Americans for Constitutional
Protection of Children
Dedicated to Zero Tolerance of
Child Molesters
No nation that fails to cherish its young has any
future as a nation.
Nor does it deserve one!
IT SHOULDN'T HURT TO BE A CHILD!
Proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
An adult convicted of the molestation of a child will be sentenced to prison for not less than ten years.
If the child dies as a result of the molestation, the person(s) convicted of the crime will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
A child as defined by this article shall one who has not attained their sixteenth birthday.
The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
This amendment will reduce prison and welfare populations by breaking the chain of molestation. In the shorter term, it is well substantiated that children having babies is an enormous burden on taxpayers. These babies of girls as young as eleven years old are invariably doomed to substandard care, which increases medical costs. As such children grow older, they are far more likely to be anti-social, under-educated and begin early criminal activities loading our juvenile justice systems, and, eventually, our courts, jails and prisons.
If adult molesters of such girls faced the federal penalties of the amendment, there would be an immediate impact on this problem that is contributing to so much heartache and fiscal difficulty in our nation. In the longer term, there will be fewer such children growing up to a life of crime, thereby reducing prison populations. Fewer such children being born will have a dramatic effect on our economy by reducing the problems they create for the schools, medical care, and other financial burdens to taxpayers.
A major factor is what this amendment will do for a lower divorce rate and the strengthening of family in this nation. Men and women will be forced to take seriously the dramatically increased risk of molestation of children due to divorce.
Fully one-half of our little girls are molested in one way or another and the trauma carries into their adult relationships, especially marriage. By radically reducing such molestations, we have taken a huge step toward establishing healthy marriages, and, by extension, a healthier society.
Consider the boys that
are molested and the enormous cost, mentally, socially and fiscally to
This amendment will virtually eliminate the inhumanity and national disgrace of child prostitution and the tragedy of children infected by AIDS. By force of law, it will encourage sexual restraint, self discipline and responsibility, and will greatly reduce the number of child pregnancies thus reducing abortions.
It will also dramatically influence Child Protective Services, forcing that agency to act in a far more humane, responsible and professional manner. There is no doubt in my mind, having worked in this agency myself, that with the power of such law as this amendment, CPS will have to do a better job of identifying, establishing factual case evidence and removing the predators of children from society.
Why should children any
longer be denied the Constitutional rights adults take for granted? Yet nothing
in the Constitution is specifically addressed to the needs of children. It thus
leaves vulnerable the most helpless of
Knowing how critically related employment is to stable homes, the amendment will force the political leadership to address the issue of jobs realistically. Virtually no one argues the fact that a vital component of encouraging responsibility and minimizing child abuse in general is employment.
This amendment is clearly one of empowering We The People to take action against an evil on which we all agree, action we can take for the sake of the future of our nation: Our Children.
This is one of the most frequent questions I am asked.
To begin, there is nothing in our Constitution specifically addressed to the needs and rights of children. It was taken for granted by the framers of the Constitution that family and society were all the protection children needed. And for its time, this was true.
But virtually everyone would agree that the times have changed in this regard. And had the Founding Fathers known how things would change, I have no doubt whatsoever that the proposed amendment would have been included in the Bill of Rights.
Fortunately, those Founding Fathers made provision for future needs to be addressed by the amendment process. So it was that slavery was ended and women were given the franchise.
As a society, as Americans, we face a most critical question concerning our future, and that future is our children. In far too many ways, we have become a society that actually seems to hate children, rather than cherishing them. This must change.
The great majority of people agree that the most basic and fundamental of all human rights is the right of a child to be raised in lawfully, protected innocence. For this reason an addition to the Bill of Rights, if you will, is in order and morally needed. No nation has ever done such a thing by its foundational charter of government. But at no time in history has such a thing cried out to be done!
And it is
And it is for this reason that the amendment is a call to We The People, as individual citizens and not the elected leadership, to act on behalf of our children, the future of our nation.
I believe We The People are better qualified than the elected leadership to recognize what is best for our children. We The People are the responsible parties for our children and our Constitution gives us the chance to act for ourselves in spite of an often corrupt leadership that acts as though it was not answerable to the will of the people.
For this reason and many others, I do not want such a leadership to pass another law. I want Americans, by the right given us as American Citizens, to do what is right for our children by making a statement to this leadership and the world that We The People, Americans and not Congress, are able to stand and do what is right for our children.
Certainly it would be far easier to ask the federal leadership to make a law rather than go through the arduous process of an amendment. But I contend Americans are better than we give ourselves credit, that Americans will recognize the absolute necessity of giving children their rightful place in our Constitution.
This is the path of nobility for a noble people, this is the chance to show the world that we, as Americans, do indeed cherish our young and recognize our place as the true leaders of responsible freedom and liberty.
In this respect, as it was in the founding of this nation, it is our duty as Americans to make our voices heard over the political glittering generalities and the mouthing of meaningless platitudes that promise much and deliver nothing on behalf of children and families. We hear the political leadership mouthing, “Children are our most precious resource; they must be given a national priority.” But where do we see this actually happening? We don't!
The amendment is the
first step for American citizens, themselves, taking personal responsibility
and action before the entire world for our young. If
The fact that this is an act of individual American citizens coming together in common cause for the sake of our children will speak volumes of our sincerity as a society to the other nations of the world. A nation that has been so richly blessed and has long been a beacon of hope to the world has a duty, an obligation, to set such a precedent for all other nations to follow. We have a reputation for sticking up for the underdog, for hatred of the coward and bully. And there is no more cowardly bully than the monster that preys on the most defenseless of victims: Children!
