baby's father, who is now married to another woman, beat her during her pregnancy. Katamba and the father deny it.

The Heflins say the father visited infrequently and acted inappropriately. He tossed the baby "like a ball in the air" and beat his feet together when the father felt he was not walking early enough.

Talmadge did admit the father stopped when he told him to.

As a parent who has not always been perfect, I shudder to think what a good lawyer could do with the time I let my 2-year-old wander off in a crowd, or accidentally scalded her back with hot coffee.

They said the mother wasn't around enough, but her job caused much of her absence. Having offered their assistance, it appears that they are offering her acceptance as evidence against her.

Most importantly, they offered no independent testimony or evidence ?- no police reports, no complaints to Child Protective Services, no testimony from medical staff.

It's just their word ?- and socioeconomics ?- against that of the parents.

And yet based on that they were able three weeks ago to get a judge to order a bailiff to seize the baby from his mother and turn him over to them without even hearing, until now, from the mother and father.

That is power.