Parents’ rights
Now that the paranoid control freaks have taken over public policy and debate, parents have lost control of their children to the government. Every law restricting parents’ options in regard to their children weakens families by diminishing parents’ authority and the hegemony of their judgment. Fewer choices don’t make for stronger families.
Parents inherently have absolute power over their children, along with absolute responsibility. We are responsible for everything having to do with our children until they’re grown. We’re liable morally and financially and every other which way for our children, and we can treat them any way we see fit. We can beat them, hug them, use them, kill them, love them, hate them, sell them, worship them, abuse them—all are parental options. Some people effectively own other people; it’s only pathological when the ownership becomes a legal fiction with words and goons to enforce it.
I don’t advocate violence. I think the murder of Elisa Izquierdo in Minnesota some years ago was deplorable, despicable, and a shame, but it was not a failure of the system, because the system can’t save everybody from everything and should quit trying.
We ought to admit that the government can’t save a child from her mother. If your mother is crazy, you’re probably going to be crazy, too, and she may kill you. If your parents are bad, you will suffer, either because you’ve got lousy parents, or because you’re an orphan and live in a bureaucracy.
Government should get out of the family business. Let families see to their own. The government is too stupid to overrule any parent. Bureaucrats can be right now and then, but we have no reason to think any bureaucrat knows better than a mother or father.
Making laws shifts responsibility for our behavior to the government. The assumption of moral behavior on the part of governments at all levels is an absurd mistake. Governments have policies, not morality.
And let’s let Susan Smith walk. You remember Smith: So Prince Charming wouldn’t pass her by, she murdered her two little boys and then blamed it on an imaginary Negro. Smith should go free, if you can call hauling her conscience around freedom, because keeping Susan Smith in jail is a waste of her life and our money.
How many times will a mother, after deciding to kill her children, stop as she’s loading the gun or sharpening the knife or gassing up the car and think, “Whoa! Susan Smith went to jail! Maybe I shouldn’t kill my children!"? Zero times. Nobody will ever not kill anybody because we’re taking care of Susan Smith. Let her go. I bet she won’t do it again.
And it doesn’t matter who killed JonBenét Ramsey. That’s between him and God. Whether JonBenét’s father raped and killed her or not, he had a right to. I bet he’s sorry—she’d’ve made Humbert howl at the moon. We can’t make the power of life and death go away; we can leave it to as many people as possible—namely all of us—or we can concentrate it with the paranoids, bullies and bureaucrats in the government. Who do you trust to make decisions about your family?
