Posted on 04/11/2013 11:14:49 AM PDT by marshmallow
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.”
Of course, judicial activists have long fostered the state-as-parent model. In a 2005 ruling that would have met with Harris-Perry’s approval, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decreed that the right of parents to control their children’s education “does not extend beyond the threshold of........
(Excerpt) Read more at crisismagazine.com ...
Whoever governs a country must first see to it that citizens keep what belongs to them and that the state does not take from individuals what is rightfully theirs. As for those politicians who pretend they are friends of the common people and try to pass laws redistributing property and drive people out of their homes or champion legislation forgiving loans, I say they are undermining the very foundations of our state. They are destroying social harmony, which cannot exist when you take away money from some to give it to others. They are also destroying fairness, which vanishes when people cannot keep what rightfully belongs to them. For as I have said, it is the proper role of government to guard the right of citizens to control their own property.
Well, we know how that turned out for Rome, don't we? But our present Western Civilization was built on the ashes of empire. The best we can hope for now is a new beginning for the American ideal of liberty. It may well be hundreds of years in the making and at a cost we cannot even imaging now.
The following is excerpted from a series entitled, "Lessons on Liberty," by an Editor of "Our Ageless Constitution" & "Rediscovering the Ideas of Liberty." The "Lesson" contrasts the Founders' Ideas of Liberty" which were intended by America's Founders to be taught to rising generations, with the Counterfeit Ideas being promoted in the so-called "public schools" of America for decades.
IDEAS OF LIBERTY:
(from America’s Founders and Presidents)“The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.” (Jefferson - 1774)
“Statesmen may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone which can establish the principles upon which Freedom can securely stand.” (John Adams - 1775)
“The Sacred Rights of Mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the Hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.” (Alexander Hamilton)
“Without God, there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life. Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first and the most basic expression of Americanism. Thus the founding fathers saw it, and thus, with God’s help, it will continue to be.” (Dwight Eisenhower)
“The same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe, the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.” (John F. Kennedy - 1961 Inaugural)
“…it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly implore His protection and favor….”(George Washington)
“Now the virtue which had been infused into the Constitution…and was to give it…the stability and duration to which it was destined, was no other than…those abstract principles…proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence—namely, the self-evident truths of the…unalienable rights of man…the…sovereignty of the people, always subordinate to a rule of right and wrong, and always responsible to the Supreme Ruler of the universe for the rightful exercise of that sovereign…power.” (John Quincy Adams, on the occasion of The Jubilee of the Constitution - 1839)
"Today, across our nation, we see consequences of decades of gross neglect and outright censorship of the Founders’ ideas from textbooks and from our public discourse. We have allowed counterfeit ideas to dominate the public square, and the Founders’ principles have been crowded out. Unwittingly, many teachers and other unknowing officials have participated in the agenda of an unelected mind-controlling elite whose tyrannical actions have robbed generations of Americans from reading or studying the ideas that made America free. Like termites, they have eroded our foundations as effectively as if they had burned the books. Yet, not once have they been willing to call it by its rightful name—censorship. Once, in America, stifling ideas about the Creator and Creator-endowed liberty was considered unthinkable. . . .
"The ideas of liberty must be passed on from generation to generation if liberty is to survive. These ideas, when they are allowed to be examined freely, will prevail, because their appeal is to reason and to the love for liberty that is deep in the human heart. John Adams warned: “The people of America now have the best opportunity and the greatest trust in their hands, that Providence ever committed to so small a number…if they betray their trust, their guilt will merit even greater punishment than other nations have suffered, and the indignation of Heaven.”
COUNTERFEIT IDEAS:
(from some of those whose views have dominated national educational policy)“The idea of God is the keystone of a perverted society. The true root of liberty, equality and culture is atheism.” (Karl Marx)
Our thinking is enlightened “in the degree in which we cease to depend upon belief in the supernatural.” (John Dewey, father of ‘progressive education’ and 1st President of American Humanist Society)
“…democracy is a human faith and movement, unencumbered by supernatural preconceptions.” (John Childs, a protégé of John Dewey at Columbia)
“…the majority of our youth still hold the values of their parents, and if we do not alter this pattern, if we do not resocialize ourselves to accept change, our society may decay.” (John Goodlad, 1971 Report to President, Schooling for the Future)
“As in 1933, humanists still believe that traditional theism, especially a faith in the prayer-hearing God, who is assumed to love and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and be able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith.” (Humanist Manifesto II, 1973)
“…the most important factor moving us toward a secular society has been the educational factor. Our schools may not teach Johnny to read properly, but the fact that Johnny is in school until he is sixteen tends to lead toward elimination of religious superstition.” (Paul Blanshard, The Humanist, March-April, 1976)
“It [the Nat’l. Education Association’s publication list] includes the delegitimizing of all authority save that of the state, the degradation of traditional morality and the encouragement of citizens in general and children in particular to despise the rules and customs that make their society a functional democracy. The NEA is drifting into exceedingly dangerous waters, and probably carrying more than a few teachers and pupils with it.” (Chester E. Finn, Jr., Ass’t. Sec. Of Education & Prof. Of Education & Public Policy, Vanderbilt Univ., 1982)
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“Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines which conflict with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence…let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountains whose waters spring close to the blood of the Revolution.” (Abraham Lincoln)
My wife and my kids would tell the Government to 'Go F themselves' if LIBERALs try to take them from us...
Matter of fact, they would shoot first!! (They know how to use guns)
Homeschooling is here to say, Harris, you Marxist.
And still the MAJORITY of conservative parents TAKE THE BAIT and feed their kids right into the belly of the beast, which are our public schools.
IDIOTS.
“One irony in this warped thinking is that the Left often insists that children are the property of parents, provided that the parents are choosing to kill them or devise their lives in an In vitro fertilization lab.”
Same with child support - when they DEMAND that the mother “name the dad”...no way the left wants to claim ownership of those kids, at least on the financial side.
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