Kids need parents, and children in need of foster care need a special kind of adult who can guide them, if not into adulthood, at least for a time in their oft-troubled lives. As a society, we deal with foster children through the political process, which ... has its problems.

Writing for the Washington Policy Council, Paul Guppy talks about one thing that can happen in the political world: certain adults take measures to enrich themselves at the expense of the kids. There's a move afoot in the state of Washington to require foster parents to unionize.

Writes Guppy, "As if helping kids weren’t hard enough, some lawmakers in Olympia want to treat foster parents like state employees and require them to join one of the powerful public-sector unions. The bill, HB 3145, doesn’t specifically mention unions (the title reads, "Implementing a tiered classification system for foster parent licensing"), but the policy direction is clear: push foster parents into mandatory collective bargaining. The idea comes from a local division of the AFL-CIO."

The alleged benefit to foster parents? Collective bargaining. But as Guppy points out, foster parents aren't in it for the money, and the prospect of forced unionization will deny some children the help they need.

The religious right gets a lot of flack for intruding into family matters. Maybe it's time that the government left gets some attention.