MSNBC: Your Kids Don’t Belong to You

This is such an incredibly creepy video it’s actually hard for me to believe it’s real. Professor of political science at Tulane University and MSNBC host, Melissa Harris-Perry states the following:

We have to break through 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 everyone’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.

This clip is very important because it really demonstrates the mentality of a statist. They want to run your lives in every way you can possibly imagine, including the upbringing of your children.  Outrageous.

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46 thoughts on “MSNBC: Your Kids Don’t Belong to You”

  1. I don’t see the problem, and I think you’re way over-reacting. Should the children of religionists who think that prayer will cure appendicitis be left alone to do as they feel regarding their child’s health? Should people who don’t have children care about the education of children in their community? Or does everyone being concerned about the welfare of the children in a community make for a better outcome and a safer society for everyone? Not all parents are good parents, after all, and there’s plenty of evidence that children are often abused or neglected in their home environments. Are we to not notice and stand up for them?

    Reply
    • signalfire6, Well hell, I guess your right about an extremely minimal number of those of faith. And I guess it is wrong for parents to do the unthinkable like teach their children that it is wrong to steal, or to cheat, or to do drugs, or to murder. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, they should never teach them to be resourceful, self reliant, educated, and hard working. You are right, all I need to do is look at the amazing job that the state(ists) are doing. look to the success(graduation) rate in public schools and the quality of that education. I guess I am supposed to be impressed by the fact that they are trying to teach deviate sexual acts to elementary school kids. Your right,society is so much safer when the children are not raised by a traditional 2 parent family. They do so much better when they only need to deceive one parent since getting involved with drugs, gangs, criminal activity or having an abortion is vital to the liberal view of society. I guess what I am trying to say is that my child is MY child. You and you liberal pervert friends can keep your perverse valueless lifestyle away from my family. We believe it is better to be above what is in the gutter not dive into it.

    • BTW, signalfire6, One more thing. There are indeed situations where children are living in squalid and or unsafe homes. These are usually in homes with only 1 parent, a parent that refuses to work because they would rather collect welfare, live in section 8, and lay around talking on their obamaphone all paid for by the type of people who you want to take children away from.

    • signalfire6, there is a crisis in some countries with measles because The Lancet pulbished a bogus paper linking the MMR vaccine with autism.

      100s of thousands will die.

      Because the establishment can be conned in “peer reviewed” papers and the “establishment” won’t back down.

      16 years of no warming and the establishment is still brainwashing children AGW exists.

    • “Not all parents are good parents”

      And the state is no parent at all.

      Somehow I’m so hoping you are in no way responsible for people.

    • The problem with making something everyone’s responsibility is that everyone will think someone else will do it. It’s called diffused responsibility, and it’s stronger than you think.

  2. I guess it’s not enough that most children are in government (collective) indoctrination schools. She needs you to verbally submit to the kids not being yours. The reality is what she is demanding is the present system. Guess collectivism doesn’t allow the acknowledgement of failure…like Fisker Automotive.

    Reply
  3. @signalfire6

    1)”Should the children of religionists who think that prayer will cure appendicitis be left alone to do as they feel regarding their child’s health?” Yes, they should, its called freedom. You are free to screw up your kids, I am free to screw up mine. And no, that is not abuse or neglect. If people are not able to fail, they have no liberty.

    2) “Or does everyone being concerned about the welfare of the children in a community make for a better outcome and a safer society for everyone?” Not really, does a mob make for better justice? Can’t we just let people make their own mistakes not have to live in a hell of busy bodies?

    Have you ever noticed that when something is every bodies responsibility, then nobody really takes an interest… If you want something done and done well, make sure an individual is directly accountable for the outcome. Sounds like Melissa Harris-Perry is advocating mediocrity as an outcome a best.

    Reply
    • Why the either-or argument? No need for that. There is always the possibility of, and need for, shared responsibility. On the individual level as well as on the policy level. Furhtermore, I think the question is ill posed. Children do not _belong_ to anyone but themselves. They can however be the responsibility of someone. That responsibility can be multi-layered and shared, so there is (of course!) a role both for the family and society. The interesting question is where you draw the line with respect to particular issues or circumstance, and that is the hard (policy)part.

