By Jim Mettenbrink
In the last article, we considered the SPLC’s declaration that Mothers for Liberty, a parental rights advocacy, as an extremist hate group. However, they did not define what it means to hate, nor just what it is about advocating for parents’ rights regarding their children is hateful and what is meant by extreme.
First parents. God has mandated parents, i.e., a man and woman married to each other should have children – “God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth….” (Genesis 1:27-28). Who has the responsibility to rear the children?
Second government. In fact, God has mandated only two functions to government – a system of civil and criminal justice and national defense. God uses both to maintain an orderly society and establish and destroy nations (when they are so evil in God’s sight). “The instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, to pull down, and to destroy it, if that nation against whom I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I thought to bring upon it. And the instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it, if it does evil in My sight so that it does not obey My voice, then I will relent concerning the good with which I said I would benefit it” (Jeremiah 18:7-10). And, “For he (government, jm) is God’s minister to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid; for he does not bear the sword in vain; for he is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil” (Romans 13:1-7). So who rears the kids?
Hillary asserted it takes a village. Bologne! This couched notion of a “village,” inferring that someone in addition to, or other than, parents has child-rearing responsibility is not new. In his, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, Charles Lasch cited two educators from 1918 – “Once the school had mainly to teach the elements of knowledge; now it is charged with the physical, mental and social training of the child as well.” Several decades earlier, Ellen Richards, the founder of modern social work, asserted that “in a social republic, the child as a future citizen is an asset of the state, not the property of its parents.”
Regarding societal breakdown, Dutch theologian, statesman, and philosopher Abraham Kuyper (1937-1920) forwarded that it was inevitable whenever a God-ordained authority either abandoned or exerted authority outside of its God-ordained sphere. It seems that both have been occurring in the USA. That gives rise to Mothers for Liberty that the SPLC declaration that they are an extremist hate group, i.e. because they insist that they have the absolute parental right over their own children. In fact, God has ordained that as a parental responsibility. Period! Butt out government!
God has given that responsibility solely to the parents “And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4).