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How the Left Views Parenthood
Last week, a district court judge dismissed a case brought by disgruntled parents against the public schools of Montgomery County, MD. The judge, an Obama appointee, sided with the school district against the parents, offering his blessing to the district’s policy of secretly “transitioning” children without notifying parents. The Washington Post ran a story about the case. I’ll quote from the top-rated comment on the Post piece:
If you treat your child as a human being with inherent worth, dignity, and the right to both privacy and self-determination; if they know you love them for who they are as a person regardless of who or how they love or what body they inhabit; then you have laid a foundation of trust where there will be no need for them to withhold anything from them.
But if you treat your child as property with no rights of their own, and teach them that the only way you’ll love them is if they walk the path YOU decide for them, then *you yourself* have taught them that they can’t trust you with their true selves. . . . Parents, you can no more control your children’s gender or sexuality than you can their eye color or shoe size. Biology doesn’t care about your beliefs, and your children WILL be who they’ll be. Whether they have to hide it from you to survive, however, is up to you. You reap what you sow.
I can’t think of a clearer expression of the neo-Rousseauian worldview of today’s American left. Children, in this view, are autonomous individuals whose task is to “discover” their “true selves,” with parents serving only as guides (if that) and sources of “emotional support.” That is, cheerleaders offering unconditional praise for whatever ideological schemes the kids happen to pick up from school, peers, and TikTok. Expectations, customs, right and wrong, biological sex itself — these things are mere impositions standing in the way of authenticity. If you impose your beliefs on your kids, you’ll cramp their style, man!
But this isn’t parenting. It’s anti-parenting. Indeed, it’s anti-civilizational. From time immemorial, in every society on every continent, the point of parenting has been to shape the next generation — to civilize the barbarian invaders and induct them into the polis, so that they might do the same in turn. We humans may be free, but our freedom is the result of a process of education, moral and otherwise. We aren’t self-creating; we’re raised. Longstanding norms and beliefs point to truth, and it’s our job to conform ourselves to them. But the logic of the commenter runs in the opposite direction: The longstanding norms and beliefs are the constructs, and the things which appear novel to us (such as the multiplicity of modern “identities”) are, in fact, innate truths.
All is turning to ash. Unconditional love, the old Christian injunction, is now unconditional surrender. And Americans are surrendering by the millions because saying “No! Enough!” is just too hard.
Published in Culture
Great post.
I wonder whether it occurs to the author of the comment that his argument could be applied to a kid who is racist.
Certainly a kid who wants to do illegal drugs.
Don’t blame me for slapping girls’ bottoms — I was born this way.
Great point — especially given that every one of us is racist. We instinctively mistrust the other, and the visibly other is the first to be mistrusted, by instinct.
The left’s view of children follows their view of society – they treat children as property which in fact belongs to the state. Sounds a lot like slavery to me. I think they don’t care whether the child goes odd sex or not. The issue is that parents have no rights.
Thanks for this, a most salient point. This is worse than neo-Rousseau. It is Nietzsche with a smile, to quote, “You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”
When I read Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, I came away with a working definition of Fascism as the state trying to form a closer relationship with kids than that of the parents. Not sure how much of that I peeled right from the book vs how much I assembled from his examples in forming his own working definition. Been a long time. Also, I know that it doesn’t address the technical definitions centered around state-controlled but privately-owned power structures.
What the Left misses because they are so screwed up is not the parents’ rights to bring up their children however they see fit but the child’s inviolate right to the protection of a parent or guardian. I have long believed that this is the point to assert in all arguments on this subject. This is not about parents and guardians. This is about children.
During the years I was bringing up my kids, I was also the “legal guardian for a mentally ill person.” This type of guardianship does not exist anymore, at least I don’t think it does. It was a “complete guardianship”–the lawyer’s term for it–not a “conservator” or a “power of attorney” or a “guardian ad litem” or some other modern legal arrangement. I had a great lawyer who put this through at a time just before the laws changed regarding guardianships for mentally ill people. I bring this up because I was given a stern lecture by the probate court judge as to what my responsibilities were, and those responsibilities he summed up thusly: to protect this person. His brief and strong lecture to me actually framed my work as a mother to my children and my volunteer work in the schools. The judge instilled great clarity in my thinking.
This is a very emotional subject for me, but rather than go on an incoherent Monday morning rant, I just want to put a plug in here for an organization I follow. I have been following it since the Justina Pelletier case involving Boston Children’s Hospital, the commonwealth of Massachusetts, and Justina’s parents. The internet has been sanitized, so I cannot find a truthful summary of the original story. However, this link will give you some information on what happened. The organization is named ParentalRights.Org. They have worked tirelessly for decades to get a constitutional amendment passed guaranteeing the right of parents to direct their children’s health care and education. Such an amendment should not be needed, but it is.
