The Daily Reveille
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Opinion
page 13
Government should stay out of child rearing RUN TO THE MILLS LANDON MILLS Columnist What’s with the liberal fascination with infringing on individual liberties? Tulane political science professor Melissa Harris-Perry believes, along with her fanbase, that your children don’t belong to you. They belong to everybody. Harris-Perry voices her liberal opinions on MSNBC’s “Melissa Harris-Perry” show on the weekends. “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 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
everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments,” Harris-Perry said in an MSNBC advertisement. Harris-Perry’s statement is nothing more than a blunt way of saying what President Barack Obama did in his State of the Union address on Feb. 12. This concept is the basis for Obama’s early childhood education plan, sometimes referred to as “preschool for all.” I see discrepancies in liberal theory. In the womb, the fetus is presumptuously called a “part” of the woman, but once brought into the world, he or she is no longer to be under the guidance and jurisdiction of the parents, but of the state. Little Johnny better get ready, because he’s going to be getting a new set of parents — each called “State” — by age 4. Many are probably thrilled to see an opportunity to hand over their parental responsibilities and let the state feed, educate and medicate them and their children. Not an infringement of rights, you say? Harris-Perry even
screencap courtesy of YOUTUBE.COM
Tulane political science professor Melissa Harris-Perry recently stated in an advertisement that children belong to communities, sparking controversy.
agrees with me. “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. And that is exactly
the fight that we have been having for a couple hundred years,” she said. In Louisiana, the care, guidance and control of children is laid out in the Children’s Code passed in 1991. “The people of Louisiana
recognize the family as the most fundamental unit of human society; that preserving families is essential to a free society; that the relationship between parent and child is pre-eminent in establishing and maintaining the well-being of the child; that parents have the responsibility for providing the basic necessities of life as well as love and affection to their children,” the preamble states. The concept of the government rearing children is laughable. I wonder what an instructional lesson on budgeting would look like. It just goes back to some people being in favor of things such as separation of church and state. I happen to be in favor of separation of child and state. Don’t give the “Harris-Perrys” of the world your children. Landon Mills is a 21-year-old international studies senior from Sunshine, La.
Contact Landon Mills at lmills@lsureveille.com; Twitter: @landondeanmills
Conference marks vital moment for secular community BUT HE MEANS WELL GORDON BRILLON Columnist The University’s Atheists, Humanists and Agnostics club hosted Reason on the Bayou on Sunday, Louisiana’s first-ever convention for the secular community. Overall, it was an impressive event, featuring secular student groups from universities across the South and speakers from across the country. Given the overwhelming Christian majority in the South, it’s vital for such groups in the region to unite, organize and act. But the nonreligious community needs to be careful not to become known as the anti-religious community. Andrew Seidel, an attorney for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, spoke at the convention, highlighting the importance of vocally opposing every violation of the separation of church and state. He referenced Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “The Tipping Point,” saying that every intrusion of religion, no matter how small, sets a precedent that can allow larger violations to happen. But I think the conference could take a different lesson from Gladwell. The secular community itself is at a tipping point right now, and
MARY LEAVINES / The Daily Reveille
Atheist activist Nate Phelps gives the keynote address Sunday at Reason on the Bayou in the Student Union’s Royal Cotillion Ballroom.
there are two paths it can take: It can work its way into the public dialogue by becoming an important part of community, or it can continue to antagonize religious organizations and be dismissed as just another side of the fanatic fringe. I’m not saying it shouldn’t pursue violations of church and state, because it’s on the right side. We shouldn’t be teaching creationism in public schools or opening legislative sessions with a prayer. Several speakers gave accounts of brave people who stood up for separation of church and
state and suffered for it. One woman in Oklahoma was beaten, threatened and had her house burned down for trying to close a prayer group in her kids’ elementary school. It was a harrowing story, but from the way it was framed, you might start to think it was the norm. The simple fact is religious people are the majority in the United States and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Demonizing them will only create division and make your people look bad. If you want to stop intolerance
against atheists and fight against religious hegemony, make people like you. Work with religious groups. Volunteer for good causes. Contribute to the community. It’s not fair that secularists have to work just to be accepted by the general public, but that’s the way it is. They can deal with it, build up some esteem in the community and eventually get their goals accomplished, or they can whine about it and continue to be ostracized. This is where the secular community’s leadership needs to come
in. You can’t make social change without organization and planning. Gladwell wrote a column in The New Yorker in 2010 criticizing so-called “Facebook activists” for overestimating the impact of social media on social change. Real revolutions, he said, must be planned and executed meticulously to be successful. It was only due to organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the NAACP that the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was successful in changing society. The secular community needs its own version of the NAACP to make a plan and choose its battles. Gordon Maples, regional coordinator for the Secular Student Alliance and the first speaker at the conference, seemed to be one of the few speakers aware of this need. The SSA is a national organization that offers support to University secular groups, and it is in a prime position to take the lead for the secular community. With the right people in charge, they might just be able to get something done. Gordon Brillon is a 19-year-old mass communication sophomore from Lincoln, R.I.
Contact Gordon Brillon at gbrillon@lsureveille.com; Twitter: @tdr_gbrillon