As ever, a huge percentage of the "culture war" in this country is the division between those who think that children are people and those who think that children are their parents chattel
It's pretty intuitive to all decent people that if your child is trans, or even just experimenting & exploring their own gender, and they feel that they need to hide that from their parents, that the person at fault here is the Parent
I would actually take this a bit further and say that culture war is mostly people mad their kids won’t listen to them and not other people so they think the government should make them, although that might also be saying the same thing.
But I don’t think it’s even that, I think it’s that they want to use the power of government to keep the views of anyone who isn’t them or the people they trust away from their kids
Definitely. Maybe it’s more like “the government should forcibly shelter my kid” or “my kid should have no influences other than me.” It’s also telling that collapse any deference between a 16 year old and a 3 year old.
I think this is/was the unstated stakes of the creationism wars of our youth. They want the whole world to be an ideological luge track for their beliefs.
I thought this was solved back in the 10 Commandments days.
Are we litigating this again?
It's almost like religious proscriptions have no real meaning to the average kid.
I think in the next couple of years we’re going to see some conservatives stop talking in subtext and just straight campaign on “it should be illegal for adult children to stop talking to their parents”
Some Dominionists/Christian Reconstructionists legitimately advocate for enforcing capital punishment on adult children who reject their parents entirely
That actually really shocked me—momentarily. And then I realized of course they do. “Thou shalt honor…” This is why we have to fight so hard to retain democracy though.
The project of America is that liberty and righteous are proven by owning property and since a lot of people don’t (the bank at the very least owns your property) what’s left to own?
The philosophy of the founding fathers states that owning and improving property is a sign of virtue right to citizenship and ablity to vote (this is also the argument used that natives where not entitled to their land) the protection of private property is the cornerstone of US law
That this extends mentally to children is just rank patriarchy - proven over and over by family court being the origin story of so many right wing werdios
I have become pretty radicalized in favor or children's rights over the last few years. It literally solves huge sources of societal strife if parents are considered temporary guardians rather the current owners.
I can't help noticing the loud parents' rights crowd doesn't think much of children's rights.
Which is well-explained by the "children are property" concept.
I almost 40 and my parents still ask me when I am gonna move back home. My life is over back home, but to parents, my life is still deeply intertwined in theirs
And then the legal system reinforces that belief. I’m involved in a case right now where a young woman is trying to get custody of her siblings. Despite horrible abuse, because it doesn’t stray into violence it doesn’t matter and the court is just 🤷♂️
This was extremely salient during covid. A lot of people trying to argue about epidemiology, pedagogy, and macroeconomics were mostly just arguing this
The people I know personally who have the strongest negative opinions on trans kids are not parents. They don't understand that kids make decisions and know their own minds.
I mean, that *their* children are the property of *them* yes. But it isn't like they have the same solicitude for parents who want their children to learn other things. The next step (some places, the step already taken) is to criminalize gender-affirming parenting. This isn't some effort to bolster
the power of the Paterfamilias. It is to impose their gender ideology on everyone through the power of the state. Parental rights exist only for parents who will use them for the "right" ends, which of course makes them not rights at all.
The cross-section claiming that a fetus has an individual right to life and also parents should be able to completely control every decision their child makes (including to have to start working) is pretty interesting (derogatory)
That's why the anti-vax to fash pipeline operates the way it does -- a key argument of the anti-vax creeps has always been that children are their parents' chattels.
