It's hard to imagine that the child welfare situation in Florida could get any worse, but it gets worse every day. Newspaper reporters decided to try their hand at locating two dozen of the hundreds of children on Florida's "missing" list, and within hours, found several of them. And though the Florida Department of Children and Families is supposed to report a missing child to the police within 24 hours, reporters discovered that in many cases, DCF employees had waited months--and even years--to make these reports.

But all of this information pales in comparison with Governor Jeb Bush's solution. He has appointed Gerald Regier as new director of the DCF. In 1989, Regier was a co-author of an essay entitled "The Christian World View Of the Family," and what an essay it was. The authors declared--among other things--that masturbation should be illegal, that women should work only in the home, and that it is okay to "spank" children hard enough to cause bruises and welts.

Why don't they just rename it the Florida Department of Child Endangerment?