Progressive or Parody? Leftist Columnist Wants You to Give Up Your Kids for ‘True Equity’
“But just imagine the solidarity that universal orphanhood would create. Wouldn’t children, raised in one system, find it easier to collaborate on global problems?”
Joe Mathews, co-president of the Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy, wants California to abolish parenthood if the state wants “to achieve true equity.”
Is this a joke? Parody? It sounds like one, but you never know with these so-called progressives.
He's a direct democracy advocate – which is all i need to know. https://t.co/i23EE93TVi pic.twitter.com/fZiz3WDaxv
— transcend_duality (@TranscendDual) January 14, 2022
Plus, do not listen to anyone who wants direct democracy. It’s the tyranny of the majority. It’s why America is a republic.
(The man cites Plato’s Republic, which puts democracy as the worst form of government.)
Mathews hints at possible satire and parody: Modest Proposal. Brave New World.
In 1729, Jonathan Swift wrote the satirical A Modest Proposal essay which suggested the poor Irish sell their children to the rich to combat the treatment of the poor in society.
Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World has humans grown in fake wombs. You must conform and stick with the class you are placed in. They force-feed the citizens a drug that keeps everything peaceful and pain-free.
But again, you never know. You literally never know. After reading a few of Mathews’ other pieces I’m going to treat his op-ed as serious. Maybe he dropped those titles as a defense against the backlash. “No, everyone, I’m not serious!”
To achieve equity, California must force parents to give away their children:
Fathers and mothers with greater wealth and education are more likely to transfer these advantages to their children, compounding privilege over generations. As a result, children of less advantaged parents face an uphill struggle, social mobility has stalled, and democracy has been corrupted. More Californians are abandoning the dream; a recent Public Policy Institute of California poll found declining belief in the notion that you can get ahead through hard work.
My solution — making raising your own children illegal — is simple, and while we wait for the legislation to pass, we can act now: the rich and poor should trade kids, and homeowners might swap children with their homeless neighbors.
To suggest taking a child away from his or her parents for selfish reasons is evil. But Mathews tries to explain why it would work, including twisting the words of people on the right to make it seem like they agree with him.
I cannot even. Somehow taking children away from their parents “would end the backlash, helping dismantle white supremacy and outdated gender norms”:
My proposal also should be politically unifying, fitting hand-in-glove with the most cherished policies of progressives and Trumpians alike.
The left’s introduction of anti-racism and gender identity in schools faces a bitter backlash from parents. Ending parenthood would end the backlash, helping dismantle white supremacy and outdated gender norms. Democrats also would have the opportunity to build a new pillar of the safety net — a child-raising system called “Foster Care for All.”
Over on the right, Republicans are happy to jettison parents’ rights in pursuit of their greatest passions, like violating migrant rights. Once you’ve gone so far as to take immigrant children from their parents and put them in border concentration camps, it’s a short walk to separating all Americans from their progeny.
Universal orphanhood also dovetails nicely with the pro-life campaign to end abortion rights. In fact, a suggestion from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, during a recent case that could overturn Roe, inspired this column. She posited that abortion rights are no longer necessary because all 50 states now have “safe haven” laws allowing women to turn their babies over to authorities after birth. My proposal would merely make mandatory such handovers of babies to the state.
By the way, if you oppose Mathews’ “rational proposal” of universal orphanhood you’re blind to “how relentless pursuit of equity might birth a brave new world.”
In other words, you’re stupid and thoughtless because you want to keep your children. “You’re lost in the empty chasm between American extremes.”
There is nothing extreme about wanting to keep your child.
I’ve written and deleted a lot in this space. But unlike Mathews, I do not have to write out anything to prove that his idea is insane and would never work.
I’d like Mathews to try to impose his insane proposal with the mothers in my life.
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Comments
Wouldn’t a “Homeless Neighbor” be an oxymoron?
let’s start with your children, joe–so, which homeless family’s kids do you want to swap with?–and btw, what are you going to tell your OWN children when they ask you and you and your wife “why?”
Years ago UNICEF adopted this as its slogan, “Every Child Is Our Child.”
China treats its people as mere subjects, who are obliged to do the will of the Communist Party. E.g., people were “just moved” (no consent) to make way for that Three Rivers Dam. As I write several sizable Chinese cities are “just shut down.”
All of this is what the American left will do to us.
As would be expected of a core member of the left, the UU is all-on-board with this sorting of thinking.
https://www.uua.org/international-justice/un/every-child
The name “Menendez” immediately suggests itself.
He parts his hair in the middle and wears weird ties so it is unlikely he has children. People married with children don’t harbor such bizarre ideas even satirically.
“…you and your wife”
I thought the first one was correct, and that you had a split personality.
