CNN hosted this interview with a woman whose part-time career as a stripper has led her 5 year-old daughter's private Christian school to threaten expulsion. This is one of those stories where everyone involved needs a good kick in the pants.

Let's start with Mommy. She claims she took the job to pay, in part, for her daughter's tuition. Fair enough, although I wonder if there weren't other ways to raise the $400/month tuition, given the impressionability of little girls, and the general obligation of a mother not to signal to her child that removing one's clothes for money is something desirable.

What grates is not the mother's reliance on a variation of that classic stripper's story, "I'm doing this to pay for school." It is, instead, this reply to the interviewer's question whether she might have anticipated that a Christian school would have problems with her behavior: "I understand that line of work is not understood by a majority of people . . ."

A show of hands, please; how many people don't understand what a stripper does? I've noticed this tendency in morally marginal professions; practitioners assert that what they do would be rightly perceived to be within societal norms, if only people understood it properly. I remember watching a talk show years ago on which a pornographic film neophyte explained that she hadn't actually engaged in sex for money, that it didn't "count" because it was just acting, and that people not in pornographic films just don't get it. The fact that practitioners need these cognitive screens, of course, is prima facie evidence that they are, in fact, violating social norms of which they are otherwise fully cognizant.

And now for the school. This touches a nerve because there is, in my city, a popular Christian school that does not accept children of unbelieving parents. I know a woman, a Buddhist, who would very much like to enroll her child in this school, and who says further that she doesn't mind at all that they would teach her child Christianity. The doors, however, remain closed to this child, and to others who would most benefit, if one takes Christian teachings seriously, from its services. (This does not appear to be a question of limited space, by the way; this parent would gladly pay to have her child taught there, yielding funds for additional capacity if needed.)

So the school where the stripper's daughter is enrolled has in their midst a child whose parents are divorced, and whose mother removes her clothes for paying strangers. I would think that it would stick in their throats, this admonition of Christ: "Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these." But perhaps he was not speaking of this child, or of my Buddhist friend's child. Perhaps Jesus really meant to say, "Let the children come to me, so long as their parents are believers and steady contributors to my churches, preferably white and upper middle class, with a penchant for soccer and ski trips, and a tendency to vote Republican."

I suppose we shall all find out in our own time. Were I in charge of these Christian schools, however, I would like to err on the side of letting in the "wrong" sorts of children. I don't think Christ will look so kindly on those who let his lambs go unaided.