The parental rights movement actively threatens the safety and wellbeing of children and by extension, democracy itself: https://t.co/kGW6sVSh7v

— Sarah Jones (@onesarahjones) April 8, 2023

Sarah Jones writes for NY Magazine.  Of course she does.  She is a lonely cat woman who will regret her life choices when she remains unmarried her entire life, wasting the very reason she is a woman by rejecting her role as a wife and mother.  But hey, she thinks she owns your children.

The “parental rights” movement is not new, but it is enjoying a resurgence. Adherents say they’re protecting children from harm, broadly defined. After an art teacher at a Florida charter school showed students a picture of Michelangelo’s David, parental complaints forced out the principal. Members of Moms for Liberty call for book bans across the country; books with LGBT content are at special risk of removal. The architects of state bans on gender-affirming care for minors say, falsely, that children are at risk from predatory physicians and activists. A “gender cult” destroys families, claimed conservative commentator Matt Walsh. “The child they held as a baby and raised and gave their lives to and loved and still love becomes, suddenly, unrecognizable,” he said. “I would rather be dead than have that happen to my kids.” The real sin isn’t that trans youth will suffer but that the parental grip might loosen.

Conservative interest in the child extends beyond a traditional hostility to LGBT people. In March, Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican, signed a bill into law that makes it easier for companies to hire children under 16 years old. More states may follow, as Terri Gerstein, the director of the Harvard Law School Labor and Worklife Program’s State and Local Enforcement Project, pointed out in the New York Times. Bills that would allow “14- and 15-year-olds to work in meatpacking plants and other dangerous jobs in Iowa as part of training programs and 16- and 17-year-olds to take jobs at construction sites in Minnesota are under consideration,” Gerstein wrote, noting that the bills coincide with a rise in dangerous child-labor violations. Not long after Republicans sought to put more children to work in Arkansas, Republicans in North Dakota killed a bill that would have expanded a free-lunch program for children from low-income families. “I can understand kids going hungry, but is that really the problem of the school district? Is that the problem of the state of North Dakota? It’s really a problem of parents being negligent with their kids,” said State Senator Mike Wobbema. His message was clear enough. A hungry child is not a collective responsibility but a private failing on the part of the parents.

Like any piece of property, a child has value to conservative activists. They are key to a future the conservative wants to win. Parental rights are merely one path to the total capture of state power and the imposition of an authoritarian hierarchy on us all. So it’s no surprise that children have long been a fixation to the right wing. The late Christian reconstructionist R.J. Rushdoony was a prominent advocate of Christian homeschooling in the 1960s through the 1980s. To Rushdoony, all education was religious, as Dr. Clint Heacock observed in a 2021 piece for Public Eye magazine. So-called government schools are churches in their own right, Rushdoony believed, indoctrinating students in the religion of secular humanism. He thought parents ought to be solely responsible for the care and education of their children instead of relinquishing them to an anti-Christian state. That fear of state influence, and belief in total parental control, isn’t limited to Rushdoony.

Literally everything she says is completely wrong.  Rushdoony had no fear of public education – he just believed it is illegitimate and a tool of statism, and taught what the Scriptures have to say about education.  Sarah confuses fear with simply knowing more than her and having a world and life view founded in Christian philosophy rather than on nothing, like Sarah.

She asserts that Christians behave and believe that children are property and a tool for taking control of them (whomever “them” is).  In fact, this is exactly the opposite of the Christian view.

You see, as I’ve pointed out so many times before, the state doesn’t own your children, but neither do you.  Ownership implies the right to enslave and abuse.  God owns our children.

That means parents are responsible for their upbringing and instruction in the way of the Lord because parents have been give authority and responsibility as lover of their children, custodians of this children, and teachers of their children – by God.

This view is embedded in and parcel to a world and life view that is as old as the Holy Writ.  To be fair, so is Sarah’s view.  Aristotle said it slightly more clearly than her.

“Neither must we suppose that any one of the citizens belongs to himself, and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.  That education should be regulated by law and should be an affair of state is not to be denied.” – R. J. Rushdoony, “The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy,” pages 85-86

It was against such men that Paul argued in Athens, when he said ” … for in Him we live and move and exist … Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to men that all everywhere should repent.”  Sarah is a communist.  Paul is not.

This is a clash of world and life views, not an artifact of a twenty first century fascination with child castration.  Because Sarah doesn’t read the Scriptures or philosophy, she doesn’t know anything about all of that.  And Sarah hasn’t repented of her sins.

But you do.  Teach your children to fear the Lord.  You have been empowered and ordered to do so.  He is watching you and watching over you with an army of angels to protect your family because you belong to Him if you know Christ.