Last Wednesday, thousands of parents and children from across the country gathered in Washington, D.C., for Children's Day on the Hill. They were rallying to dramatize the need for national child-care and parentalleave legislation. We planned to be there, too - in force. We had buses ready to take hundreds of AFT members to the rally. And we believed that the imminent passage of a new child-care bill, the Act for Better Child Care Services (ABC), would give us something to celebrate. But at the last minute, we called off our buses and canceled our participation.
How come? The answer is a last-minute amendment that turned ABC into a bill we could no longer support indeed, one we strongly oppose.
Here's what the new version of ABC calls for. And here's what's wrong with it.
The original bill supported child-care programs in both public and religious institutions, but it prohibited using federal funds for religious instruction. In other words, it followed this nation's 200-year-old tradition of carefully separating religion and government. But the new version of ABC would require the federal government to reimburse churches and synagogues for the cost of religious instruction to young children. As our Founding Fathers understood, that's a move bound to increase religious and social divisions in our nation.
Am I saying we're opposed to any government support for child-care programs run by churches? Not at all. Publicly funded programs, such as Head Start, have flourished in churches for years. And the majority of nonsectarian child-care programs are now housed in church facilities.
Until now, this arrangement has worked well. These programs have respected the diversity of the children in their care. But if the new ABC bill passes, many will undoubtedly do what they always wanted to do anyway - provide instruction in the religion their church favors. And they'll be able to do it with taxpayers' dollars.
As a result, many parents will lose something they now have. They'll find that the child-care program in their neighborhood - the one they've been using all along - is now teaching a religion they can't support, and they'll have two choices: pull their kid out and look for another program (that may not exist) or worry about having their own religion undermined.
The new ABC bill will defeat the idea of child-care programs that are hospitable to kids of all races and religions. So kids will be losers, too. Instead of getting an early experience of diversity and tolerance, they'll be separated into groups of kids like themselves. The last thing this nation needs is the kind of fragmentation that ABC would foster.
The new ABC bill will also set a dangerous precedent, opening the back door to federal and other public funding of religious training in elementary and secondary education. After all, many will say, if it's okay to pay for religious instruction for 3-year-olds, why not for 8-year-olds or 16-year-olds?
We could even find ourselves in the position of using federal funds to promote extremist religious groups. The law doesn't distinguish between a child-care center sponsored by your local mainstream church or synagogue and one that might teach Minister Louis Farrakhan's brand of hatred or advocate the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's world view or the Ayatollah's death sentence on Salman Rushdie.
Some of the people who don't want to give up on the ABC bill, even with this terrible amendment, have been fighting for child-care legislation for years. Half a loaf, they say, is better than none. But much as we are committed to broadening child-care legislation, we think they're wrong. You don't sacrifice basic principles to achieve your objectives, even if the objectives are good ones. Advocates for civil rights understood this when they held up federal aid to education until they could be sure it wouldn't be used in segregated schools. In the same way, advocates for child-care legislation must continue fighting until they get a law that will give them what they want without compromising one of this nation's fundamental principles.
Others who oppose spending taxpayers' money for religious instruction are probably counting on the courts to throw out the provision, declare it unconstitutional. But who knows what the courts will say? It's bad business to pass bad legislation and then expect the courts to straighten out your mess for you.
Working families need comprehensive child care - no doubt about it - but not at the terrible price we'll all have to pay if the new ABC bill is passed.