WHO OWNS OUR CHILDREN

 

Utopian idealists tend to believe that the State owns then. However, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao have proven poor parental substitutes. Consequently, they are now all gone and their experiments in State ownership are history.

Some collapses haven’t been violent and abrupt. Some utopian communities have merely found their idealism unworkable, and, therefore, have reverted to a more traditional understanding and practice.

In the early 70s, I had spent time on a number of Kibbutzim of the most radical and socialistic movement, Hashomer Hatziar. The Kibbutzim of this movement had been so radical that, initially, they had rejected marriage and the nuclear family as oppressive forms of “ownership.” However, by the time that I had stayed with them in the 70s, all had reverted back to the traditional nuclear families, although some tasks remained communal.

However, this discredited ideal of the State ownership of children stubbornly continues. In “To Whom Do Children Belong,” Melissa Moschella attempts to defend parental rights. At the beginning of her book, she quotes Melissa Harris-Perry:

·       “We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.” 

Well, why shouldn’t children belong to their State? Doesn’t the State have a right and responsibility to ensure that children grow up into responsible adults? Of course! However, who can best ensure the welfare of the children and their positive adjustment to society?

Under the various utopian schemes, children have been made into the pawns of the prevailing ideology rather than the beneficiaries of parental love. The same critique can be made today.

Now, many school districts are pandering to the ideology of transgenderism. As a result, they are proscribing gender specific pronouns and encouraging young children to explore sexual alternatives. Besides, this ideology has become so militant that parents are no longer allowed to exempt their children from teachings they regard as inappropriate. Often, they are not even told about the schools’ advocacy of transgenderism.

About transgenderism and the State usurping the responsibility of the parents, psychiatrist Boris Vatel has written:

·       The NYC Commission on Human Rights maintains that gender identity is "one's internal deeply held sense of one's gender, which may be the same or different from one's sex assigned at birth. This statement intentionally uses language to distort reality. Except in cases of rare medical conditions resulting in ambiguous genitalia, no one's sex is "assigned" at birth any more than the fact of belonging to the human species is assigned at birth.

·       More significantly, this statement erroneously implies that a person's beliefs about himself carry more legitimacy than the physical facts that contradict such beliefs. Using the Commission's reasoning, can we declare an alternate "age identity" to be legitimately different from one's true age? What about "race identity" or even "species identity"? If one accepts as legitimate the logic by which men may identify themselves as women and insist on being considered as such by others, there is no reason to reject as invalid any number of other idiosyncratic identities that have no basis in reality. (Salvo Magazine)

Vatel compares the delusion of a boy thinking himself a girl with the delusion of subordinate thinking yourself the CEO of the company. Vatel argues that responsible psychotherapy has to challenge delusional thinking and not exalt it and pander to it through sex-change therapies.

If choice is exalted to encourage a boy to think he is a girl, why not also to encourage a Black to think he is a White, or a human to think he is a bird or a cow.

The parent understands the absurdity of such thinking, even more so, the potential damage to her children. The State doesn’t care. It has other concerns.

King Solomon, in his surpassing wisdom, understood this. When two women came before him, each claiming maternity over a certain baby, Solomon ordered that the baby be cut in two – one half given to each claimant. At this, the real mother cried out:

·       “Please, my lord, give her the living baby! Don’t kill him!” But the other said, “Neither I nor you shall have him. Cut him in two!” Then the king gave his ruling: “Give the living baby to the first woman. Do not kill him; she is his mother.” (1 Kings 3:26-27)

In contrast, the State might have answered, “Fine! If I can’t have the child, then no one else should.”

The State can never provide parental love (and it has no interest in providing this), and the parents will never sacrifice their child to a vague, politically correct ideal. This is why parents must retain control over their children!

The Truth about Sex Education

Peter Hitchens is a well-known journalist, author, and cultural commentator from Great Britain. The following comments come from an interview with LifeSiteNews:

• "We find that despite the greater and greater extent of sex education in our society...the number of people becoming pregnant when they didn't want to continues to rise and the number of people contracting sexually transmitted diseases continues to rise." 

Why has this happened? Had the experts just been so wrong?

• “The problem with sex education,” he told me by phone, “is that the ostensible purpose for which it is advocated turns out not to be true. I did a sort of study a few years ago of the development of sex education in my own country, and what I found is that it's been justified really since the middle part of the Second World War, when of course there were a lot of venereal diseases, on the basis that if people were better educated about it, then it would reduce the amount of sexually transmitted disease and the amount of unwanted pregnancy. And yet if you watch the figures for both sexually transmitted disease and for unwanted pregnancy, and increasingly now for abortion, we find that despite the greater and greater extent of sex education in our society, more and more frankness about sex, and more and more pornography (which is also supposed to end repression), the number of people becoming pregnant when they didn't want to continues to rise and the number of people contracting sexually transmitted diseases continues to rise.” 