    • Perry needs to check out how China is doing or better yet she needs to see what being a collective is by seeing the horrors of North Korea! Try living there where you have the elite and the poor with no say and you better not complain or you’ll go to a prison camp,and then tell me how much of a great idea that is…

  4. It is upsetting to me that the same folks who have actively participated in managing education and have created horrible results are still offering their solutions. If they were were a business they would have been fired long ago, with their ineffective theories and practices. It is not about spending more money. Some kids are homeschooled and are remarkably prepared for college. Some inner city schools receive greater than average amounts of money and they barely yield 50% graduation rates and the graduates are subpar. It is not about monetary investment.
    If educators spent one tenth the energy they have spent on creating their own pay packages on student results, the world of education would be far different. Instead, the US education system is now ranked somewhere south of 40th in the world and pensions are massively underfunded. It is a pathetic joke and all administrators should be shamed into apologetic silence. They either actively participated or were silently complicit. I have relatives that are educators and I believe they are good, but the systemic failures are so bad that they all have to own it. Net,net they have failed.

    Her argument, taken to the extreme, would allow every community member to decide whom should carry a child to birth, since after all, the fetus belongs to all of us. We could force abortions and block them, too.
    I am simply making a point of the absurdity of her argument.

    In the case of parents that are harming children there are already laws in place to address this.

    Reply
  5. A complete misrepresentation of the point… being that we are all (as a society) responsible for the welfare of children, and that cutting public education funding to reduce federal debt created by corporate wars and malfeasance, is immoral.

    Really, did I link to a Sarah Palin blog or something?

    Reply
    • Perhaps you can explain to me how government’s pointing a gun at my head and stealing my money to fund compulsory government-run education is NOT immoral.

      If we were having a conversation about public education in the Soviet Union, nationalist Germany, Maoist China or any number of other places, we would probably use words like “brainwashing” and “indoctrination” to describe those systems, and rightly so. But when America does it, it’s somehow, magically different. Perhaps you could explain this to me as well.

  6. The point was absolutely NOT misrepresented. We all understand CLEARLY what she was saying – that the State, not the parents, should have ownership of the kids. We are NOT a village. And Sarah Palin has nothing to do with this. You invalidate your point when you drag the usual, tired, “corporate wars” and “Sarah Palin blog” stuff into this.
    Honestly, can you not see what is happening here? That the State is moving for our kids? That you cannot name three government programs run efficiently at or below cost? That this government under Barack Obama, with all its promises, has done to you EXACTLY what they said they would not – record death toll STILL in Afghanistan, record debt, record deficits, record unemployment, record bank failures, record foreclosures, record number of people on public assistance, and economy in shambles, record gas prices, bank bailouts, insane monetary printing, the forcing of the Obamacare leviathan upon us all, record use of drones, the assassination of American citizens on foreign soil, bank bailouts, corporate handouts, endless vacations and golf games for the First Family, the use of Executive Order to further whatever aims please Obama – etc. etc. etc.

    Wake up! You’ve been lied to. Your government hates you and wants to control every single thing you do. Do not give them control of one more thing. Not. One. More.

    Reply
  7. As one of the commenters says

    “the same folks who have actively participated in managing education and have created horrible results are still offering their solutions. ”

    Now… where have I heard that before?

    When America sneezes? (UK here)

    That many primary educators take the sprawl of fashionable progressive indoctrination dogma du jour and pump it wholesale into very young minds…

    The towering, rather sinister arrogance of Melissa HP … sheesh! – what a piece of work…

    I would like to get her onto a public debate with Dr. Ben Carson

    yeah, that I’d pay to watch.

    Reply
  8. “Should the children of religionists who think that prayer will cure appendicitis be left alone to do as they feel regarding their child’s health?”

    In a case like this where a child’s life is actually in grave danger, most of us are going to gut-react “no”, and that is a good thing. However, we should think very hard about the implications here and recognize clear lines.

