General Quotes and Comments

"Socialism ... intervenes between the children and the parents, claiming to support them, protect them, and educate them for its own ampler purposes. Socialism, in fact, is the State family. The old family of the private individual must vanish before it ... They are incompatible with it" [H.G. Wells, Socialism and the Family, 1906].

"Bring up the child in an atmosphere of a widely developed Socialist family" [Alexandra Kollontai, People's Commissaire, Decree: Child Welfare, 2nd Principle, Department for Safeguarding Motherhood and Infancy, 31 January 1918].

"We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them" [Instructions given at a congress of Soviet educators in 1918, cited in Sheldon Richman, Separating School and State: How to Liberate America's Families, p.xv, quoted at source].

"When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side', I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already. ... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.'" [Adolph Hitler, speech given 06 November 1933, quoted at source].

"This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing" [Adolph Hitler, 01 May 1937, quoted at source].

"[The Soviet family] is an organic part of Soviet society. Parents are not without authority ... but this authority is only a reflection of social authority. ... In our country he alone is a man of worth whose needs and desires are the needs and desires of a collectivist. ... Our family offers rich soil for the cultivation of such collectivism" [Soviet family theorist Anton S. Makarenko, The Collective Family, A Handbook for Russian Parents, 1967, pp.xi-xii, p.42, quoted at source].

"The first thing that a totalitarian regime tries to do is to get at the children, to distance them from the subversive, varied influences of their families, and indoctrinate them in their rulers' view of the world" [UK Supreme Court, Judgment, The Christian Institute and Others v The Lord Advocate (Scotland), 28 July 2016, para. 73, source].

"No woman should be authorised to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have the choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one" [Simone de Beauvoir, quoted at source].

"A variety of ways have been suggested for reducing [women's] desire for babies. One commonly suggested proposal to achieve this goal is greater encouragement of labor-force participation by women. ... [Perhaps girls could] be given an electric shock whenever they see a picture of an adorable baby until they very thought of motherhood becomes anathema to them" [Jessie Bernard, quoted at source].

"If we want to talk about equality of opportunity for children, then the fact that children are raised in families means there's no equality. ... In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them" [Dr. Mary Jo Bane, in Dolores Barclay, The Family: It's Surviving and Healthy, in 'Tulsa World, 21 August 1977, quoted at source].

"Ever since Plato, the idea of capturing the hearts and minds of children has fascinated social planners. ... Hilary Clinton summarised the attitude well when she insisted Americans 'have to start thinking and believing that there isn't really any such thing as someone else's child'. In her book, It Takes A Village, she reveals that babies of all classes are born in a state of crisis so profound that immediate state intervention is required. They need immediate aid from the 'helping professions' [aka the Professional Busybodies and the Child Snatchers'] since even wealthy parents feel stress and 'we know that babies sense the stress'. If ever there was a utopian goal for government, the elimination of parental stress must be it. Like so many progressives, Clinton seems ignorant of how her ideas might come across to people who don't already agree with her. For instance, those with a memory of Orwell's 1984 might be disturbed by her idea that the government should mount giant television screens wherever 'people gather and have to wait'. The screens would play, on a continuous loop, official instructions on how to care for your children. Across the Western world, the politically correct micro-managing of daily life continues to intensify. ... In Australia last month [Dec 2008], a local government ruled that its beaches must be cleansed of sharp seashells that might cut children's feet" [Jonah Goldberg, Daily Mail, 04 January 2009].

"This has been going on for decades and it's part of the Marxist/socialist agenda to break the family unit, straight from the Frankfurt School of Socialist Policy. It operates in this country [UK] as the Common Purpose Charity, a 5th column in the UK and rife in our local authorities and the establishment [Comment at source].

"We've always had a kind of private notion of children: 'Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility.'  We haven't had a very collective notion [that] 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 recognise that kids belong to whole communities" [Melissa Harris-Perry, MSNBC host, 'Lean Forward' at source].

