Like any piece of property, a child has value to conservative activists. They are key to a future the conservative wants to win. Parental rights are merely one path to the total capture of state power and the imposition of an authoritarian hierarchy on us all. So it’s no surprise that children have long been a fixation to the right wing. …
At Salon, the journalist Kathryn Joyce reported that Michael Farris — a Trump ally who is the former president of the Alliance Defending Freedom and the founder of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association — launched a parental rights nonprofit in the late aughts that sought to amend the Constitution to read, “The liberty of parents to direct the upbringing, education, and care of their children is a fundamental right.”
Farris also objected, strenuously, to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which the U.S. still hasn’t ratified. In his mind, the treaty threatened the parent’s right to homeschool and to use corporal punishment. No intermediary may come between parents and their property. …
Children who work may be exposed to adult dangers, like workplace injury or sexual harassment. In the home and at school, children must also fear gun violence in the name of the Second Amendment. Adults who encourage the proliferation of guns do so knowing well that children will die. In their hierarchy, the adult right to a gun is worth more than the child‘s right to live. Reduced to the level of a collectible or a beloved pet, the child is not a person to the right.
— in Children Are Not Property the Idea That Underlies the Right-Wing Campaign for “Parents’ Rights”