The left encouraged their women to abort their children so now they need ours.
so, to put his words and thoughts into a historical context: the slave owners who sold children away from their mothers were doing it to foster a better society?
And these are the people who go around screaming about “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Maybe this isn’t as loony as we might think if it was applied in limited circumstances. Why should the taxpayers support the cycle of bad decisions that some make? Instead of sending a check or authorizing various benefits; housing, food assistance, health insurance, to parents with a demonstrated history of being unable or unwilling to materially support their children why not simply remove the incentives? It’s one thing to fall on hard times. It’s quite another to make deliberate decisions that lead to failure. If a young woman wants a child then she should be able to support them. If she can’t or won’t she is demonstrating she lacks the fitness to be a parent. Consider a young woman without a HS education who chooses to have a child. In modern society she can’t provide a home or utilities or food or time to parent that child. She can’t afford child care or healthcare. All those are provided by the State for the benefit of the child.
Those benefits should continue but the guardian of that child should definitely change. Why would we allow another generation to be reared in a dysfunctional relationship where a child is, in many respects, simply an incentive to gain substantial govt benefits? Remove the children and withdraw the benefits from these unfit mothers and break the cycle. Place the kids in loving homes, working with the various religious charitable organizations to assist placement. In addition reform and streamline adoption rules. Rethink custody arrangements and the distorted family court system to put a higher value on ability to provide for a child. Remove the foolish bias that many States enshrine in presuming the mother is automatically a better parent.
Are you the decider?
Asking for a friend
If an unemployed 17 year old with no HS degree and no independent ability to provide a home for her current child decides to become pregnant with a second child then we should, as a society, decide whether those actions demonstrate the ability to be a fit parent.
The bottom line is there needs to be a single standard for what constitutes the minimum threshold for the well being of a child. That standard should be consistently applied in divorce proceedings, custody arrangements and yes in the case of additional children born to a single, unemployed, uneducated, unskilled mother who already demonstrates she can’t independently meet the needs of her current child.
So no not me individually. Nor you. Rather the collective opinion of the electorate as expressed through the State legislature.
The solution is to stop incentivizing poor decisions. Don’t need to hurt them, the decisions do that anyways.
How does this hurt anyone? The current benefits would follow the child to a new home in a stable environment. The only ‘harm’ would be in that redirection of funds away from a person who views a child as a cabbage patch kid with 18 years of monthly checks attached.
The newly childless could then be free to succeed or fail on the basis of their skill set, willingness to work and determination to succeed.
Or, we could compel the chronic welfare mother to undergo sterilization after the second child? Bring back eugenics?
I hope the columnist was just trying his hand at a Swiftian satire along the lines of Swift’s “Modest Proposal”. But, it is my fear that he was in earnest.
Does this buffoon have any children?
It takes a village… just saying
If only we could eliminate the village idiots.
Especially the Pehudniks from places like Harvard!
Having lived in what was essentially a large, overgrown village in the Far East, the “village” in question means an extended family system in which one person’s misdeeds brings reproach upon at least a few hundred others. It also means a steadfast refusal to trash your own culture. It by no means means a small coterie of government-approved “experts”.
That would solve the nature vs nurture problem except they’d deliberately sandbag whites and Asians they way the do white males now, so that it comes out even.
I can foresee the word “cuckoo” (as in the animal, not the inmate) officially becoming “pejorative slang” by Democrat ukase soon after.
Israeli kibbutzim tried this idea years ago. Kids were all taken out of the homes to be raised all together in the Kids’ House.. Even among the insane leftist kibbutznics this policy didn’t last longer than a few decades – and that was with the communities being fairly small (between 100 and a few thousand people) and the kids never being more than a 2 minute walk away from the parents.
I spent a couple of years on Israeli kibbutzim and it was very instructive. Every lunatic leftist idea you could come up with was tried there, among the best sized populations, filled with hard-working, dedicated, intelligent leftists … and they all failed miserably. ANyone who wants to know what is wrong with any particular leftist idea need only look at the kibbutzim that implemented it and they will see why they failed. The Israeli kibbutz project was the world’s greatest lesson in the weaknesses and problems and dangers of leftist policies.
I’d like to watch this guy try to do a push-up.
I am not sure if he is Jonathon Swift or Nicolae Ceaușescu?
If somebody isn’t stalking him with a butterfly net, they should be.
Damn parents were such an unexpected roadblock to our stuffing kids’ heads with CRT. Solution: eliminate the parents.
The fact we can’t tell if this is genuine or parody tells you how far this country has fallen
No, only the loudmouthed wackos. California, in particular.
“Socialism doesn’t work, but I’d gladly pay higher taxes to try it!”