If we work together as Americans, we can take this step to guarantee our children their emancipation from slavery to the molester and his ilk. And in so doing, we have taken the necessary step to prove to our children and the world that we do love and cherish our children. There is no question that our children have come to question this, that they have been losing hope of a future, that they are too often growing up in a callous and uncaring society where there is no protection for them, no absolutes of morality. The amendment will speak volumes to our children and the world of the real love and concern we have for them. As Americans, we can do no less. We owe our children and the children of the world no less.
Given that correct knowledge consists of facts as opposed to beliefs and that wisdom consists of love and compassion together with a love of truth and an instinctive hatred of evil, I present Heath's Equation in this form for your consideration: KNOWLEDGE + WISDOM = PEACE
If this equation is correct, it logically follows that the world has never attained to wisdom since the world has never known peace. It is my contention that the world can never attain wisdom as long as a full half of humankind, women, is excluded from having an equal voice with men in the decision-making processes guiding national and world affairs.
It is my further contention that men and women are of equal value based on the compatibility of differences, and within the context of those differences “Men make wars and Women make homes!” What is desperately needed is a complete philosophy that will be a melding of the philosophies of both men and women, one that will be neither too soft nor too hard but tough and resilient enough to meet and overcome the adversities of life.
It logically follows that until children become the priority of nations and until women are accepted and included by men as of equal value that wisdom, and by extension peace, will continue to be unattainable.
If it can be agreed that parents, regardless of differences of circumstances and political or religious ideologies, essentially want the same things for their children, the same hope of a future for their children, the emphasis should be on the best way of attaining such a future.
Quite obviously it has been the exclusion of women from the philosophies of men, the exclusion of women as of equal value to men, the lack of proper emphasis placed on the future of our species, our children, the insistence on emphasizing political and religious differences rather than what is best for all children, that has kept the world in conflict these past thousands of years. This must change. And the only way it can change for the better is for people to agree on a course of action that will lead to such a change based on wisdom. I submit that the proposed amendment is a logical and wise first step in such a change for the better.
We have reached a point of decision where the world has become far too dangerous and violent to ignore any longer the fact that until the proper emphasis is placed on the future of humankind, our children, Armageddon looms ominously. The question that confronts all of humankind is whether the differences of religion and politics that are too often the organization of hatreds will continue to predominate and be a source of continuing conflict or whether people of the world will come together and agree on a course of action which will insure a future for all children regardless of the historic hatreds and prejudices based on religion and politics.
The proposed amendment to the Constitution is a logical first step toward solving the historic problems of religious and political hatreds. The amendment addresses a problem about which all good people agree and proposes a solution completely devoid of any religious or political ideologies. It is simply the right and wise thing to do for the sake of our posterity.
No nation in history has
ever made children a priority by virtue of its foundational charter of
government.
At one point in Harper Lee's masterful novel To Kill A Mockingbird little Dill has run away from home. Scout thinks his folks must have mistreated him and this was the reason he ran away.
But Dill tries to explain it wasn't this at all. As he says to Scout, "That wasn't it - they just wasn't interested in me."
Scout thought this the oddest reason for running away from home that she had ever heard.
But Scout had people who cared about her. Atticus had made her feel important to him, had made her feel loved and needed. She couldn't possibly understand Dill's point.
But I understand it all too well. It is the thing that after many years of working with teenagers in the schools, after working in Child Protective Services, led me to say to parents in respect to children: Things aren't as bad as you think, they are far worse!
I came to realize first hand that when it came to the schools, a system for failure couldn't have been better designed had it been done intentionally. I began to realize that we have evolved a society that actually behaves as though it hates children. And children know this.
What little Dill was
trying to explain to Scout is what has led to things like the massacre in
Dill's folks didn't beat
or mistreat him. What they did was tell him, “All right, we bought you
all the toys. Now, go play with them and leave us alone!” This is
From the ghetto of Watts
to the barrio of East San Jose and upscale places like Castro Valley, through my
experience in the schools, CPS and other activities, I have seen the best and
the worst of circumstances for children in America. Indifference, as ignorance,
is a real killer as we have witnessed in
When any society condones, and even encourages, perversion and violence, particularly perversion and violence against children, that society will pay the price. When a society teaches children that there are no moral absolutes, when a society teaches babies are things to be murdered at will through abortion and have no value, that homosexuals are acceptable role models in classrooms, that pornography is acceptable and approved by society, that all manner of perversion and violence is approved and called entertainment, children know such a society has no real concern for them, that such a society is really INDIFFERENT! to them.
It does indeed take a village, an entire society, to raise a child. And when that society engages in the madness so well represented by its refusing to make children the real priority while continuing to pay lip-service only to concern for them - which they easily recognize as hypocrisy, when that society through its indifference to children teaches them there are no moral boundaries or absolutes, that society, that nation, has no future.
No, you cannot make
people care. But you can act. You can do your part as a good citizen in
confronting the evil that is destroying our children and our nation. But one of
the major points I make is the fact that there are far too many people who may
be good people, but they are not good citizens. If you are too busy to be
politically active, you may be a good person but you are not a good citizen. As
a result, the children pay the price for apathy and indifference on the part of
adults who have the sole responsibility for the future of children. And
As we are subjected to all
the experts coming forth with their solutions to the problem exemplified by the
killings in
Understanding that wisdom
derives from love and compassion with an instinctive hatred of evil, it follows
that there can be no solution of the problem evidenced by the tragic events in
Samuel D. G. Heath, Ph. D.
Americans for Constitutional Protection of Children