MORE MODEST PROPOSALS: THE CHILD-FREE

Here in America, where every annoyance becomes a grievance and every grievance spawns a movement, a new group has raised their heads, gotten their drawers in a wad, and begun clamoring for change. This time, the oppressors against which they fight are: parents and their children. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the adherents of the "child-free" movement. (They don’t like the term "childless" because it "has connotations of loss and regret," according to a story in the New York Times.)

Now, understand. I am not talking about people who have chosen not to have kids and who live happily that way. I've heard horror stories from these folks about having to brave the scorn of meddling busybodies who constantly inquire "when are YOU going to have children?" For them, I have sympathy.

Not only that, I'm right with those people who rail against children running wild and uncontrolled in restaurants and movie theaters while Mummy and Daddy calmly sip their coffee or watch the previews. (I actually kind of envy the kids, because I sure as heck was never allowed to get away with nonsense like that. It looks like fun.)

What I'm talking about are the more activist voices among the child-free, people like writer Elinor Burkett, who has written a book called "The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly America Cheats the Childless". According to Burkett, benefits such as flex-time for parents, on-site daycare, and extended maternity leave violate the sacred feminist principle of equal pay for equal work. She's also not real happy with the concept of tax breaks for families. "Who subsidizes that tax break?" Burkett asks rhetorically. "You're looking at her."

But what really gets her goat is having to pick up the slack for people who miss work for family obligations. "Every time someone takes off for that sick child or that school conference, then someone else has to pick up the extra work," she says in an interview in the New York Times story mentioned above. "And the supposition on the part of management almost always is that the person without kids is more able -- and it's true -- to do that than a parent…after a while you're doing two jobs for one salary."

You know, she may be right. Letting people take time off of work to look after their little crumb-snatchers DOES discriminate against the child-free. And, as several people have written in this very newspaper, why SHOULD the hard-earned dollars of taxpayers go to educate the children of others?

So, here are some modest proposals to equalize things for the non-breeders:

1. Don’t let people with children have jobs. Or, if that seems too severe, just bar mothers from having jobs. After all, it's more often the Mom who has to leave work and go pick up Junior at day-care when he has the sniffles. This way, there'll be no inequity caused by having to cover for parents, because parents won’t be in the workplace at all.
2. Do away with all tax-funded education. All schools should be able to fund themselves by the simple expedient of putting the little tykes to work in some income-earning capacity, such as shoe-making (for the little ones) or carpentry (when they get big enough to wield a nail-gun). This plan will have the added effect of teaching kids those all-important job skills for when they get out.
3. To avoid disturbing the delicate ears of people who complain about noisy children in their neighborhoods, parents will be forced to live on abandoned military bases with soundproofed barracks.

Now, obviously, this will not happen overnight. And some things will need to be rewritten, such as the Tax Code, the child-labor laws, and the U.S. Constitution. But it's a small price to pay to preserve the civil rights of those who choose to live child-free. After all, the right not to be annoyed by other people's children is one of the basic human freedoms, one whose history dates back to the Magna Carta. ("No Knight or Freeman shalle be compelled to sit at the King’s table and listenne to the Prince of Wales describe the interestinge boogers that said Prince hath found.")

If the measures described above seem a bit draconian on the surface, keep in mind that they'll only have to be in place for a few years. Childlessness is, after all, hereditary.

COPYRIGHT 2000 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.