"[Melissa] Harris-Perry thinks that, after they're born, children fundamentally belong to the state. ... if, as Harris-Perry holds, '[t]he cost to raise a child [is] $10,000 a year up to $20,000 a year', and if children should be viewed as collectively 'owned' by 'society', then taken to its logical extension, a woman's choices about having a child should be informed by the economic considerations of the 'community', would it not? But of course, that logic would take someone to justify, for example, the 'one-child' policy in Communist China. What's morre, the notion of collective responsibility for children was a philosophy that undergirded the Cultural Revolution in Communist China under Chairman Mao. I bring that up because, as you may recall, another Harris-Perry 'Lean Forward' spot contains a reference to a 'great leap forward', which calls to mind the disastrous agricultural reform plan which starved millions of Chinese to death in the 1950s" [source].

"First it was Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village to raise children by community effort and cost. Now it's über-leftist Melissa Harris-Perry who says it takes a 'community' to care for children. By 'community' she means the State. ... Like all good liberals, Harris-Perry believes that she and her cadre of social do-gooders are better equipped to raise other people's children, ... Former Texas Republican senator Phil Gramm tells the story about the time he was on an interview show with an educationalist elitist who held to a worldview similar to that of Harris-Perry. He told her, 'My educational policies are based on the fact that I care more about my children than you do'. She said, 'No, you don't'. Gramm replied, 'Okay, what are their names?'" [source].

"When liberals say, 'It's everybody's responsibility', they really mean it's the State's responsibility to be paid for by everybody. ... When a liberal says something about 'making better investments', we have to automatically assume that the government - the State - must involve itself in the life of children so they are taught so-called Progressive ideals, with money confiscated from working families and implemented by the State" [source].

"No where in the Bible does it say kids belong to the community. They in fact do not. They really do not 'belong' to anyone but God and themselves. But God, knowing children's inexperience, gave them to parents, to bring them up and raise them in a Godly fashion and guide them throughout life. Children belong to God first, their parents second, the church third, and the corrupt government never. It has always been the parents' job to educate and disciple [discipline?] their children, the church usually helped in this process, but the [decisions] were always ultimately left up to the parents. ... Yes, support your local kids, love them and care for them, but remember, you are not their parents, respect their parents and leave [decision] making to them and God, it's none of your business" [comment at source].

"'Increasingly, decisions about our children's wellbeing are being taken out of our hands. Not just education, but sex, health, lifestyle, even political life is taught to children by people outside the home.' That is the nature of the New World Order. You can't build a new society without first dismantling the old one and to do that you need to destroy the family unit and take control of the children" [comment at source].

"[A]n ideological agenda has been pushed for many decades now. Radical social engineering is a big part of why we now readily part with our own babies and toddlers, giving them to complete strangers to look after during their most crucial stages of life" [source].

"We know that as the family goes, so goes the nation. No society can survive without strong families. That is why the enemies of society in the West have always worked so hard, targeting families. Once the family is weakened or destroyed, so will be the nation.  All the radicals have known this. Vladimir Lenin said, 'Destroy the family, destroy the nation.'  Simone de Beauvoir said the family is an 'obscene bourgeois institution'. All these radicals worked overtime to see the family undermined and decimated. Thus the defence of the family is always a fundamental task of the rest of us. ... [O]ur first duty is to protect and promote the most enduring, the most valuable, and the most child-friendly institutions known to man" [source].

"Family is about children and their welfare. An attack on family is an attack on children, for family is the fortress and well being of children" [comment at source].

