When Idaho state Rep. Dan Mader votes to cut state support for agricultural research, as he did the week before last, let him answer to his fellow farmers. They can take care of themselves. But when the Lewiston Republican helps to block immunization of preschool children, as he did last week, every one of his adult constituents should hold him responsible for an act of callous neglect, if not outright meanness.
The youngsters who will contract serious diseases have no sway at the ballot box.
Or on the Legislature's budget committee, where Mader's vote was crucial to Gov. Phil Batt's request for an immediate outlay of $76,000 a year to immunize more young children and provide nutrition and preventive health care to more pregnant women. The committee voted 11-9 to reject Batt's recommendation. If Mader had voted opposite from the way he did, the motion would have died on a tie.
It deserved to.
The committee's perennial opponents of childhood immunization programs talk as if they are promoting personal responsibility.
"Why should we have volunteers go out and recruit people?" Sen. Dean Cameron, R-Rupert, asked before the vote. "If they're not willing to step forward on their own two feet, I'm not sure what the government can do."
Yeah, what's the matter with those 3-year-old slackers, anyway? When are they going to learn that if they want to stay healthy, they'd better get their butts to the nearest health district office?
It is true, of course, that inoculations are readily available to anyone who wants them. But it is also true that only 72 percent of the state's preschoolers have received them. The program Batt proposed would have financed seven volunteers from the VISTA program to work with eight federally financed volunteers to find children needing their shots, and give them.
Say what you like about the kind of parents who let their kids go without ordinary protection from disease. And if you're feeling punitive, make them pay for it some way.
But this vote visited the sins of the parents on their children. That might be the prerogative of an Old Testament God, but it has no place in any government that considers itself humane.
Dan Mader is no monster. But he is a conservative guy. And now that the conservatives are firmly in control of both chambers of the Legislature, he probably finds it easy to go along with their more stone-hearted initiatives.
Something needs to make it harder for him. J.F.
Quote of note
No matter what, God wants us to be happy. He doesn't want us to be sad. Birds sing after a storm. Why shouldn't we?" Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy who died Sunday at 104
