ow easily we pontificate about family values. How easily children become footballs for political punt, pass, and kick.
In Pontiac, Mich., a judge last week sentenced Nathaniel Abraham to seven years in a maximum-security juvenile facility. Abraham was the youngest person ever convicted as an adult for a murder. He committed the crime when he was 11. The judge, Eugene Arthur Moore, could have fashioned a sentence that would have sent Abraham to adult prison at 21.
Moore refused, saying that society has gone too far in punishing children. Michigan passed a law three years ago allowing a child of any age to be tried as an adult.
''We can't continue to see incarceration as a long-term solution,'' Moore said in his decision. ''He is a boy who has been neglected by his home, our community, and our juvenile justice system. He represents our collective failings.... I urge the Legislature to lean toward improving the resources and programs within the juvenile justice system rather than diverting more youth into an already failed adult system.''
This did not stop Governor John Engler from defending the trial of small children as adults, even when it was clear that Abraham, of a mental age much younger than his current 13, barely understood the gravity of his act. Engler spokeswoman Susan Shafer said, ''He thinks it's a good law.''
Down in Florida there is the highly publicized case of Elian Gonzalez, the 6-year-old Cuban boy who survived the capsizing of a boat two months ago that was attempting to escape from Cuba to the United States. His mother died in the accident. Elian was rescued and placed with relatives in Florida.
Elian has a father in Cuba who wants him back. The Immigration and Naturalization Service ruled that the boy should go back. But relatives in the politically powerful Cuban-American community of south Florida, which hates Fidel Castro, say they are keeping the child and have turned the battle over Elian into capitalism vs. communism, freedom vs. the INS, thought control vs. ice cream, and Havana vs. Disney World.
Florida Senator Connie Mack wants Congress to grant the child instant US citizenship, a move that has the full support of the Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, and the House majority whip, Tom DeLay, and the probable support of House Speaker Dennis Hastert.
The case is now presidential politics. No major contender - George W. Bush, John McCain, Al Gore, nor Bill Bradley - has had the courage to flatly say the boy should be promptly sent back to his father. They all have punted the child, passed him into limbo, and kicked the father to the curb.
Instead, Bush and McCain blasted the INS. Gore said the father should come to the United States to plead for his boy. Bradley has flip-flopped, saying, ''I thought Elian Gonzalez should stay in the United States, but I'm not going to second-guess the INS.''
President Clinton this week said, ''We need to think long and hard'' whether Elian should not be sent back to his father, even ''if we don't like the government of the country where the people lived.'' But the anti-Castro lobby has made him think so long and hard it now appears that instead of sending Elian home soon, he will let the case be drawn out in the courts.
This all adds up to a political arena that cannot get it straight about ''family values.'' In Michigan, everyone concerned with the Abraham case laments the fact that the boy never knew his father, who left the family before his birth. In an interview last fall on ''60 Minutes,'' Nathaniel Abraham said his father's absence ''makes me mad sometimes, too ... cause it just, leaving my mama there all by herself.''
But many people want to blockade the father of Elian Gonzalez for political points, points that contradict their own claims about the importance of fathers. Bush complains about ''children abandoned by fathers.'' McCain said, ''We are not parenting our children.'' Bradley said part of reducing poverty is ''fathers realizing that having a child is a lifetime commitment.''
Gore has said, ''the father must have a central role in his children's lives.... Children growing up without a father are more likely to do poorly in school, get pregnant, do drugs, and have a hard time finding and keeping a job. On the positive side, a father's involvement, even in a broken family, has a very positive impact on the children.''
If all these politicians really believe in this ''central role,'' Elian Gonzalez would be home now. Fathers of children like Nathaniel Abraham would be held more accountable for parenting and support. We would end this fantasy that ice cream cones, trips to Disney, and US citizenship are a substitute for a father after a mother has died.
Nathaniel Abraham's fatherless world has already crashed. The reality of loss will soon come crashing down on Elian Gonzalez. Soon, he will feel punted, passed around, and kicked in his soul. The person who should be waiting to catch him is not some some well-meaning but barely familiar relative. It should be his father.
Derrick Z. Jackson is a Globe columnist.