Not all Leftists are transparent about their intentions. However, some are:

• “It's said,” Hitchens noted, “that Gyorgy Lukas, who was commissar for education in the short-lived Bela Kun Soviet Government in Hungary in 1918, openly said that the purpose of sex education when he introduced it then - I think he was probably the first person to do so - was to debauch the minds and morals of religiously-brought up young women particularly. It seems to me to make a certain amount of sense…because the kinds of things that people are taught in sex education are disinhibiting things.”

Dis-inhibition seems to have been a powerful tool:

• “When I was in school no one ever mentioned masturbation. It would have been extremely bad manners to mention it anywhere, let alone for an adult teacher to talk to quite young children about it and about other sexual practices in class. The moment these things start being discussed, it disinhibits people, it takes restraints off them that previously were there. Now you may believe, and a lot of people do believe and have believed for many years, that these inhibitions are bad for us. That's a point of view, I don't happen to share it, and if you follow that belief as a parent, I suppose you're entitled to introduce your child to this sort of thing as early an age as you wish in a free country, but what bothers us in many cases [is that] parents don't realize what is being done in classrooms until after it's happened.”

According to Hitchens, Leftist politics intends to undermine parental influence:

  

• “There is politics in sex,” says Peter Hitchens. “Much of those politics are about…the family and the State. The state is increasingly hostile to the strong family, and the strong family is sustained by lifelong marriage and by a pretty stern and puritan attitude towards sexual relations—whereas the strong state benefits in many ways, as does modern commerce and the modern employer, from weak marriages and relaxed sexual relations. There's also the point that Aldous Huxley makes, which is that we are increasingly going to embrace our own enslavement in the pursuit of pleasure, which I believe actually the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm made...that there is absolutely no congruence in human history between sexual freedom and political freedom. Slaves have always been allowed to copulate, what they haven't been allowed to do is marry.”

How is unrestricted sex promoted? It promises freedom, both socially and psychologically. However, according to Hitchens, there is more evidence that it enslaves:

• “And this,” Hitchens continued, “is an extremely important point. There is no necessary connection between a society which is sexually free and sexually uninhibited, and a society that is politically free and has free speech and freedom of assembly, it doesn't necessarily follow at all. So we're all doing it with a very, very profound philosophical battle about the nature of society, and it needs to be conducted in a very serious fashion. The difficulty is in finding anyone to give you a hearing.” 

The Leftist agenda is still in favor of world revolution. However, it is now conducted in a slow, stealthful, and “peaceful” manner:

•  “The fundamental engine of left-wing activity, really since the 1960s, has not been to seize the post office and the barracks and the railway station, it's been to seize the television station and the newspaper and the university, and to obtain victory through capturing the minds of people, and also to alter society not through the nationalizing of railways, but through the nationalizing of childhood.”

The State has a poor record for overseeing the interests of children. For the State, they are merely pawns in a political game to be used to accomplish the dreams of ideologues. Understandably, it is the parents who love their children and want the best for them.

What evidence do the Leftists provide that they can create a better world? If they have it, they are keeping it a secret, as the world descends into chaos.

National Socialism in the First Grade

Totalitarianism requires thought control. Consequently, such a society has its gatekeepers controlling the flow of information. Adolph Hitler had a lot to say on the subject:

• In every really great revolutionary movement propaganda will first have to spread the idea of this movement. Thus, it will untiringly try to make clear to the others the new train of thought, to draw them over to its own ground, or at least to make them doubtful of their own previous conviction…The organization receives its members from the followers in general won by propaganda. (Mein Kampf)

Hitler understood that propaganda and mind control had to include the nation’s youngest members. Western mind-controllers understand this principle:

• For a North Carolina first grader who wrote a touching poem about her grandfather's military service in Vietnam, everything was fine until she made a reference to God. At that point, officials at West Marion Elementary School deleted the line before the 6-year-old could read it aloud at a school assembly after a parent complained about the religious reference. The line read, "He prayed to God for peace, he prayed to God for strength."

Although this kind of censorship is justified by the concern to not offend others, this is just a hypocritical ruse. If offending others was truly their concern, they might have expressed some concern about offending this first-grader. However, the secular authorities envision this little child as Hitler had – as the object of indoctrination into the “new train of thought.”

This agenda separates children from their parents and the child from his childhood, making the State into his primary custodian. After all, the State knows what’s best about their children, while their parents are mired by repressive God-myths!

In this case, it’s a matter of raising children for sexual consumerism – children who would have no objection to any form of sexual experimentation. I would guess that if this first-grader had instead reported about his sexual feelings, his paper would have been used as a model for other first-graders.

Homeschooling and its Threat

Homeschoolers are facing intense persecution in manycountries:

• Despite the fact that his children passed difficult government imposed tests, and even qualified for law school at the ages of 13 and 14, homeschooler Cleber Nunes and his wife Bernadeth have been slapped with fines equivalent to a total of $3,200 for refusing to submit their children to the Brazilian school system.

In Sweden, homeschoolers are facing even more intense persecution:

• A leader of Sweden’s Liberal Party last week called for a change in the country’s social services law so that the government can take children away from home-schooling families more easily by allowing social workers to do so.

