Children Are Not The Property of the State: A Response to Sarah Jones
BY Herschel Smith1 year, 6 months ago
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.
On April 12, 2023 at 10:36 pm, Bill Buppert said:
Zero out all government subsidy of K-PhD “education” in the USSA and in one generation communism as an ideal and a solution is destroyed. You burn out and extinguish the seedbed of most government supremacism.
On April 13, 2023 at 8:08 am, J said:
One more step…dissolve the illegitimate Feral Department of Indoctronation. Stop taking our tax dollars to fund those that want to control every aspect of our lives. Damned Commies.
On April 13, 2023 at 9:41 am, PGF said:
In the tweet, she accuses Christians of doing precisely what Horace Mann set out to do by instituting the Prussian Military School Model in America. This is a Classic Alinsky tactic; accuse your enemy of what you are doing. Note: she made Holy God, and thereby me, her enemy. She didn’t have to do that; the choice was hers.
On April 13, 2023 at 9:57 am, Grunt said:
F’ing commie.
On April 13, 2023 at 12:35 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
Re: “Children Are Not The Property of the State: A Response to Sarah Jones”
The communists certainly believe that they are, and will use the power of the state to back them up. Parents had better be willing to fight for their children, because that’s what it is going to be – a fight.
And it isn’t just the children who are threatened; all are in danger as long as the communists remain in power. To them, the people are not free to live their lives according to the dictates of their own conscience, but property of the party and the state. At this present juncture, it is more probable by the day that the machine will reinstitute conscription, a.k.a. a military draft. And this time, it may include women and people who think they’re too old or out-of-reach to worry. Got to feed the meat-grinder, doncha know!
On April 13, 2023 at 5:22 pm, Jack Crabb said:
Herschel, I will apologize upfront for my post.
Sarah Jones, please find homes for all of your cats, layout a bunch of 6 mil poly, then immediately fire up a chainsaw and go fuck yourself with it.
On April 13, 2023 at 6:34 pm, Latigo Morgan said:
Here’s my argument: NO!
Your move.
On April 13, 2023 at 7:56 pm, Dan said:
Society’s problem is we allow people like Sarah Jones….and the countless others who enpmbrace her level of insanity…to continue existing. A normal functioning society removes defective people like this from society BEFORE they cause the great harm they are intent on causing.
On April 14, 2023 at 7:54 am, Name (required) said:
A century ago we had a Christian society that didn’t tolerate this sort of depravity. Then Christians abdicated their power, turned their society over to satan worshipers, apparently to “be nice,” or “winsome.”
We’re called to take control of our society, ensure there is a Godly government that is a terror to evil doers. We haven’t gotten back to that yet.