Golly, these leftist meat puppets spend a frightening amount of time voicing their fetish for children.
Pedophilia is the next frontier of the sexual revolution. Soon, we will have sober, learned heads from prestigious institutions nodding their heads and blessing it with “studies”.
“My proposal would merely make mandatory such handovers of babies to the state.”
This is the same moron who tweets:
“I’d love a single-payer [healthcare] system and would happily pay higher taxes for it. But I don’t for a second believe that our state is capable of building and managing such a system efficiently & cost-effectively. What makes you think otherwise?”
But “hand over your babies to the state?” No problemo! What’s the worst that could happen?
I’m half on board with this. Let me keep my boys when they are young and still fun. Then let me turn them over to the state when they are at the age of wanting a car.
Whoops – need to hide this post from the wife “what honey? No I didn’t post it! I actually wrote we need to find him and check his medication”
Isn’t that what military recruiters are for?
My recruiter still owes me a car then. All he gave e was 1/2 way plane tickets, not even one way. I got to be onboard when it took off, but not when it landed.
I hear that. I told my Dad I didn’t want to attend ‘college night’ my JR year of HS. The next afternoon he came home early and took me to the recruiting station to make the point that his legal obligation ended at 18 and while he would help me he wasn’t willing to financially support any dumb ass ideas I had for my future.
Come and try to take my kids, motherfucker, and I’ll gut you like a fish.
See? Now there’s the best explanation of why the ivory-tower socialists who float ideas of remaking human social systems into anything other than what Darwin has already explained is wired into our meat and the reason for that, are best entirely ignored, and at worst should be drowned like witches.
I hereby nominate Joe Matthews as the keynote speaker at the next DNC.
Publishing this nutty idea was his application.
He wrote “But my proposal is quite modest.”
That’s a clue.
If I rolled my eyes any harder, I’d need medical attention.
LOL. “migrant rights”. First of all, he means “illegal aliens”. Secondly, no such thing. We may choose to extend them privileges but illegals have no “rights”. The Constitution is pretty clear on this right in the preamble: “… secure the Blessings of Liberty to OURSELVES AND TO OUR POSTERITY”, not to illegals invading from around the world.
Illegals have their own countries and their own governments to protect and defend any rights they think they have. And those governments are responsible for the actions of their citizens when they try and breach our borders.
“Plus, do not listen to anyone who wants direct democracy. It’s the tyranny of the majority. It’s why America is a republic.”
Democracy is not the tyranny of the majority. It is the tyranny of the greatest minority. To see this, we need only look at the one place it is used in our government, and where it most consistently fails: the Supreme Court.
For decades now, on any contentious issue (which is to say, any pet issue of the Democrats no matter how obviously unconstitutional), it has been a case of 4-4-1, with 4 justices siding with logic and reason, 4 justices siding with anarchy, and the one in the middle getting to play kingmaker. For all the posturing and debate, those other 8 votes don’t matter. They’re already cast, and whichever narcissistic squish occupies “the middle” gets to cast down their own particular view of the world as law.
Hell, look at the “conversation” around abolishing the filibuster. In a direct democracy, Manchin and Sinema control the entire Senate, each senator dances to their whims, lest they be “persuaded” to side with that senator’s opposition. By their own complaints, the put paid to the lie that democracy is in any way anything other than absolute tyranny and despotism by the smallest minority.
Pseudo-liberals ALWAYS try to out-liberal each other. Always.
It’s peer-pressure run amok; a bunch of dummies engaged in hysterical virtue signaling.
The in fact tart almost 100 years ago with John Dewey. They pushed until people objected so they stopped. Then again in the 60s and they pushed until people objected. We can’t forget Hillbully in the 90s saying “only government could run your life” and here we are again.
What better way to get committed child soldiers for the new killing fields?
What that a$$hat completely disregarded is LOVE. It is a corny old saying, but the hand that rocks the cradle moves the world.
“But just imagine the solidarity that universal orphanhood would create. Wouldn’t children, raised in one system, find it easier to collaborate on global problems?”
Imagine a society of children all raised in institutions. It would BE a global problem. But I guess the reasoning is that they would all grow up to be true dedicated Democrats.
I have an alternative modest proposal, dear Joe Mathews. If “fathers and mothers with greater wealth and education are more likely to transfer these advantages to their children, compounding privilege over generations. As a result, children of less advantaged parents face an uphill struggle, social mobility has stalled, and democracy has been corrupted” then I suggest that Democrat parents – who certainly hold much of the available in California – give up their status and positions in order for the less lucky to have their share of fortune. And there’s a compelling evidence that the situation would improve, whoever is that replace Democrat parents.