Just a few years ago, a large number of parents woke up to what was going on in public schools across the nation. Libraries were being stocked with books containing graphic, sexual images and encouraging kids below the legal age of consent to participate in homosexual and equally aberrant heterosexual acts (Ron DeSantis Executes Troll for the Ages at Presser on ‘Book Banning’). Racist indoctrination was held with no greater purpose than grievance-mongering, blame-shifting, and turning one racial and/or ethnic group against another for sh**s-and-grins (School Board Throws Racist Tantrum After Oklahoma Governor Bans Critical Race Theory in Schools). Sexual assaults by student predators were hidden from law enforcement because of their declared sexuality (Washington Post Turns to Victim Shaming of a Minor to Preserve Narrative in Loudoun County School Rape Case). Writing porn was suddenly an English assignment (Watch: Dad Goes off on School Board About Assignment Asking HS Students to Describe ‘Sexual Fantasies’). When parents expressed their concerns, they were belittled (California School Board Association Training Agenda Calls Parent Concerns’ Propaganda-Induced’ and ‘Noise’) and sometimes arrested (Loudoun County Father Who Was Slandered, Beaten, and Arrested Speaks Out).
All of this energized a “parents’ rights” movement, something unimaginable just a decade ago, to ensure that parents were made aware of what was being taught to their children. This movement has gained steam. In 2022, 85 bills that strengthen the rights of parents to influence their child’s education were introduced in 26 states. Six of them became law. In 2023, 62 such bills have been introduced in 24 states.
As the movement attracted adherents from sane people of all political persuasions, the progressive left is growing more than a little unhinged. Though they control the educational bureaucracy, most don’t have children. Most of those in the childless category are there because they are sexual deviants, are too unattractive to find a partner, or don’t have the mental horsepower to master the mechanics of the process. The only way they can pass their corrupt worldview on to a future generation is by capturing your children (The Extreme Left Has Finally Admitted Their End Game for Your Children. and The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus Celebrated Pride Month by Boasting That They ‘Are Coming for Your Children’).
One sure sign they are panicking is when New York magazine’s unironically named “Intelligencer” runs a post titled, Children Are Not Property — The idea that underlies the right-wing campaign for “parents’ rights.”
The key point the author of this rather bizarre screed, Sarah Jones, misses is that no one thinks children are property…except the “my body, my choice” crowd who think babies can be killed with impunity. Property can be bought, sold, discarded, or destroyed. The only people involved in the parents’ rights movement are those concerned with and involved in their child’s educational, emotional, and moral well-being.
Her first objection is to the idea that parents have an obligation to bring up their children in a way that offers them the greatest chance of having a happy, successful, and healthy life. An integral part of that is developing their character. If you allow a child to free-range and develop their own character and morality, or worse yet, learn it from some magenta-haired freak, you have no right to be shocked at what happens next. Jones, a self-proclaimed atheist, is obsessed with her hate for the Bible and, by extension, Judeo-Christian tradition. She says Proverbs 22:6, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it,” means that “[a] child can be broken, or stamped into shape, much like any domesticated animal.” To call this ignorant is to engage in understatement.
She mischaracterizes the bill Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed into law, relaxing rules to enable teens to find work more easily. This bill and others under consideration across the nation do not open the door to putting kids to work at dangerous jobs. Instead, they are focused on making it easier for kids to gain the socialization they need to be valuable members of society instead of social parasites who graduate from high school or college thinking they are owed a living.
Likewise, she calls North Dakota’s legislature’s refusal to expand the “free-lunch program” as saying, “A hungry child is not a collective responsibility but a private failing on the part of the parents.” Actually, what they were saying is that providing meals is not an educational function. Making schools a focal point for meals, birth control, sexual technique advice, and gender transition assistance hasn’t worked out well for kids or the country.
Then we encounter this:
Like any piece of property, a child has value to conservative activists. They are key to a future the conservative wants to win. Parental rights are merely one path to the total capture of state power and the imposition of an authoritarian hierarchy on us all.
