🚀 go-pugleaf

Joe wrote:
> 
> Trish <Trish@speedy.ehs.uiuc.edu> wrote:
> 
> >>A line must be drawn somewhere; most people would agree the
> >>above examples represent such a place. However, what if I raise my
> >>kids to be snake handlers? Or worship Satan? It's a slippery slope.
> 
> >  Indeed it is.  If you were to choose the above for them,
> >then so be it.  My point is, while I may not find it
> >personally to be a good choice, or rather a choice I would
> >have made, it's not my place or anyone elses to tell you it's
> >wrong for you and your's.
> 
> That sounds good, but it's not exactly true.  Why isn't it anyone
> else's place to tell someone how to raise "their" kid?   Poorly-raised
> children eventually turn into maladjusted adults who cost our society
> untold billions in dollars and suffering.     Most of the carnage in
> our nation's cities is caused by people under the age of 18.

I take it that you're a supporter of the almost-unremarked trend towards
requiring parents to slowly abrogate their rights? In another thread,
you remark that isolationists who wish to remain separate, such as (to
use your example) Hebrew-speaking Hasidim in New York or Chinese in San
Francisco, have every right to transmit their culture and to speak their
languages and to retain their own forms of worship, etc. I couldn't
agree more (provided that they speak English as well as their own
traditional language by the second generation in America).

But if you take this position, surely you must realize that it's
mutually-exclusive to the position you take in this article. If you
argue that the village has more rights to raise a child than do the
parents of that child, you are essentially taking the first
argumentative step towards State-run _creches_ which regulate who may
give birth and when, which regulate what children may be taught and by
whom, and such a stance in antithetical to the essential freedoms which
we as Americans so revere.

> It really does take a whole village to raise a child.  Because it only
> takes one child to destroy a whole village.

Ah, but this is, again, only the first step in a line of reasoning which
presupposes that the State has not only the right, but the _duty_
(primarily to itself, of course) to ensure that only peaceful productive
taxpayers will be produced to increase its own wealth, power and
prestige.

In a world where weapons of mass-destruction are to be found under every
kitchen sink, there is some slight merit to this argument; yet it is
merely the argument of a proactive paranoid, desparately seeking to
protect himself at the detriment of all others, knowing all along that
should the ploy be discovered, righteous revenge will surely be
forthcoming.

We must all take a stand against any powers or would-be-powers which
seek to regulate reproductive and child-rearing freedoms; which remove
parental authority by default instead of for-cause; which require that
only the State or the Church or their equivalents may raise a child.
Some famous preist once remarked that if you gave him the child until
the child was three, you could therafter have him back; by that time he
was (due to early influence) forever the creature of the priest.

It would be better to license parents for permission to become parents
than it would be to interfere in the transmission of culture through the
regulation of parental influence or parental input after the birth of
the child. In the first case, only those parents deemed "suitable" by
the State would be permitted to bear their own children and raise them
as they saw fit - in the second case, any parent bearing a child could
be reduced to a mere source of biological material for the State to mold
as it will.

Already, through the intervention of the courts,
doubtless-well-intentioned psychologists and social-workers, and forced
public-education, the State arguably has too much influence on our
precious children. 

For now the State is our last guardian of our freedom and of our rights,
but to allow it to mold the next generation is to face the risk that
those molded by the State will change the form and kind and degree of
Government to something which we would hardly wish to see in a position
of power over our posterity. If we are to see our precious posterity
live under a benign and just government, we who hold these principles
dear must ensure that our children also hold them dear. Bureaucracies
are, after all primarily concerned with their own expansion. And what
better goal might they seek than that they be allowed to raise the next
generation to accept their necessary evil, and to furthermore raise them
to acceed to its unlimited and untrammelled expansion into all areas of
our own, and into our children's, lives?

It is we, and not bureaucrats, who must raise our children as we see
fit.

Fight this fight with all you have, you have nothing to lose but tyranny
for your children. And Keep the Faith.

-- 
Be kind to your       | When the going gets weird the weird turn pro.
neighbors even though | http://www.clark.net/pub/klaatu/
they be transgenic    | Now. chock full of uninteresting links.
chimerae.             |-- Genesis 19:1-13 - Hebrews 13:2 -- 
---- INCOMING! http://www.clark.net/pub/klaatu/incoming.html ---------
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