Attention, Conservative Parents: Your Kids Aren't Your Property

[ancianita]

I never read Tim Wise without loving him for his intensity, clarity, commitment, and writing excellence, among other things.

...

I remember it like yesterday, even though it was twenty-six years ago.

I had just finished giving a lecture at Kansas City Community College in which I examined the intersection of racism and heterosexism and some of the connections between organized racist movements and the homophobic religious right.

That’s when it happened.

A woman in the audience jumped to her feet during the Q&A, insisting that she had every right to teach her children that homosexuality was immoral and that gays and lesbians were going to Hell.

How dare I, she bellowed, challenge her right as a parent to raise her children as she wished. After all, she explained, using precisely these words: they were her property.

Seriously, she went all the way there — in effect, equating her children with the ottoman in her living room or perhaps her bedside table.

She did so without hesitation, without misgiving, and without the tiniest bit of self-awareness as to how ridiculous it made her sound.

If you listen carefully, you hear notes of the same tune in the cacophony of craziness playing out around the country regarding anti-racist education or mask mandates in the face of COVID.

“These are my children,” they scream. “How dare you teach them about racism in America.”

“How dare you mask the precious faces that God gave them!”

“How dare you use books in elementary or middle school that have gay characters or same-sex couples. That goes against our family’s values!”

And here’s the best one of all:

“How dare you indoctrinate them!”

https://timjwise.medium.com/attention-conservative-parents-your-kids-arent-your-property-d6b89755c7db

[FoxNewsSucks]

1. No, they're not her property, they're her RESPONSIBILITY

There's a big difference and she failed miserably.

[ancianita]

2. Right! One would think she'd think of them as humans, not pets. Like Tim says,

"... The fact is, children are human beings with a right to their development as free moral agents. Sure, as parents, we have an obligation to protect them.

From armed intruders.

From grizzly bears when we’re camping.

From light sockets.

From sharp edges on coffee tables.

From drugs and gangs and crossing the street in front of a speeding car.

But not from ideas.

To say you wish to protect a child from ideas or be given exclusive right to influence them on specific subjects is to deny them their humanity.

It is to say that this child is but an extension of your will as a parent. They are not autonomous. They are robots — A.I. in human form.

This is ghastly.

It is a kind of thinking that denies children the very free will that, ironically, some of their parents’ fundamentalist churches teach is central to the doctrine of salvation.

After all, it is precisely the ability to choose righteousness and faith and be “saved” that makes the unwillingness to do so worthy of eternal damnation.

If people can’t choose to come into the light, then they can’t very well be condemned for not doing so.

Putting aside those who believe in predestination and reject free will — another discussion for another time — this notion of free will is central to most evangelical traditions today.

And yet, the same people who stress the importance of choosing Jesus freely (even though it’s an open question how willingly anyone does so when they’ve been threatened with a lake of fire since they were 5) would here deny that same freedom to their children.

This is cult behavior..."

[Runningdawg]

3. You have to understand in many American evangelical cults, they do consider women & children

property and it's hard to convince them otherwise when the women and children comply.

[ancianita]

5. Maybe, but they know it's wrong, which is why they don't tell their women & children, and so

their women and children really don't know they're considered property. Children and women are put into a "don't ask don't tell" life under fundamentalist Christianity.

Even if they were told, I expect they'd also know they're captives. That their chains are padded, and that they're rewarded with comforts and false validation, keeps them from running.

If you've got time, there is a horrendously frightening article in this week's New Yorker about when they DO run. It's about how frustrated parents and courts turn over troubled youth to the shadow Christian penal system called Teen Challenge, started in the 60's and spread across 50 states (or at least the red ones). George W. Bush loved it.
I call it the Christian taliban's sharia here in the U.S.
The sheer numbers of children being criminalized for their free wills, then traumatized by christo-fascist 'rehab' nonprofits is a horrible secret that the nation has to get data on. So far there is little to none.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/18/the-shadow-penal-system-for-struggling-kids

[Runningdawg]

9. I was raised in a religious cult. I knew it was bullshit before my first suicide attempt at age 10

but I stayed until I was 18 rather than risk being "that poor girl who went missing" or a breeder for some old man who buried his last 2 wives out by the barn.

[ancianita]

10. I'm glad you waited it out and escaped. Time heals a lot, but not everything.

I hope your life is better.

Thousands get put into these punitive, controlling "programs" that do nothing but beat down "sin" and break their free wills with no substitute education in judgment, skill building team building experience, or a self help reading list, just obedience training through brainwashing.

Traumatic childhood is recognized as a major area of psychology these days, so prevalent that many therapies have been developed and ongoing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_trauma#Traumatic_grief

[markie]

4. guess they don't adhere to Gibran....

"...And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth...."

[ancianita]

6. Nope. They probably don't even know he exists unless teachers have them read him in high school.

That's what the big ruckus is about -- teachers teaching World Literature ( I taught Gibran's poems) or science that doesn't adhere to the parochial prejudices of their narrow minds.

I'm reminded of a cartoon I saw here recently:

[markie]

7. Kahlil Gibran was my life in High School

later, I taught for a bit, not long... I am afraid this is how some teach now...

[ancianita]

8. At least with World Literature, everyone gets a taste of most cultures.

The idea of a 12th grade teacher should not be to impose one standard of proof of learning. By that year, the idea is to get kids to love reading, the arts, love different foods, holidays, music, museum field trips, literature, and to get them to carry that with them into the world.

They did a LOT of multi-media culture sharing.

[Solly Mack]

11. K&R