Monday, April 8, 2013

Your Child Is Not Your Child

MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry is not shy about telling us how liberal/progressives view the family, and particularly how they feel about your quaint notion that your children are yours:
At least as far back as Plato the left has been demanding that children be seen as not belonging to their parents but to the state. They are a kind of communal property and how children should be raised and what they should be taught should be determined by the state.

Marx believed that the traditional family was a bourgeois institution that needed to be discarded. B.F. Skinner envisioned in Walden II a community in which children were taken from their parents (as Plato advised in The Republic) and raised by the community. Numerous others have expressed similar aspirations.

Such ideas are usually confined to academic circles, however, because to promote them publicly would be to to invite derision and discredit and make it difficult to achieve the political power necessary to enact them.

Nevertheless, the left's long, slow march through the institutions that commenced in the early 20th century and began to bear fruit in the 1960s - the relaxation of divorce laws, the disapprobation of parental authority, both in the home and in the now obsolete doctrine of in loco parentis in our public schools, the acceptance of alternatives to traditional marriage - has been tending inexorably toward the dissolution of the family as an essential social unit. It has been the lodestone toward which liberal policies have inclined for over a century.

The fact that a mainstream cable news network feels confident enough to air an ad like this suggests that they believe themselves on the cusp of achieving the influence necessary to talk openly about dissolving the bonds of family and achieving their goal of social atomism. Sadly, they're probably not wrong about this.

George Orwell captured perfectly the leftist vision of what the state and the family should look like in his novel 1984. If you've never read it you should.