When I’ve mentioned in the past the absolute supremacy of parents’ rights over the care and upbringing of their children, many people have written that the State needs to keep an interest in this relationship because of bad parenting. This is a point of much substantive argument against the amendment. I think we need to head off that argument by describing it as an amendment asserting the responsibilities and rights of parents and guardians, but that’s for the organization to decide. So please read “parental rights” as meaning “children’s right to a parent or guardian.” To the probate courts, “parents” and “guardians” are roughly the same in terms of responsibilities.
Without going into detail, I would restructure the entire social services setup as well. But first things first. :-)
Yo, Woke Obama Judge, it is written:
Catechism of the Catholic Church 2223
Interesting that this is exactly the flip of what the left believes before the child is born. From conception to … maybe even a little past birth, that being is the absolute, rights-less property of the mother, who should feel free to dispose of it according to her own whim—not at all a being with inherent worth and dignity, and in fact any such claim is to be scorned.
Heck, if you truly believe that humans have no gender until they decide—with the help of teachers and school counselors and willing physicians—what that might be, abortion represents the wholesale slaughter of non-binary, gender-fluid individuals. How can such a thing be tolerated?
I agree that the comment is left-speak. But it also seems pretty irrelevant to the question of whether or not notifying parents of what’s going at school is a good thing.
This is the state running the show.
No, sir. This is not “balance.”
.
This is the state arrogating to itself a role equal or greater than the parent’s. Infuriating.
You and Joe Biden.
Barf.
Superb.
Really good observation.
So if I obstruct my child’s plans to blow the WashPost straight to Kingdom Come, I would be committing an atrocious human rights violation. This is so, so clarifying.
Here is a Wokish to English translation:
If you let your children conduct themselves as they please; if you take no corrective action towards any sexualized conduct in which they choose to engage; then you have laid a foundation of trust where they will be eager to tell you all about it.
But if you treat your children as if you expect them to adhere to a traditional code of sexual ethics, then you have taught them not to trust you to permit them to engage in any kind of sexualized activity that seems like a good idea at the time. Parents, the way a child engages with the world sexually is not subject to your influence. A child’s sexualized conduct is pre-determined. Your child’s sexualized conduct cannot be tempered by anything you say or do. Indeed, if you make any attempt to influence your child to adhere to a traditional code of sexual ethics, you will surely kill him!
Yeah, in the barf one, they included this line that debunks their entire philosophy and ignorance.
“Biology doesn’t care about your beliefs” … indeed not, and they were created male and female (with appropriate biological body parts), and biology does not give a rip about their made-up pronouns and genders.
I don’t advocate violence, but I’m surprised someone hasn’t snapped and taken one of these judges out . . .
The bad guys have hostages. It’d insidious.
They don’t believe in anything, but when they have power, which is a primary overarching goal, they rule as totalitarians, specifying everything for everybody.
It’s for the children, don’t you know.
Time for some more charter schools to be set up. Of course the teachers’ unions will oppose them for this very issue (as they have defended CRT) but surely new charters can state that their charters do not interfere with what the parents want if it is to foster a child’s re-identification; they would just not let it be foisted into a family relationship by the school.
Yeah, I can’t control my kid’s eye color or shoe size, but I wouldn’t support chemical or surgical intervention in order to “affirm” her mistaken belief that her eyes are blue when they aren’t or that her feet are smaller than they actually are. Am I misunderstanding this quoted comment? Is it saying that the kid will be who she is, but that parents ought not pay any attention to the physical manifestations of a child’s sex? I think that in progressive leftist parlance, “affirming” just means the opposite of what it ought to mean.
I can understand why the Left is obsessed with Right wing terrorist. Eventually when they have hurt enough of the Right Children there will be a reaction. Since it cannot be electoral with the rigged voting system it will be via other methods. Since any conservative protest involves a set up to lock up the only option that will be left to the Right involves other methods. Or maybe not. The Right has a history of whining and bending over and taking it. Maybe if they can hold for a decade or two and the Churches get behind it as a moral good maybe even an extreme moral good this will pass also.
We have way more Irishman than Ireland. Anyone know where someone could find a barrel or three? Asking for a friend.
Ummmmmm….Do you think the person who wrote this comment gave even two seconds of reflection on what they were saying? Because they pretty much eviscerated the entire concept of the Trans community in just six words.
There was another thread recently where someone threw out the phrase “Genitals are a Social Construct” as a joke and I said I’d like to see that on a bumper sticker. But “Biology doesn’t care about your beliefs” is even better.
Delusions, not beliefs.
I would not send a child to a school that supported a student “transitioning.
If gender fluidity was as common as supporters claim it is, then set up charter schools for them.
It’s no surprise that people who want to fundamentally change America would also want to fundamentally change America’s children.
But America doesn’t in any real sense ‘have’ children. Parents do.
Government in its all-too-many forms is not a parent. However much faceless Julia might wish it to be, it is incapable of serving that function. It can, however, serve the same function as that creepy guy who likes to hang out by the children’s playground.