It’s Melissa Harris-Perry’s children’s story, and she’s sticking to it
No apologies, no regrets
Melissa Harris-Perry made headlines when she made the now infamous statement:
“We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents”
She’s sticking to that story, writing today Why caring for children is not just a parent’s job.
Harris-Perry throws in the veritable kitchen sink of arguments, a little of caring for the children, her own experience as a Tulane professor, her upbringing, slavery, Native Americans, Newtown, and, er, reproductive rights. Here’s the gist of it, but by all means read the whole thing:
My inbox began filling with hateful, personal attacks on Monday, apparently as a result of conservative reactions to a recent “Lean Forward” advertisement now airing on MSNBC, which you can view above. What I thought was an uncontroversial comment on my desire for Americans to see children as everyone’s responsibility has created a bit of a tempest in the right’s teapot. Allow me to double down.
One thing is for sure: I have no intention of apologizing for saying that our children, all of our children, are part of more than our households, they are part of our communities and deserve to have the care, attention, resources, respect and opportunities of those communities….
I’ll even admit that despite being an unwavering advocate for women’s reproductive rights, I have learned this lesson from some of my most sincere, ethically motivated, pro-life colleagues. Those people who truly believe that the potential life inherent in a fetus is equivalent to the actualized life of an infant have argued that the community has a distinct interest in children no matter what the mother’s and father’s interests or needs. So while we come down on different sides of the choice issue, we agree that kids are not the property of their parents. Their lives matter to all of us….
So those of you who were alarmed by the ad can relax. I have no designs on taking your children. Please keep your kids! But I understand the fear.
We do live in a nation where slaveholders took the infants from the arms of my foremothers and sold them for their own profit. We do live in a nation where the government snatched American Indian children from their families and “re-educated” them by forbidding them to speak their language and practice their traditions.
But that is not what I was talking about, and you know it….
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Comments
“It Takes a Village”… to kidnap your children.
Shades of Ceauşescu in Romania
Aw, wasn’t Christmas Day, 1989, the best ever in Romania’s capital! 🙂
the latest version of history says that didn’t happen
Ask a Romanian who was there, instead of believing the current new-speak of academia. I did.
25 December 1989 must have been surreal in Bucharest…
Life there before then must have been a nightmare before the dictator was executed.
Since she is sticking to it, just want to let her know the last installment of “our son’s” college tuition is due.
don’t say that. you know they plan on forgiving all student loans.. that’s probably how hillary will get elected
Many of us knew exactly what HP was talking about and she knows that! HP is a dedicated Elitist working to promote her concept of Socialism and its form of a totalitarianism government. A form of government she intends to rule over us all, just as her political pal V. Jarrett stated back just before Obama’s first inauguration.
Coupla thangs…
1. this poor young lady is out of her FLUCKING mind
2. “So while we come down on different sides of the choice issue, we agree that kids are not the property of their parents. Their lives matter to all of us….”
Ummm…horsespit. First, WHEN do they matter to you? Second, “Kermit Gosnell”. Third, NOBODY agrees with you EXCEPT your Collective. FOURTH, NOBODY BUT YOU used the term “property of their parents”. Children are not property, liar.
3. “We do live in a nation where slaveholders took the infants from the arms of my foremothers and sold them for their own profit.”
Nope. I call BS. THAT would be AWFUL management. It would ALSO be STUPID consumerism…INFANTS do not live long without intensive care. Poor, stupid woman.
4. “We do live in a nation where the government snatched American Indian children from their families and “re-educated” them by forbidding them to speak their language and practice their traditions.”
Can you say, “Progressive Era”…??? I KNEW you could…!!!
HOLY CRAP…!!!
all of those things and more exasperation
Mary H-P is an ass. She knows what she said and how she implied it and how it came across. Now she wants to dredge up slavery and the Native Americans to shame us guilty racist evil Tea-Party’n white folk into propping up her bullsh#t agenda. I get so sick of these commie tools and their pro-govt. talking points. Indoctrinate much? My kids do not belong to your “village” Melissa hyphenated Harris-Perryhole.But thanks for the offer. NOT.
