Note: Missouri state Rep. Darin Chappell, vice president of Veterans in Defense of Liberty, cowrote this column.
The other week, President Biden started a bit of a firestorm, when he stated, “There is no such thing as someone else’s child. No such thing as someone else’s child. Our nation’s children are all our children.” Yes, we are all responsible for making the world a better place for the next generations; we all should be willing to help in areas wherein the nation’s youth are struggling in matters relating to educational failings, the prevalence of crime, access to drugs and the constant attack on American values and mores – but all of these concerns are just as much a product of self-interest as they are from a sense of altruism. Frankly, we want others’ children to be healthy, educated, mentally alert and safe from crime, not just because I want to see the innocent among us thrive, but also because they are the future of our country, and if they fail, we all fail as a nation. However, President Biden was not speaking of these concepts in that manner, when he spoke. He was offering a slightly distorted echo of Hillary Clinton’s contention that it “takes a village” to raise a child properly.
The basic premise is: We cannot trust individual family units to properly indoctrinate children into the mindset needed for them to become compliant with the vision of the Left; therefore, we will do it ourselves.
Frankly, this is but the latest in a long-term effort to dissect the traditional American family, dislodging it from its foundational roots, so that it can be deconstructed once and for all.
The process began in the infancy of the women’s liberation movement, with individuals suggesting that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Of course, women were told this to encourage them to refuse reliance on male support. They were warned that to be tied to a man for support was to accept a glass ceiling in the home, workplace, or any interpersonal relationship in which they found themselves. They were encouraged to “break free,” and many did, seeing the divorce rates climb higher in the ’70s than ever before. Then, the premise was that women could “have it all” – a career, a fulfilling family life and social liberty to express themselves without being tied to any traditional roles that had held their mothers in the home. Of course, this saw the creation of the latchkey kids of Gen X, who were arguably the most unparented generation in the history of the world, and for whom being an adult came way earlier than would otherwise have been the case.
Obviously, the next step was to completely emasculate men by suggesting that the changing of traditional roles of women was not enough. Now, men would have to be told all about the dangers of “toxic masculinity” and that we should not encourage the rough and tumble lifestyle of boys seen in previous generations. Games were not meant to win, but to simply achieve awards absent achievement. Competition is not good in itself but a problem with sports for children (especially boys), because of the way in which it teaches men to be aggressive in the workplace and in other parts of a man’s life. “Winning” is not only wrong if sought at all costs; it’s simply wrong to want to win.
Once the roles of men and women had been altered in the home, it was only a short step to question marriage’s validity underpinning it. Why tie one’s self to another for life, when so many exciting opportunities lie outside the bonds of marriage? Gone are the days of “staying together for the children.” All that was left was to attack the innocence of the children themselves.
We are told that children are far too immature to use a firearm in the hunting field, at the firing range, or even to have one in the home. However, those same minors can determine what gender they want to be, or whether they should go through life-altering surgeries and hormone therapies that will often leave them scarred and sterile should they later realize they have made a terrible mistake. Children who have no capacity even to sign a contract for a cellphone of their own, are encouraged to embrace all that the internet has to offer, by inattentive parents more focused on their own irresponsible pursuits than actually parenting their children. We are not to spank a child, ever. Instead, we should try to reason with him to “make better choices,” even though reasoning with irrational people (which small children are) is a fruitless effort, and one need only spend a modicum of time in public places to hear how children speak to their parents (and others) to see how poorly this hands-off parenting is working.
Now, we are told your children are not even yours. They belong to all of us, as a society. We, the People, are not only coming together to form a more perfect union but now a more perfect family setting, based upon the whim and wish of a leftist perspective that has only failed at every turn, making things worse for the family unit in every conceivable fashion. It is, in a word, “Lunacy.”
Many people do not really understand “conservatism ” as a societal and political philosophy. Sadly, even many who espouse themselves as conservatives do not fully comprehend the premise. Conservatism is the idea that, over the last 10,000 years or so of recorded human history, many concepts of societal formatting have been tried. Some have been wildly successful, while many others have failed miserably. If we look at the totality of human existence as our laboratory of ideas, with each being a separate experiment of the human condition, we can sift through it all, separating what works from what does not, choose the best options to be followed, and shun the failures lest we repeat them. Conservatism is not merely “traditionalism” for the sake of tradition. It is the search for the tried and true answers to life’s most basic questions. How do we keep families together? How are children most successfully reared to be productive citizens for the good of society? What are the best ways in which a child may be educated?
All such questions can only be answered with certainty, not by the ridiculous fads of societal engineering of the modern Left, but by the time-proven practices of those who have gone on before us with obvious success. All we are doing by turning our backs on what we know to be true is not making things better, but making things different. In the ten millennia of recorded human experience, “different” has been consistently horrible for the fabric of society – but, hey … maybe this time will be different?
No, no it won’t.
This is all an attack on our families, their structure, their importance to individual happiness and success, and on their most precious members’ futures. They are your children; not society’s. It is time for you to protect them from society when society has lost its collective mind!
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