I love Republican euphemistic names for bills, don’t you? You know, like the “Healthy Forests Initiative” that encouraged logging in national forests. In Pennsylvania this week, we have the “Women’s Right to Know Act.” Now, from the title, you might think this has something to do with, say, women being entitled to know what salary men doing the same job make, or where their husbands really were when they went on that “Appalachian Trail hike.”  But of course, what this bill is really about is women’s “right to know” that anti-abortion legislators want to poke them in the privates with an ultrasound wand and then harangue and shame them about wanting an abortion.

So, in the same Republican spirit of limited government intervention and individual freedom (and carried out by forced mandates on private doctors), I propose the Children’s Right to Know Act. This legislation will require pediatricians to identify parents’ political leanings at all office visits of school-aged children. Children of Republican parents will be shown videos of people with no teeth living in trailers, soup kitchens, crowded prisons, oil-covered beaches, closed factories and collapsed bridges. It will end by the magic of technology with a shot of the child’s face (taken from her mandatory ID card) superimposed on that of a soldier in a squad attacking a group of dark-skinned people in a desert village. The pediatrician must then inform the children that these are the consequences of voting Republican. I mean, they have a right to know, don’t they?