Laura Ingraham’s fear of children: Inside her latest xenophobic assault

In her America, if we don't crack down on immigrants, little kids will ruin "our" way of life and take "our" jobs

HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported a terrible story of the uncovering of a mass grave in which the bodies of 800 children were apparently thrown haphazardly over a period of years. The mass grave was a septic tank. No, this wasn’t another report from the various conflagrations in the Middle East or an ancient people’s burial ground. It was found on the grounds of a 20th century Catholic unwed mothers’ home in Ireland.

This was one of those places where desperate girls were shunted to be chastised and used as indentured servants as they awaited the birth of their “illegitimate” children — children who were, by necessity, left behind to be raised in “The Home” or adopted out, if they were lucky. A lot of girls passed through those walls over the course of more than 40 years. Evidently, a lot of their children never left.

Hopefully, this sort of thing could never happen again. The Obama administration is taking humanitarian action on behalf of unaccompanied children who are crossing the border between Mexico and the U.S. According to this report, the numbers of such kids have been surging recently, and Health and Human Services is caring for as many as 60,000 this year, up from a mere 5,800 just a few years ago. Most of these kids are from Central America, escaping violence and economic despair. (Mexican children are usually repatriated at the border.) It’s a crisis of such proportion that the administration is asking for additional funds to manage it.

These are kids, some of them quite little, many of them girls. They are in desperate straits. One would certainly assume that any person of faith would be compassionate toward children who have done nothing more than try to escape a terrible fate and find a new life somewhere else. But that is not what many of our most ardent “right-to-life” defenders of children and “family values” have to say about it, of course. Much like their forebears in that Catholic home for unwed mothers, they have no sympathy for either the parents who are so desperate they send their little children to America alone in the hope they can find a better life, or the poor kids who actually make it here.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/06/04/laura_ingrahams_fear_of_children_inside_her_latest_xenophobic_assault/