UNICEF, yet another totalitarian UN agency masquerading as “humanitarian,” has used these slogans,
“Every child is our child”
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What…
“Whatever it takes to Save a Child”
http://unicefcarolina.weebly.c…
Both are breathtakingly frightening in their implications.
With each passing day we see the hardening of the positions to the
question, Which Way, America? The way of the Framers with limited
government. Or, the way of the UN.
Remember, there is only one known alternative to limited government: unlimited government.
I want to keep as far away from these people as possible. Why can’t I enjoy the Right to be Left Alone?
I wonder what Melissa H-P would say if Child Protective services took her children away because they didn’t meet some standard of parenting, hmmm?
Is she disowning her children by her statement? i.e. her kids don’t belong to her? Well, I’d be worried for the Children if they were abandoned by their parent like that.
Perhaps someone ought to call CPS and find out?
While tempted to do so, I will not fall to the level of progressive trash, and will instead call out Melissa on her absolutely asinine statement instead.
http://riehlworldview.com/2013/04/oops-melissa-harris-perrys-10-year-old-daughter-parker-interviews-gabrielle-douglas.html
What is this…a trend…???
Is this in conformity with child labor laws…???
Gabby spent the 2 years prior to London living in Iowa being cared for & home schooled by another family ( for free).
The rest of the family were back in Virginia Beach.
At best one could conclude that the original family ( parents twice divorced ) is still Douglas’s first call & in this interview she did not credit the generous Iowa family & never has.
Case for case it is interesting to note the comparisons to the 2 Russian girls who won silver & bronze behind Gabby.
Both went to live at the state run Lake Krugloye national gymnastic centre about 50 k outside of Moscow at around the same age. Both return home only infrequently. oth visited a monastery to receive blessings prior to London soare presumably christian also.
All 3 have communist trained coaches & follow communist ( china for Gabby ) sport principles.
So there is a definite village there.
“we agree kids are not the property of their parents”
1st. Kids are property? I guess if we’re all property of the state.. Did she really just casually refer to children as property…
2nd. Obviously all the responsibility arguments we all make.
The child as property is a perversion of the divinely established order. It is a construct of the socialist mind, as well as the libertarian, practically speaking. For example, Rothbard argues that a child is incapable of self ownership, but also argues that parents can’t be compelled to feed it. http://board.freedomainradio.com/forums/t/29231.aspx (The disposability of the child implies ownership.) To my mind, Rothbard is as evil as Melissa.
Can we say that a child belongs to his parents, even though it doesn’t imply ownership? Yes, of course. It’s how we define the family, and underscore the responsibility of parents.
Exactly how I understand it. It’s a practical reasoning, like abortion. Hypocritically but unsurprisingly an inhumane opinion. Ownership and responsibility may be obvious but calling a child property is going too far in my bleeding hear opinion. . . Even if I accept that as more or less reality.
Rothbard played with both speculative and practical Libertarian philosophy; and he observed the difference between the legal requirements and moral responsibilities of parents to children. What you note is the former, and is simply the logical consequence of his speculative musings. Also, all Libertarians don’t accept all of Rothbard’s perspectives, so it’s incorrect to say Libertarian thought is functionally the same as Harris-Perry’s thoroughly Marxist thought.
A child belongs to her parents only in that they have and exercise responsibility for her achieving selfhood in the legal sense embodied by that term. In practice, parents claim responsibility for children even beyond the child’s achieving practical selfhood by embarking into life through school, job, marriage, etc. That’s just human devotion and love.
What is interesting, though, is how Rothbard got there. His musings take the individualist legal aspects, the starting point of libertarianism as I see it, to an extreme. The reason that Melissa Marxist gets any traction is that her notion of “the community has a distinct interest in children” strikes much closer to Christian morality than does Rothbards. To be clear, Mel perverts the moral argument into one of state control.
The state does have a compelling interest in children, their protection and education and more. This does not imply state intervention which actually has the opposite effect. The proper role is to defend marriage, provide incentives for stable marriages, make the economic environment favorable so that a dad can earn a living and the mom can stay at home, and provide incentives for the flourishing of private education. I know that a lot of libertarians would agree with me, but many would see this as too interventionist.
You’re right about her perverting it into an argument for state control. I see you make the same fallacy. The state has no interest. Only people have that.
