Where I Stand -- Mike O'Callaghan: Stop separating siblings

WE LIVED a long way out of town so my sister had to leave the farm to attend high school. I was in the fifth grade when she left for the city and not even my dog or the morning and evening chores filled the vacuum her absence created. Oh, we used to argue and fight almost every other day, but that was much better than not having her to walk home with or help me feed the cattle and clean the barn.

She was a real sport and tougher than many of the boys in school. Anything I could do, she could, more often than not, do better. No matter how cold it became in those Wisconsin winters nor how the clouds of mosquitos settled on us in the summer, she seldom complained. My mother was the fastest runner in picnic and family races, but my sister was always a close second. We had lost a brother and sister shortly after they were born, but she was as good as any brother could have been.

During these same years of the Great Depression we had a tiny girl cousin come to live with us. She was about four years younger than me and when she was 2, her mother died on their isolated ranch in Montana. My uncle brought her to live with us and then I had two sisters for the rest of my life. The little one, now retired from a school district in California, was, like the older sister, every bit as good as having a brother. She could work, hunt, ride and fish with the best of them.

There was no way her dad and sister could have raised her in Montana and kept the ranch going. She became my sister in every sense of the word, but my parents made certain she retained her relationship and identity with her dad and siblings. Their relationship has been retained and strengthened over the past 65 years and her trips to Montana are still important.

Down the road a few miles from our farm was the Ernie Brown family. They lived in a house built mostly from the trees cleared from the land on which it sat. Ernie was a skilled hunter, trapper and fisherman and he used these skills to feed his family of five boys and a girl. Their mother had died but Ernie kept the family together and the last time I heard they were still all alive and retired from very productive lives. The youngest, Ronnie, lives here in Clark County and his family bonds are stronger than ever.

Readers who have been raised with brothers and sisters have already figured out where I'm going with this column. So may some of those people who have been denied strong bonds with siblings because it's possible they feel something is missing. People having experienced warm bonds with brothers and sisters have an extra dimension added to their lives.

Not every child has the good fortune to have both good parents alive and able to care for them. Death, accidents, poverty, divorce and several other problems, including abuse, enter the picture and the state becomes involved. Following this can come institutions, a series of foster homes and sometimes adoption. It's during this period of stress that the state must be especially aware of sibling bonds and keep the children together. This isn't always the result, and the children are torn apart physically and emotionally.

Until the Miller administration, Nevada had two special children's homes as a resource to care for the children and keep siblings together. These resources were destroyed by selfish and ignorant administrators with the eager help of equally selfish and ignorant legislators. This resulted in an honest administrator admitting to a legislative committee that siblings are being torn apart for economic reasons. This shocked a few of the more sensitive legislators who then told him "that policy ought to be revised."

There's now a case in Massachusetts where the courts are separating a 4-year-old boy and his 6-year-old sister. A New York Times story relates that Hugo P. and his sister, Gloria, are being torn apart despite their exceptional need for each other. "Hugo and Gloria are so close that, when Hugo has difficulty making himself understood, Gloria sometimes speaks for him. Their troubled biological parents were declared unfit to rear them so they are, for each other, all that remains of their original nuclear family." Hugo probably needs Gloria even more than many other children need their siblings. It comes right down to realizing the two of them are a family, yet at least 35,000 other siblings are sent to different foster and adoptive homes every year in the United States.

There's little doubt that the average American can see and feel the pain and loss being suffered by siblings separated without feeling by courts and administrators. The case of Hugo P. and his sister is headed for the U.S. Supreme Court, where we can only hope it will be accepted and decided. Certainly a court that finds time to hear a case of one grade-school student bothering another should have time for Hugo P. and Gloria.

It's a shame that something so obviously inhumane and wrong should have to be decided by our nation's highest court, but that's the situation into which we have allowed government administrators and courts to place our children.

I don't know whether siblings have a constitutional right to be kept together. That decision will be made by the justices. I do know that as human beings they have a right to be kept together, and to deny them this right is brutality of the lowest form.

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