It's 11:00 p.m., do your children at least have your written permission to be wherever?

I should have seen this one coming. Under legislation being kicked around in the Indiana House, a curfew law would allow children to be in public places after curfew, if they are under prior written permission of a parent or guardian. Every other problem must have been solved, I guess. Must have skipped over the Indiana section of the Courier-Journal the other day. This is what has to be taken care of this year, huh?

This is just the latest in a long line of moves designed to take responsibility out of parents' hands as it relates to their children. Every time some kid does something really stupid, the race is on to see who shifts blame the quickest – the parents, the media, or, Lord help us, the experts. Professional wrestling moves being imitated? Blame the wrestlers, who have no more control over the issue than the producers of an action movie. Separating right from wrong is learned, and it is learned first at home, not on the talk-show circuit after the litigation has started.

Not that it isn't presumptuous enough for government to tell you where your kids are allowed to be and when, but when the problem can be dismissed with a note from home, that makes this unnecessary for two reasons. First, how does a note absolve the parent ultimately? I mean, if they merely assumed that's where their child was going, is it good enough they at least wrote down where they thought their kid was going to wind up? Secondly, how much scrutiny and time will be wasted by police officers checking to see if permission slips are fakes? While I personally loathe using the phrasing, when I was in school, we had people called teachers for that. Of course, since neither the schools nor the parents are to blame, the end result has become teachers and police officers sharing much the same job. That's for another time, I suppose.