I think Judeo/Christian values are values in general anyone would choose. IE “atheists” adopting many of them. In a free society where corruption is not tolerated by individuals or the community people’s natural interests in the values would create this order. . Hence they are traditional. These values cause this order to spontaneously emerge throughout history. Not that we don’t need to fight for them. It’s just that using the state is basically inherently a corruption.
I guess I wasn’t clear. Or maybe you don’t admit reasons for having government at all.
In regards to family, we must have property and inheritance protections; the “death tax” is extremely anti-family. Tax exemptions for dependents should be tripled, or more. Families must have the right under law, or better, by constitutional amendment, to educate their children as they choose, including home schooling, and not be forced to pay for government indoctrination. They must have the same regarding control over medical treatment of their children. The existence of Melissa Marxist types makes such protections even more imperative.
Another protection I would work for is a severe limitation on pornography. Porn destroys many marriages and it should be harder to obtain. Now you can see why I’m not libertarian.
The simplest, most fundamental analysis destroys the “child as property” BS.
If my child is my property, I may dispose of it via gift, sale, or abandonment.
See…??? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Totally agree. But the line blurs slightly with animals …
I wonder if it were an otter fetus if Peta would abort it
“What I thought was an uncontroversial comment on my desire for Americans to see children as everyone’s responsibility …”
Frightening thing is, she may actually have believed that the idea that we do not think of our children as being part of the collective was uncontroversial.
Victim of the liberal echo chamber, far far from reality or common sense.
Those people who truly believe that the potential life inherent in a fetus is equivalent to the actualized life of an infant have argued that the community has a distinct interest in children no matter what the mother’s and father’s interests or needs. So while we come down on different sides of the choice issue, we agree that kids are not the property of their parents. Their lives matter to all of us…
She’s presidential material. There’s “potential life” and “actualized life” — and one becomes the other when? What did Obama think of a botched abortion, i.e., one that leaves a recently potential-life breathing on the table?
But more than that, did you catch the devious twist of the argument? She creates the straw man,”the community has a distinct interest,” that, while undefined, applies to both her and pro-lifers. She then implicitly defines “community interest” to be ownership. No. Pro-lifers oppose murder. They do not claim ownership.
Hence, Mel reserves the right to kill her child along with the right to raise yours. Furthermore, “community interest” in any person’s life and welfare entitles the community to control the person. That’s Obama and Liz Warren to a tee. You do not even belong to yourself, i.e., all you are belong to us.
Mel’s pro-life dilemma further exacerbates what could be called gender inequality under abortion. Specifically, how are the rights and responsibility of the father defined? It all depends on what the mom calls the thing growing inside her. If it’s tissue, then it belongs to her alone and she can kill it. If it’s a child, then the father must pay child support (unless he’s of the absolved deadbeat minority class, but that’s for another day).
If the father wants his child, tough luck. If he doesn’t want it, tough luck: why can’t he supply a writ of abortion accompanied by $250 to the mother? But now, under Mel’s “community interest” construct, the child doesn’t belong to the father, born or unborn. Is there ever any responsibility for the father? Is there more or less incentive to let the child live?
And you wonder why they want to register guns, collect them next, arrest those who won’t obey? This is one reason why the Second Amendment was written into the Bill of Rights. How else will Ms. Harris-Perry and her cohorts make certain that their beloved State cares for “our” children, other than by the use of force to take them away from their rightful homes with their parents?
“Teach your child the way he should go” was not meant for parents of 3,000 years ago. Just sayin’.
And nope, MY children DO NOT belong to the State. They belong to God: He gave them to my husband and me to be good parents to them.
This woman’s intentions should be a good enough reason to private or homeschool your child as soon as possible.
We have no intention of taking your big gulp, twinkies, guns, smokes, lawn darts, alcohol, money, kids. . . .
Certainly less depressing than what was first published about her comments. But still disturbing in that she confuses the fact that saying “he/she is MY child” is the same as saying that “he/she” is my property. The two concepts are not at all equivalent and she should know that. If she was thinking clearly, she would, hopefully, realize that she was conflating the two. Perhaps her view is colored by a fixation (understandable) on the facts she mentioned toward the end of the quote about the things which took place during the horror that was slavery in this country. Also disturbing that she refuses to acknowledge the fact that a fetus is a human being who is not yet capable of living outside the womb.
