Posted by
CW on Tuesday, January 08, 2008 11:39:43 AM
When I was in Colorado this Christmas I became familiar with a local story about a 7-year old girl who died after being punched and kicked by her 16-year old half-sister and the sister’s 17-year old boyfriend, supposedly as part of an imitation of the video game “Mortal Kombat.” The 16-year old and, get this, her “live-in” boyfriend lived with her mother, along with the 7-year old and who knows who else. In the initial coverage of the story no mention was made about the fathers of either of these girls, but are we surprised?
Eventually the newspaper tracked down the slain girl’s father, who lives out of state. The father, “…said…there is plenty of blame to go around for his daughter’s death.” Were we actually going to hear a father accept some responsibility for the tragic fate of his child, I wondered and hoped. Would he regret that he had chosen to bring this child into the world, only to abandon her with a woman that he knew to be a sorry excuse for a mother? I should have known better. “I think all of them are at fault,” he said, referring to the sister, mother and boyfriend. He also said, “Child Services should have taken them away a long time ago.”
Now, wouldn’t it be logical for the reporter to ask the father about that comment, since it implies that the little girl was being abused for some time and that he was aware of it but did nothing? Not in today’s world, where it has become politically incorrect for reporters to ask such questions when doing so might result in others passing judgment (gasp!) on someone’s behavior. No, in the more liberalized world that we live in today, better that we all live without fear of being judged by our neighbors, even if it means that children are fatherless, teenagers (and custodial mothers) have live-in boyfriends, and no one is watching when two teenagers beat a 7-year old to death.