Prior to Boston’s bombing garnering most of the nation’s attention, the week previous cable news host Melissa Harris-Perry received more attention than usual for the news she made as opposed to the news she reported. In only a 30 second promotional ad for her network, the television host and Tulane professor said the following:
“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have, because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children. ‘Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility.’ We haven’t had a very collective notion of ‘these are our children.’ So part of it is we have to breakthrough our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.” [Emphasis was Harris-Perry’s.]
While the Intramuralist previously paid little attention to the rhetorical flap that has since transpired on all sides of the equation, my desire today is to briefly analyze what the TV host said and why my internal alarms are unfortunately now sounding…
In attempts to either squelch the firestorm (or gain increased publicity — you decide), Harris-Perry acknowledged that while she can comprehend how many are “genuinely upset” by what she said, she still stands by her statement. She reiterated that the ad “isn’t about me wanting to take your kids, and this isn’t even about whether children are property. This is about whether we as a society, expressing our collective will through our public institutions, including our government, have a right to impinge on individual freedoms in order to advance a common good.”
That emphasis is mine. That’s where my alarm begins to sound…
Let’s be clear. People sometimes make bad choices. We sometimes make bad choices. I still make bad choices. I’ve previously allowed my kids to sleep ‘til noon and eat ice cream for breakfast. I also have zero doubt that at times I’ve allowed them to believe some things that were not true — even completely, totally ignorantly on my part; yes, I have at times taught them wrongly… maybe even “allowing” my kids to believe something that didn’t advance the desired “common good” that one of the country’s presumed intellectuals passionately believes in.
But a free, democratic republic, that teaching is no one’s right nor responsibility other than my household’s. Perhaps even more significantly — and why this intelligent professor’s comments strike me as a contradiction of wisdom — is because it is no one else’s responsibility to teach my kids rightly. It is no one else’s right nor responsibility to discern what is right or wrong for my children… that applies whether the topic be worldly or weighty, no matter if even about ice cream.
For me, that’s what bothers me about this ad. With all due respect to Melissa Harris-Perry, I do not think of my children as my property; that’s not the issue.
Each of us has been endowed with inalienable rights. Note: the Declaration of Independence credits our Creator for those rights — not any desiring overreach of government. One of those rights — and responsibilities — is to raise our children well. That is not our community’s right nor the government’s responsibility. That job is notably, divinely ours.
So if in my responsibility I make errors in judgment — which will happen sometimes — and if I make errors that cause partisans on one side or another (or both) to cringe at my teaching — it is no one’s right to play the moral compass or perceived human Holy Spirit and convict my kid; it is not their right to straighten my kid out. Alarmingly, that argument is far more compatible with a socialist state than with a democratic republic that long ago acknowledged the individual endowment by our Creator.
Pass the ice cream, please. For the record, we’ll be serving it for breakfast.
Respectfully,
AR