• The call for the change comes amidst already stringent penalties in Sweden for home schooling. The Home School Legal Defense Association and Alliance Defense Fund have applied to the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of one family whose child was abducted by the government in 2009 and have filed a brief in a Swedish appellate court on behalf of another family fined an amount equivalent to $26,000 U.S..

• “The right of parents to choose the kind of education their children receive is a fundamental human right recognized in international legal documents including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” said HSLDA attorney Michael Donnelly. “Sweden has lost its way and is ignoring basic human rights joining Germany in repressing educational freedom. It’s important that free people stand up to governments who persecute their own people.”

Sadly, the USAseems that it might also follow the same trajectory as it pursues a greater educational role for the State at the expense of parental rights:

• The New Hampshire Supreme Court upheld a lower court order Wednesday that sided with the father of a homeschooled student and forced her into a government-run school against her Christian mother’s wishes.

Although the court claimed that it wasn’t considering the “larger religious liberty and homeschooling concerns,” this claim is suspect. First of all, the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) attorney John Anthony Simmons, who represented the mother, who is divorced from the father, claimed that:

• Because no harm was demonstrated and the girl was acknowledged to be academically superior and socially interactive, even by the court, Simmons argued that the homeschooling arrangement should not have been changed.

Even more suspect is the lower court rationale:

• In July 2009, Judge Lucinda V. Sadler reasoned that the girl’s “vigorous defense of her religious beliefs to [her] counselor suggests strongly that she has not had the opportunity to seriously consider any other point of view.”

However, there is no evidence to support the court’s claim that the girl is suffering any deprivation as a result of homeschooling. Instead, the court’s judgment reflects secular hubris - that the State is a better judge and provider of what children need than the parents. But what are the facts about homeschooling, and shouldn’t these govern the State’s decisions?

• In 2007, the Home School Legal Defense Association commissioned Dr. Brian D. Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute to conduct a nationwide study of homeschooling in America. The study’s purpose was to develop a current picture of homeschool students and their families—capturing their demographics and educational background—and analyze the impact of certain variables on homeschoolers’ academic achievement. Dr. Ray collected data for the cross-sectional, descriptive study in spring 2008. The 11,739 participants came from all 50 states, Guam, and Puerto Rico.

• In the study, homeschoolers scored 34–39 percentile points higher than the norm [50%] on standardized achievement tests. The homeschool national average ranged from the 84th percentile for Language, Math, and Social Studies to the 89th percentile for Reading.

This strongly argues against the contention that the State knows best and can provide what’s best for the children. The study also showed that it didn’t matter if the parent was a certified teacher or if homeschooling had been supervised by the state had no significant effect upon the academic outcome. Interestingly, socio-economic family status didn’t impact academic outcomes.

In another study conducted by Ray in 2003, over 7,300 adults were surveyed who were homeschooled:

• Over 5,000 of these had been home educated at least seven years, and the statistics in this synopsis are based on their responses.

• Over 74% of home-educated adults ages 18–24 have taken college-level courses, compared to 46% of the general United States population.

• Homeschool graduates are active and involved in their communities. Seventy-one percent participate in an ongoing community service activity compared to 37% of U.S. adults of similar ages. Eighty-eight percent of the homeschool graduates surveyed were members of an organization…compared to 50% of U.S. adults…Only 4.2% of the homeschool graduates surveyed consider politics and government too complicated to understand, compared to 35% of U.S. adults.

• 95% of the homeschool graduates surveyed are glad that they were homeschooled. In the opinion of the homeschool graduates, homeschooling has not hindered them in their careers or education. Eighty-two percent would homeschool their own children. Of the 812 study participants who had children age 5 or older, 74% were already homeschooling.

According to Wikipedia,

• Numerous studies have found that homeschooled students on average outperform their peers on standardized tests…In the 1970s Raymond S. and Dorothy N. Moore conducted four federally funded analyses of more than 8,000 early childhood studies, from which they published their original findings in Better Late Than Early, 1975. This was followed by School Can Wait, a repackaging of these same findings designed specifically for educational professionals.[24] They concluded that, "where possible, children should be withheld from formal schooling until at least ages eight to ten."

Wikipedia also admits that

• While there is no specific evidence to suggest that abuse among homeschoolers is more pervasive or severe than other institutions.

Why then the opposition?

• Stanford University political scientist Professor Rob Reich (not to be confused with former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich) wrote in The Civic Perils of Homeschooling (2002) that homeschooling can potentially give students a one-sided point of view, as their parents may, even unwittingly, block or diminish all points of view but their own in teaching.

However, if diversity is truly Reich’s concern, it would seem that he would be a champion of alternatives to the monolithic state controlled system.

• He also argues that homeschooling, by reducing students' contact with peers, reduces their sense of civic engagement with their community.

However, this contention is invalidated by Ray’s surveys. Why then the hostility against homeschooling? Is it that homeschooling presently lies beyond the influence of secularism?