Melissa-Harris Perry makes an egregiously stupid statement that “children belong to communities.”
Sarah Palin responds with an equally stupid statement:
Apparently MSNBC doesn’t think your children belong to you. Unflippingbelievable. youtu.be/Oa9temz_Cxw
— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) April 7, 2013
Conclusion: neither the progressives nor the conservatives are prepared to see children as human beings who don’t belong to anybody other than themselves. For both groups, children are things. Or, at best, house pets.
Clarissa's Blog 
I already distrust most politicians and news personalities anyway. Typical.
Thanks for exposing the hypocrisies.
LikeLike
My own opinion is that “children belong to X” is a very poorly constructed way of saying “X is responsible for doing for children that which they can’t do for themselves” (which is… a lot, children are mostly not capable of survival without adult provisioning and guidance).
What I hate is the all or nothing mutually antagnonistic model espoused by both Perry and Palin. There are some things that parents can do for their children better than anyone else and some things that are better handled at the community level. This should not set either side against the other (or make them ‘sides’). I reject Perry’s desire to micro-manage other people’s family lives as much as I reject Palin’s view of them as cannon fodder for their parents’ cultural wars.
LikeLike
“What I hate is the all or nothing mutually antagnonistic model espoused by both Perry and Palin. There are some things that parents can do for their children better than anyone else and some things that are better handled at the community level. This should not set either side against the other (or make them ‘sides’). I reject Perry’s desire to micro-manage other people’s family lives as much as I reject Palin’s view of them as cannon fodder for their parents’ cultural wars.”
– Exactly. For both of them, children are property that can be used to make a point. And children evoke a strong emotional reaction in everybody. Like fluffy puppies. So why not use them?
LikeLike
They don’t evoke any reaction in me. The word, “children” does not have many emotional connotations. At least, not on an adult level.
LikeLike
AMEN!
LikeLike
The word “belong” is often misused, perhaps as shorthand for something else. At the Democrat National Convention, a video was presented claiming that “we all belong to the Government.” We don’t, of course, and even in context I found that concept more offensive than the two you mention.
Parents have responsibilities for their children that no one else has — care, nurture and the initial inculcation of values, probably their own. As children age a bit and enter school they are (or should be) exposed to influences beyond their parents. For good or bad (I think it is increasingly bad), parents have little influence on the natures of such influences external to their homes.
We may well disagree on whether the “librul” (a word of my own confection that I use to distinguish them from liberals in the old fashioned sense of the word) influences on children in primary and secondary school, and even at university level, are good or bad. There have been many reports of late of small (even seven year old) children being suspended from school for such things as chewing a pop tart to resemble something seen by a teacher as resembling a pistol. John Turley, whom I consider a moderately conservative attorney, has commented on several such situations at his blog. As best I know, no elementary school student has yet carried to school and displayed a copy of the U.S. Constitution with the Second Amendment highlighted. What, I wonder, would happen were one to do so?
Bertrand Russel, one of my few heroes and a liberal in the old fashioned sense of the word, wrote that if given very young children to educate he could teach them that water freezes when heated on the stove and boils when placed in the refrigerator. As they grew into adults they would accept it, at least as a “Sunday truth” to be professed with conviction as true. However, if desiring tea they would nevertheless put the kettle on the stove for the water to boil.
LikeLike
I’m sure you can imagine what kind of fierce ideological conditioning I was exposed to in my Soviet school. Even at the university in the 1990s, we were still taught by KGB officers. None of this had any influence on me, though. Or on anybody else who went to school with me, except one child who suffered from a severe mental disability.
LikeLike