Welcome to a brave new "national conversation" that proposes not simply to redefine the family, but to eliminate it.
MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry recently shocked millions with her brazen TV promo spot urging us to get rid of the idea that kids belong to their parents or to "private" families. She presses us to replace it with a "collective" notion of children: "Kids belong to whole communities."
Clearly, we are entering a new phase in family breakdown. In the earlier phases, leftist policies cultivated unrestrained sexual license, abortion and single parenting. Those policies set the stage for new forms of child poverty as well as heightened social divisions along lines of race, class and sex. Their proponents, however, refrained from openly attacking the family in mass media.
But today Harris-Perry hits us right in the mainstream with what seem to be fighting words, an open declaration of war on families.
When we ponder how we got here, we tend to look in retrospect at Hillary Clinton's softer treatise from 1996, It Takes a Village. But somewhere on the continuum between Clinton and Harris-Perry we ought to focus on one of Harris-Perry's lesser known trailblazers, Sandra Feldman.
As president of the American Federation of Teachers, Feldman (d. 2005) published in 1998 a stealthy little essay entitled "The Childswap Society" which injected into the mainstream -- as never before -- the idea of state-owned children. Her article appeared prominently the Washington Post, New York Times, and other dailies, as one in a series of AFT commentaries run as paid advertisements under the AFT banner "Where We Stand."
In it Feldman seems to have planted seed for debates that pit a collectivist vision of community against the autonomy of the family. "The Childswap Society" has since been used, apparently for years, in various high school and college argumentation curricula.
The essay explores the idea of a lottery in which all children are "swapped" or assigned at random by the state to their caregivers. Feldman claimed it was based on a plot from a science fiction story she read as a youth. It lingered in her conscience as a way to help Americans better understand the problems of child poverty and inequality. She explains:
"One thing the lottery did was to make the whole society very conscientious about how things were arranged for kids. After all, you never knew where your own child would end up after the next lottery, so in a very real sense everyone's child was -- or could be -- yours. As a result children growing up under this system got everything they needed to thrive, both physically and intellectually, and the society itself was harmonious. What if someone wrote a story about what American society in the late 20th century takes for granted in the arrangements for its children? We might not want to admit it, but don't we take for granted that some kids are going to have much better lives than others? Of course."
Feldman then discusses the differences for children: some live in wealthy suburbs versus inner cities; some receive excellent medical treatment versus little or no treatment; some go to well-appointed versus dilapidated school buildings:
"We take for granted, in so many ways, that the children whom the lottery of birth has made the most needy will get the least. 'After all,' we say to ourselves, 'it's up to each family to look after its own. If some parents can't give their children what they need to thrive, that's their problem.'"
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/the_war_on_the_family_enters_a_new_stage.html#ixzz2QBPmxDds
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