“We
have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to
their parents,” MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry argued. “Educators love
their students and know better than anyone what they need to learn and
to thrive,” the NEA asserted. “Parents claim they have the right to
shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t,” a Washington Post
op-ed bluntly asserted.
A Minnesota bill now proposes to take
children away from parents who don’t agree to have them sexually
mutilated. Similar bills are working their way through other states.
Behind
all the identity politics, the graphic sexual materials in classrooms,
the covert gender swaps by public school administrators, critical race
theory, drag shows and so much else is a showdown between the family and
the state. It’s not a new confrontation, but teenage puberty blockers,
suicides, sex and racism manuals have made the stakes painfully clear.
At
the heart of sexual identity politics is an obsession with dismantling
the family. The embrace of transgenderism by the state is no accident of
politics. The family, like race and religion, is the chief rival to the
state. The state set out to neuter its rivals through identity
politics, using race, religion and finally sexuality to define new
identities and use them to make the state supreme.
The great
struggle between human beings and the state was always going to come
down to the question of whether the system or the family would be the
central unit of social organization. In a little over a century a
question that once seemed as basic to the understanding of humanity as
the differences between men and women was muddied. The government took
charge of education and demanded oversight of all the nation’s children
because the indoctrination of the citizenry was a vital national
interest. But so was the existence or non-existence of the children.
The
state did not just control what children learned, but whether they
lived. It asserts the right to kill unborn children in the womb, and in
Canada and Europe to kill them through euthanasia if they are ill or
depressed. From eugenics to abortion, the state determined that it had a
vital interest in not only how children were raised, but that they
lived or died at its command.
Democracy had come to mean not a
town meeting and a free press, but the state determining its own future
constituencies, rigging elections a generation ahead by controlling
demographics, education and all the elements of the lives of children.
By controlling children, the state had become a next generation tyranny
in the guise of a multi-generational democracy. The Left always looked
to the “future” and the “children” because they had already brought it
into being.
The new social order remade parents into glorified
employees of the state. Birthing and rearing children became labor on
behalf of the state subsidized by its institutions with the
understanding that at the opportune moment, the state would tell the
parents to step back while it takes charge.
When schools secretly
change the gender of children or push sexual and racist materials on
them, the state is taking charge. And administrations and unions
indignantly tell parents to keep quiet and not interfere. Parents, like
most taxpayers, under the impression that the system answers to them or
at least that it ought to answer to them were confused and enraged.
The
shift from the single-income family to the two-income family with
preschool encompassing children as young as 18 months and then to an
ever more intensive chain of state educational institutions happened
gradually enough that most parents thought it was their own idea. But
what the Soviet Union and Communist China had failed to accomplish,
happened in America.
Children, from even before they could talk,
were being raised either directly by the state or by the institutions
that it closely regulated. The unintended consequences of that,
emotional fragility, a lack of healthy models for interpersonal
relationships, and an obsession with ‘snitching’ on others that persists
well into adulthood, were only the collateral damage.
The campus
safe space and the ghetto are where the experimental testing of the
children has been conducted, leaving behind radioactive social
wastelands fit only for DEI seminars.
Such children raised by the
state become adults who want the state to go on raising them. When
they’re hungry, the state feeds them, when they’re cold, the state
shelters them and when they’re unhappy, the state tells them whom to
blame. When their relationships fall apart or when their feelings are
hurt, they turn to the state to soothe them with a dose of revenge.
The
state was field testing its transitional model for replacing the family
with its communal institutions. This dream, at least two centuries old
in western socialist circles, is being realized not only by the primary
products of those experiments, single mothers raising children from
different fathers on government subsidies, but by much of the next
generation.
Teachers and administrators in those institutions are
pushing sexual identity politics on children as young as two years old
not just because it’s a current leftist fad, but because eliminating the
family wipes out any competition. The gradual transitional elimination
of the family is rapidly picking up speed. Now the plan is to destroy
the family by destroying the children.
Children have an inherent
need for a family. Totalitarian regimes have fought the family in the
past by turning children against their parents. And yet even in the face
of the monstrous propaganda of the USSR, Communist China and Nazi
Germany, the family has persisted. The Left has come to realize that the
only way to destroy the family is to destroy the children.
The
familiar vision of socialism is man as a tabula rasa, a blank state, not
just economically or socially as under Communism, but completely empty,
ready to fit any mold. He can be a man or a woman, or any hybridized
combination of new invented sexes to be determined by the state.
Instead
of the people deciding what the state ought to be like, the state will
determine what the people will be like down to the smaller granular
detail. A democracy of people who have been trained to reshape
themselves completely in response to propaganda and their instructors
are capable of becoming the willing pawns and puppets of any state no
matter how terrible.
Or so it would seem.
This
totalitarian utopia requires the extinction of the family as its
ultimate precondition and final triumph. That is what is really at stake
in this struggle. And it is best summed up by a single question. “Whose
children? Our children or the children of the state?”
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.