No, it does NOT take a village
Just another brilliant, insightful piece from the incomparable Dan Greenfield.
Whose Children? Our Children
“Our children or the children of the state?”“We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents,” MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry argued. “Educators love their students and know better than anyone what they need to learn and to thrive,” the NEA asserted. “Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t,” a Washington Post op-ed bluntly asserted.
A Minnesota bill now proposes to take children away from parents who don’t agree to have them sexually mutilated. Similar bills are working their way through other states.
Behind all the identity politics, the graphic sexual materials in classrooms, the covert gender swaps by public school administrators, critical race theory, drag shows and so much else is a showdown between the family and the state. It’s not a new confrontation, but teenage puberty blockers, suicides, sex and racism manuals have made the stakes painfully clear.
At the heart of sexual identity politics is an obsession with dismantling the family. The embrace of transgenderism by the state is no accident of politics. The family, like race and religion, is the chief rival to the state. The state set out to neuter its rivals through identity politics, using race, religion and finally sexuality to define new identities and use them to make the state supreme.
The great struggle between human beings and the state was always going to come down to the question of whether the system or the family would be the central unit of social organization. In a little over a century a question that once seemed as basic to the understanding of humanity as the differences between men and women was muddied. The government took charge of education and demanded oversight of all the nation’s children because the indoctrination of the citizenry was a vital national interest. But so was the existence or non-existence of the children.
The shift from the single-income family to the two-income family with preschool encompassing children as young as 18 months and then to an ever more intensive chain of state educational institutions happened gradually enough that most parents thought it was their own idea. But what the Soviet Union and Communist China had failed to accomplish, happened in America.
Children, from even before they could talk, were being raised either directly by the state or by the institutions that it closely regulated. The unintended consequences of that, emotional fragility, a lack of healthy models for interpersonal relationships, and an obsession with ‘snitching’ on others that persists well into adulthood, were only the collateral damage.
Teachers and administrators in those institutions are pushing sexual identity politics on children as young as two years old not just because it’s a current leftist fad, but because eliminating the family wipes out any competition. The gradual transitional elimination of the family is rapidly picking up speed. Now the plan is to destroy the family by destroying the children.
To try to argue that it just ain’t so, one must first blind oneself to all observable reality, both current and historical. That’s more than mere folly; at root, it amounts to abject cowardice, submission, and ultimately, death.