This is a disturbing time for the truth. Some powerful voices in New Hampshire are so bound up in defending their political turf and avoiding responsibility for how they have contributed to danger children face in New Hampshire that they are willing to distort their reporting on facts to you, even in areas as important as child protection.

This sort of distortion was part of a blog Andrew Cline published for the Josiah Bartlett Center in the area of state responsibility for child protection in early October. You can find his assessment on the center’s website (bit.ly/2CTIzx0). He doubled-down on it in an opinion piece in the New Hampshire Union Leader.

Cline’s analysis blames one party for the current crisis and withholds fundamental information about the crisis in rendering his analysis, all while decrying partisanship when his party is called to task for its decision-making in the area.

In remarkable and crass terms, he even calls our child protective services spending a “favored child,” even as the federal government opined in a published report that DCYF was getting failing grades as of late this summer.

This kind of gaslighting is Orwellian.

It is also an outrage. Cline’s analysis and the conclusions he reports are an insult to abused and neglected children, including to the memories of children who were killed during a period the governor has called a state of crisis.

Cline provides the numbers to support his position (bit.ly/2OwaUQi).

He doesn’t tell you this, but what they reveal is that 10 years ago, in 2008, we were spending $108 million on child protection. Today, in the midst of an opioid crisis, total spending is $17 million less than that at just north of $91 million in 2018.

The same spending numbers also reveal, that before 2011, total spending on Child Protection was between $103 million and $110 million. The true deviation from spending on child protection in New Hampshire occurred not when Cline’s ideological opponents controlled the budget, but in 2011, when his allies did, in what has been called “The O’Brien Budget.”

It was in that budget that child protection spending dipped below $100 million after receiving a cut of approximately $20 million. That cut began a trend of deep neglect in the area that bottomed us out at $82 million in 2016.

In other words, through the tea party revolution and an approach to public safety that pursued undifferentiated austerity at the expense of common-sense safety measures, total spending on child protection in New Hampshire went from $110 million to $82 million.

That is a cut of $28 million in total spending in the area of child protection from which we have never recovered.

Now we are in a crisis with children who are abused suffering, giving us all a chance to reflect on basic notions of cause and effect and about our own sense of common decency.

Will you be duped into believing that we are close to living up to our obligations to New Hampshire’s most vulnerable children in light of the information we have?

Will you allow yourself to exist in a mind-set that imagines away moral responsibility in this area?

Or will you demand truth as a basis for credibility, ignore or decry the efforts of partisans like Cline to suggest failure equals success when it comes to fundamental commitments, and demand that our state remove itself from a state of persistent illegality in an area as fundamental as the protection of children from child abuse and neglect?

(Michael S. Lewis is a Concord attorney.)