The state-as-parent model: the Left seeing parental rights as an obstacle to centralized planning.

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.”

In a culture that prized parental rights, most of these proposals would go nowhere. But now, after years of familial erosion and accelerating collectivism, they crowd our politics. Pro-abortion pols who care about children the least talk about them the most, framing their big-government schemes as boons “for the children.”

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