Courtesy of The New York Post, we have this indication of a renewed op-ed offensive. The piece is full of high-flown sententiousness, clever deceits, and outright slander of the mushrooming Parental Rights movement, but in the end author Sarah Jones’s prescription is what matters:
Children aren’t private property, then, but a public responsibility.
Or, as Post reporter Snejana Farberov notes:
Unsurprisingly, Jones’ commentary sparked a furious backlash online, with critics fuming that the op-ed implies children should be the “property” of the state.
“Narrator: What Sarah really means is that children are not property of their parents, rather, they are property of the state,” California Assembly candidate Corbin Sabol tweeted.
Angry parents were quick to hit back, insisting that it is parents — and not the state — who have children’s best interests at heart.
I could spend the rest of the day on this subject, but as I’m tired and somewhat out of sorts, I’ll leap over the detail work and go straight to the Sunday punch:
His parents, or the State?
The utter absurdity of Sarah Jones’s contentions is most effectively laid bare by that question.
Now let’s riposte the objectors:
- Yes: There are unfit parents who treat their children shamefully or worse.
- Yes: There are resource-poor homes, in which children lack some of the things that would conduce to their physical, intellectual, and characterological development.
- Yes: Some parents will make sub-optimal decisions about their children’s well-being.
These are edge cases. They do not constitute a sufficient rationale for the State to arrogate parents’ authority over their children’s lives. A single glance at the horrors to which children taken from their parents by the State are subjected will convince any objective observer. The government-run school system, as bad as it has become, is the least of them.
The Left has tried this before. Remember this bit of odiousness, three decades ago? They’ll keep trying, over and over, until there are no more aspiring tyrants who crave to shape all of Mankind to their preferences; in other words, until Mankind itself is no more. Remain on your guard — for the children!
There can be no greater stretch of arbitrary power than is required to seize children from their parents, teach them whatever the authorities decree they shall be taught, and expropriate from the parents the funds to pay for the procedure. If this principle really is not understood, let any parent holding a positive religious faith consider how it would seem to him if his children were taken by force and taught an opposite creed. — Isabel Paterson
2 comments
Dickens’ framing of his Oliver Twist story highlights this predicament for children.
All aspects of upbringing outside the familial places the child in an horrific situation. So bad that even being placed in the care of criminals provides the child a sense of worth and at least a faked love, things that are absent from the rest outside of family.
Dickens had it so right that I find it hard to believe that those who designed the particulars of our welfare system ever meant well whatever their claims. Their system assured the brake-up of so many nuclear families that they drove the appeal of gang membership. Dickens provided them enough proof that that was likely to be the case, and that would lead the growing or grown children to be captured by the states’ legal system.
Pretty slick, eh?
We say this bulls**t being spewed thirty years ago when Cankles The Killer, head of the Clinton Crime Cabal was spewing the “It takes a village” nonsense. Hitlers henchmen knew this also. Get the kids while they are young, indoctrinate them to your cult and you own them. Not a new strategy. But one we have allowed to thrive by allowing the Fed Gov criminals to dictate Education Standards and Practices. THAT is a branch of government that needs to be eliminated. Can’t happen soon enough. We don’t need it and it didn’t even exist prior to 1980.