    For instance … if you say “no”, does that also mean you remove a child from a home because his parents smoke? Or if they simply don’t like the foods the child is being fed? Or if they teach him that homosexual behavior is wrong?

    I watched a History Channel program delving into the history of the KKK and I watched in sick horror as they had footage kids out there participating in their ceremonies and grappled with the question — should we stand for that?

    And the answer, tragically, sadly, *has* to be yes, as much as I hate to even consider it.

    Because if they don’t have the right to teach their kids their “values”, then I don’t have the right to teach my kids my values. It’s as simple as that.

    We should do everything within our power in the marketplace of ideas to discredit values we think are wrong-headed, but the moment we make them illegal just because we don’t like them — nobody’s values are safe. Those are the cold, hard facts of liberty and free will.

    If you value liberty and free will – if you value any sort of personal autonomy, this must be your conclusion.

    Now consider this in light of what I covered above:

    “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

    -President John Adams to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, 1798

    The breakdown from the moral foundation of our country is largely responsible for where we are right now. The concurrent breakdown of the authority and autonomy of the individual and of family cohesiveness is a force which will in the end transfer all meaningful autonomy to the state.

    This will result in state tyranny, one way or another.

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  9. Funny? … Interesting? … Pathetic? … how those who live off government funding argue for causes that would increase the breadth and depth of government. Just an observation. Please continue!

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  10. I agree with those who think people are overreacting to the comments. She did not say that children belong to the government — she said they belong to the whole community. Community is not the same as government Community is local, small-scale, and people support one another. The trouble with government is that it is the exact opposite of community. She is right in one sense. Some people think they should not pay for educating someone else’s kids. But how well those kids perform once they get a bit older affects everyone. Community certainly has a stake in the well-being of kids.

    Reply
    • In that context, we all “belong” to “the community”. The elderly, children, men, women, the infirm, even the incarcerated. Why mention just the children?

    • Because the focus of her comments is how we are failing children. The consequences of bad parenting will fall on all of us. There is a common “community” interest — not government, but community.

    • I don’t buy that. I think she is inferring a greater role for the community (and by extension, government) than you surmise.
      Sure the community has an interest (or even a stake as you mentioned earlier) in how children are raised but there are still bounderies.
      Just like there is an interest and a stake for all citizens in our nation’s foreign policy (as it effects us all). We still acknowledge that someone specific is appointed for its formulation and execution. It is that specific person that is held responsible (via elections). And while citizens (I.e. the community) can apply pressure (via call-in campaigns, individual activism, joining pressure groups, or what not) when the job is poorely done, that is the extent of our responibility and investment. They are by no means equal … nor can we claim that it (foreign policy) belongs equally to all of us.
      Certainly the legal and financial responsibility for children, as it stands today in this country, rests with the parents and not the community. That is more than a “kind of private idea” regarding ownership … it is very real.
      In some parts of the US, parents (not the community) are being held legally responsible for the acts of their children . Juxtaposed to that, in the UK (recently), parents had their children taken from them by the UKs child protection services because of the parents political beliefs. Those examples are the extreems on either end of this debate. I believe our intrepid professor is speaking in paradigmatic terms …. and has made her philosophical home in one of the two extreems above. Guess which one.

    • So you are suggesting that we abolish the Dept of Education since that is a Federal “Community”? My Superintendent buddy has long said they don’t need the feds.

  11. Yeah, because we’ve made such wonderful collective decisions before. I think I heard a story once about something that belonged to everyone, once. Something about a field, some sheep, common ownership and a tragedy.

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  12. Classic someone who likely gave kids to grandparents or “aunties” to raise and has no attachment anyway (and my rule is if you screwed up the kids you should NEVER be allowed to screw up another generation).

    I wonder also if she “claims” her kids on her taxes – I mean I know it’s legal, but she’s taking a moral stand so did she NOT claim them since they are not really hers? I already know the answer – again socialism is always for the minions and everyone else – the socialist preachers still deserve THEIR limo’s and their minimum wage paid servants who clean their homes, babysit their kids, cook their food (they used to be called slaves), and they deserve private health care and money in the bank and oil investments, but everyone ELSE needs “to share the wealth”

    Reply

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