About
a year ago MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry put out a video in which she argued
that children “belong to whole communities” and that we need to end the idea
that children belong to their parents.
You can access the video at the link provided below.
While Ms. Harris-Perry quickly
backed off on her blog (she called it “doubling down” but I read her statement
and she was wiggling like a worm stuck on a hook), it appears others have taken
up her cause. Recently a Michigan woman
took her teenage daughter to a local health care facility only to find a sign posted that told any parent of a 12 to 17 year old that a new law required there be a five minute private conversation between the child and a nurse or doctor.
Mom was infuriated, and rightly
so. She asked for the opt out provision
and was told there was none. She
ultimately decided to take her child elsewhere.
In the meantime, Mom apparently got The Blaze.com involved, sparking a
number of reports, including at InfoWars.com.
The Blaze reported that their efforts to find such a law ended in
failure and that one Michigan legislator, speaking anonymously, said no such
law existed. Efforts to confirm why the
health care facility believed such a law was in place were met with silence. I spent a few minutes researching Michigan
law myself on the state legislature’s website, but came up with ZERO hits for
any such law. I confess I did not do an
exhaustive search, but 25 years of active lawyering usually means finding such
laws fairly quickly. It appears no such
law ever existed – the health care facility was, ahem, misinformed . . .? We’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.
In
the meantime, taking its cue from the United Nations, Scotland has already
passed laws by which every single child in Scotland will be assigned a “named
person” who is specifically not that child’s parent to maintain some sort of
overview of the child’s welfare. The
United States has thus far not signed off on this United Nations treaty, which
places ultimate control of children’s welfare in the hands of the state instead
of parents. We’ve already seen an
episode of this effort in Nazi Germany (look it up – Hitler understood that the
key to controlling a nation was controlling its educational apparatus and its
children). Other countries will be
following suit and Senate Democrats continue to bring this “Convention on the
Rights of the Child” up for ratification by the United States. If you have an interest, you can link to it
here: http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx. It should be called the Convention on the
Rights of Government to Control Children.
Like most government nonsense, it sounds good on the surface, but the
devil, as the old saying goes, is in the details.
My
youngest child will soon be an adult so this kind of stuff will very likely
never affect me directly. However, our
government has shown itself incapable of so many things, particularly related
to social engineering and social outcomes, that I confess significant distress
that the next generation – those of you with young children right now – might think
it is a good idea for the government to tell you what to do with your kids, or
have your kids discuss things with their doctor outside of your hearing. I’m reminded of Orwell’s 1984 in which one of the characters gets reported for some
“offense” by his own young son and then,
ironically, acts like it’s such a great thing!
Orwell was maybe onto something?
These
days, unfortunately, with the massive changes in health care as a result of
PPACA, otherwise known as Obamacare, patients have no idea if such claims like
the one this mom confronted are real or not.
But this is what we should come to expect as we transition into a
post-Christian America. Christians don’t
always do everything right – that’s a given.
And while I have heard conservative Christian leaders, notably Russell
Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention, suggest we should be happy to see the
death of so-called “cultural Christianity,” I’m not so sure. With a society lurching into moral
non-judgmentalism in which acts are only morally problematic depending on the
latest social trend, public opinion poll, or government mandate, maybe some
good ole cultural Christianity plugging the ever gaping hole in the moral dike wouldn’t
be such a bad thing.
I’m
a Southern Baptist and I generally agree with Dr. Moore. He’s certainly a more sophisticated
theologian than me and I understand his problem was that many cultural Christians
were laboring under a belief they were saved when they weren’t. The problem now, though, is society requires
laws about everything because people no longer adhere to even a moderately
Christian framework for their moral underpinnings. Without an underlying, agreed upon moral
code, a vacuum erupts which demands filling.
The vacuum gets filled with laws, which become necessary in order to
take care of every action and reaction that we see. Thus, a clinic in Michigan wrongly interprets
or is wrongly told about or wrongly just makes up a law that parents must
consent to their teenagers having a private conversation with the doctor or
nurse.
Unfortunately,
we have apparently turned over our moral reasoning to an atheistic culture from
which can only come the kind of government portrayed in 1984. Control of the
populace becomes the government’s entire function. This requires an inordinate number of
laws. While so-called cultural
Christianity had significant problems, it may have served an unintended
function, namely creating a basic, agreed upon moral code that didn’t require
any law to enforce it. It served as a
fence around the schoolyard, which allowed us freedom to roam around within
boundaries that helped define morality.
Now, the fence has been removed.
Advocates of removing that fence would claim we are now more free. The truth, though, is we aren’t because we
all need that fence and the government has stepped in and is putting up higher
and more restrictive fences with less space for roaming. Yes, the government will give you rights that
it thinks will make you more complacent, like saying all kinds of sexual
activity is perfectly permissible. That is
a basis for more control, not less. Drug
the people with their preferred analgesic and let them go – they’ll be easier
to control and easier to weed out if they get too hard to handle.
People
used to understand that all kinds of things were their responsibility because
of cultural Christianity – it served as a standard bearer for basic moral
living, even when people were not true believers. Have things really gotten better since we
supposedly “threw off” all the alleged repression? Do you really want some faceless government bureaucrat
telling you how to raise your child? Do
you really want some unknown nurse or doctor to “have a private talk” with your
teenage son or daughter about subjects best left to parental discretion? That’s where we are headed.
My
dad always used to tell me that many of the people who are most desirous of
government control are the very first people the government will get rid of
upon seizing total control. Ms.
Harris-Perry beware?
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