I would like the hyphenated commie negress to know she can pound sand and the word RACIST no longer has any meaning for me. Go ahead, call me a racist and then wait for the caring to hit you. You will be standing there, with that unique to you stupid look on your face, waiting, for a looooooong time.
Besides being a rabid racist bigot, Melissa Harris-Perry is a devout anti-American Socialist Marxist Statist, hence her unapologetic collective statement, where she espouses that the “State” should control, if not own, everything and everyone from cradle to grave.
Quote-
David Mamet: “Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.
For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to each according to his needs.” “Needs and abilities” are, of course, subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to “the State shall take, the State shall give.”
She places the wealth and welfare of the mother and father in front of an innocent human life conceived from their voluntary behavior. A human life evolves from conception to grave. There is no ethical or moral justification for an elective abortion. It is premeditated murder committed by the mother or her proxy without cause and without due process. It is a crime committed against an individual human life and the community.
She fails to acknowledge that her foremothers were first slaves of Black Africans or “native” Americans. This does not justify anyone’s participation, but why leave out critical information about the legacy of her forefathers? People should understand the depravity and dysfunction which preceded them. A selective history serves only special interests who desire to exploit it for their profit.
Furthermore, she fails to respect individual dignity. She is in the same class as slaveholders, racists, eugenicists, and other people who fail to judge others as individuals and fail to respect human life.
No, I don’t know it. She denies individual dignity. She supports a general devaluation of human life. Her criticism is of herself. She is not part of the solution. She is part of the problem.
Even Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young knew that Children belonged to their parents. I.e. teach YOUR children….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkaKwXddT_I
Things I learned in school:
You cannot ask anyone else to risk their life for your kid.
“…a nation where slaveholders took the infants from the arms of my foremothers …”
Karma gonna getcha!
Please take take me to a nation with a pristine history where I won’t have to hear about what Harris-Perry’s racist white forefathers did her conjectural foremothers.
Harris-Perry’s mother was/is white and her father was/is African-American, so it’s a very safe bet that H-P is about 65% pure white racist. If the race card determines the winner of this argument, H-P should think a minute about the math.
I’m so tired of this transgenerational guilt-by-association claptrap.
If children are “property”, then slave owners had every right to sell the children of slaves. Sounds logical to me.
Lefties often engage in a rhetorical trick which is to take something that is partly true and transform it into an absolutism of a very different kind. Of course children are not *100%* parents’ responsibility. But they are *primarily* ours. Who puts in the vast amount of work, money, blood, sweat, tears? Parents. And why? So that the State can take *our* children and turn them into good little leftist drones? Lefties like Harris-Perry take that “well the community does have a role” (which is true) and use it to flip the whole equation upside down such that parents are no longer *primary*. Remember the whole “well shucks businesses use roads and police and fire therefore… they didn’t build that and business owners somehow owe the State everything”.
Moreover it is a basically parasitical worldview. We do all the work, take all the risk. But the State and the statist want all the benefit. Let us use your children to advance Progressivism! Let us use your business to advance Collectivism! Because G-d knows they (generally speaking) have less children and start less businesses themselves. So they’d prefer to coopt and exploit ours.
Yet another liberal attempt to excise the “tumor” of self reliance and responsibility from the population, and replace it with government oversight.
MSNBC is so tone deaf that the network seemingly is now actually encouraging ham-handed Marxism from its pundits. Either that, or the network gets so little audience notice that desperation has led executives to rhetorical equivalent of arson in order to get publicity.
I love how she immediately plays the victim card though. That’s good comedy.
Given the “value” society puts on unborn babies, I am hardly inclined to let them turn my child into one of their government dependent proles.
The “Lean Forward” network once again demonstrates that it is really the “Bend Over” network.
[…] did she get in trouble for this! Even Bob Beckel as FOX’s “The Five” said he didn’t have a dump truck big […]
Dear MSNBC, if our kids belong to you, do your kids belong to us too? If so, can we take them hunting after church in our big pickup truck?
—Sarah Palin
HEH…!!!
Another radical moonbat, with visions of Socialism dancing in her empty head. Not the first inane comment from this POS, nor will it be the last.
[…] You heard her. Now read her defense of the statement: […]