The “Private Idea” of Parental Rights
by
George Neumayr
The Left has always held a dim view of parental rights,
seeing them as an obstacle to centralized planning. But usually the
Left’s spokesmen are a little more circumspect in their pronouncements
than MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, who blurted out in a promotional ad
for the channel that “we have to break through our kind of private idea
that kids belong to their parents” and see them as “our children.”
Harris-Perry’s paean to collectivism makes explicit the principle
that is implicit in many of the policies of the Left—from its resistance
to home schooling to its propagandistic sex education in public schools
to its opposition to parental consent or even parental notification for
abortion. All of those policies are based on the state-as-parent model
that she articulated.
Harris-Perry’s remark also explains the blizzard of proposals one
hears these days from groups given Orwellian names like the “Children’s
Defense Fund.” In the name of “our children”—as if they belong first to
the state and then only provisionally to parents—these groups are always
clamoring for public school teachers to get their hands on children at
younger and younger ages and for more of the day and year: they want
them “before-school,” “after-school,” and “year-round.”
George Neumayr is a contributing editor to The American Spectator, and a weekly columnist for Crisis Magazine. He is also co-author (with Phyllis Schlafly) of No Higher Power: Obama's War on Religious Freedom.
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