To Jones, it is not authoritarianism when children are taught that there are multiple genders (spoiler alert: there are two) or that homosexual sex is normal, or that the definition of marriage that was handed to us by the Almighty can be stretched to include men marrying men and women marrying women. What Jones proposes is precisely what happened in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, and Castro’s Cuba. Schools imprint the values of the ruling clique on children in the classroom to retain power and extend their control over society.
And how about this?
The National Children’s Alliance says that over 600,000 children were documented victims of abuse and neglect in 2020. In 77 percent of substantiated cases, a parent committed the abuse. The language of parental rights can become a license to torture, as it did in the case of 13-year-old Hana Grace-Rose Williams. In 2011, officials found her “face down, naked and emaciated in the backyard,” the New York Times reported. An investigation later reported malnutrition and hypothermia as her causes of death.
According to Jones, the real cause is that parents had a book published in 1994 by a Baptist minister in the house that believed in corporal punishment as a disciplinary technique. The book is supposed to have sold some 670,000 copies, but Jones concludes:
By the time of the Times report, three children, including Williams, had died in homes with the Pearls’ book on the shelves.
From there, we go onto the Holy Grail of the activists fighting against parental rights. They want access to your kids to inculcate them with their sexual values. It isn’t without reason that we call them “groomers.”
Far-right activists invent tales of wanton surgeries on minors and irreversible hormonal treatments. In doing so, they obscure the high suicide rate among LGBT youth who need gender-affirming care as a matter of life or death. Children who work may be exposed to adult dangers, like workplace injury or sexual harassment. In the home and at school, children must also fear gun violence in the name of the Second Amendment. Adults who encourage the proliferation of guns do so knowing well that children will die. In their hierarchy, the adult right to a gun is worth more than the child‘s right to live. Reduced to the level of a collectible or a beloved pet, the child is not a person to the right.
There is no evidence that “gender-affirming care” does anything good. The Swedish and British national health systems have stopped performing this butchery. There is more evidence that the high suicide rate is rooted in gender confusion, often exacerbated by “transgender activists,” than in their access to industrial-strength hormones and surgical mutilation. Her argument that an adult owning a gun puts a child somewhere at risk is possibly the most ridiculous anti-gun statement made other than anything said by David Hogg.
The fetus is more valuable than the child because the fetus is a means to an end: the subjugation of women. Once born, a child’s value depreciates. The parental right to “train” the child takes precedence over the child’s basic rights. There are ways to circumvent a child’s established right to an education, as conservatives know. Homeschooling laws are so lax in the U.S. that thousands of children have essentially disappeared into an academic void. Even if a child goes to public school, chronic underfunding deprives many children, especially in poor areas, of a sound education. In much of the country, trans youth aren’t treated like people with medical needs but political targets. This is ownership, and the U.S. rarely interferes.
Note to Ms. Jones, or whatever her desired pronoun might be, the Handmaid’s Tale is a f***ing silly novel. It isn’t real. If you feel subjugated by having a kid, then don’t have one. Just die alone and be eaten by your cats. Please don’t apply your ill-informed judgment to families who have decided to have children.
She’s right about depriving children of an education. Just not the way she thinks. While peer-reviewed studies show that homeschooled children perform better than public school peers, that may be damning by faint praise.
Funding does not equate to performance.
Maybe the problem is that many public school systems are a jobs program and not an educational system.
If my example means anything, it’s this: Children are not dogs to train but adults in formation. They will learn, someday soon, that the future belongs to them. What they do with that knowledge matters to everyone. Children aren’t private property, then, but a public responsibility. To expand our democratic project to children is to grant them the security the right seeks to deny them: education, health care, shelter, food. A better America begins with the child.
Children are not a public responsibility. It doesn’t “take a village” Child-rearing takes involved parents who make the decisions without hostile interlopers who don’t have to live with the mess they create. No one is seeking to deprive a child of education, health care, shelter, or food because the overwhelming majority of parents want only the best for their children.
She’s right on one count, a better America begins with the child, and the quicker we can push aside the progressives who think they have a right to teach their immorality and lack of values to our children, the quicker we can get to that better America.