"I wrote a book a few years ago about religion and science and I summarised the difference between them in two sentences: 'Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean'.  And that's a way of thinking about culture also. Does it put things together or does it take them apart? What made the traditional family remarkable, ... is what it brought together: sexual drive, physical desire, friendship, companionship, emotional kinship and love, the begetting of children and their protection and care, their early education and induction into an identity and a history. Seldom has any institution woven together so many different drives and desires, roles and responsibilities. It made sense of the world and gave it a human face, the face of love. For a whole variety of reasons, ... some to do with moral change like the idea that we are free to do whatever we like so long as it does not harm others, some to do with a transfer of responsibilities from the individual to the state, and other and more profound changes in the culture of the West, almost everything that marriage once brought together has now been split apart. ... This is creating a divide within societies the like of which has not been seen since Disraeli spoke of 'two nations' a century and a half ago. Those who are privileged to grow up in stable loving association with the two people who brought them into being will, on average, be healthier physically and emotionally. They will do better at school and at work. They will have more successful relationships , be happier and live longer.  And yes, there are many exceptions. But the injustice of it all cries out to heaven. It will go down in history as one of the tragic instances of what Friedrich Hayek called 'the fatal conceit' that somehow we know better than the wisdom of the ages, and can defy the lessons of biology and history. ... [O]ur compassion for those who live differently should not inhibit us from being advocates for the single most humanising institution in history. The family, man, woman, and child, is not one lifestyle choice among many. It is the best means we have yet discovered for nurturing future generations and enabling children to grow in a matrix of stability and love. It is where we learn the delicate choreography of relationship and how to handle the inevitable conflicts within any human group. It is where we first take the risk of giving and receiving love. It is where one generation passes on its values to the next, ensuring the continuity of a civilization. For any society, the family is the crucible of its future, and for the sake of our children's future, we must be its defenders" [source].

"The UK Government is committed to tackling childcare as an obstacle to women's economic activity [EMcD: please see this article for the communist origin of this thinking]. It launched the Out of School Childcare Grant Initiative in April 1993 to offer parents of school aged children the opportunity to participate more fully in the labour market, by increasing the quantity and quality of out of school childcare. 45 million is being channelled through Training and Enterprise Councils (LECs in Scotland), with the aim of creating up to 50,000 new after school holiday places for children under 5 years of age" [source].

"Stop the nationalisation of the family. Subsidised childcare is cynically used by politicians desperate to force more women out to work as a short-term fix for deep-seated economic problems. It is also favoured by the kind of high-flying women who become career politicians, but is not wanted by the majority of women, who consistently say in surveys they would like to spend more time with the children rather than going out to work. However, it effectively nationalises both the role of the father and the mother, with long term very damaging consequences: as the state increasingly assumes the role of provider, both sexes start to see fathers as superfluous to family life, and single parenthood increases" [source].

"Another SNP measure hits at the autonomy of the family. This is the Named Persons Act, which provides for the state to appoint a named guardian, usually a social worker or teacher, for every child and adolescent in Scotland. This is, of course, dressed up as a means of providing protection for vulnerable children and young people. Who, they say, could possibly object to this? The answer is anyone who believes parents are better judges of their children's interests than the state or social workers. The SNP claims parents and children have asked for these guardians, but, for me, the assumption is clear: parents can't be trusted and children belong not to their parents but to the state, just as in Mao's China" [source].

"Early intervention is driven by the power of wishful thinking. The notion that there is a window of opportunity before the age of three within which adults can decisively influence infantile development is an old dogma of psychoanalysis now dubiously reinforced by speculative neuroscience. Massive research into Sure Start has confirmed that the evidence for its efficacy is very weak - yet it is stronger than that for any other form of early intervention. The downside of early intervention is that it pathologises whole communities, inevitably communities that already suffer poverty and neglect. By replacing family and social links with therapeutic relationships between targeted individuals and professionals, early intervention further undermines personal resilience. Rather than strengthening individuals and communities, it renders them more atomised and more dependent on state support" [source].

"[I]n politically correct Britain you can starve and beat a child and very little is done, but if you have the wrong political views children will be taken from you immediately. If you work in education as I do, or any public sector job, you are in grave danger of losing your job if you express the wrong political views. Children in our schools are immediately withdrawn or suspended if they break the taboos of political correctness in relation to race or gender. Young children are reported to the police for saying the wrong things in the playground, especially if it is related to Islam or immigration. The agencies of the state are very quick to crush dissent and any questioning of the multiracial utopia they are creating. However when it comes to a starving and beaten four-year-old whose parents are immigrants the agencies of the state are not so quick to act" [source].

"Of course we should not be surprised by this, shocking as it is. We have recently witnessed the systematic rape and sexual abuse of young white girls by Pakistani men all over the country, and the police and social services simply refused to intervene in order to ensure good race relations and 'community cohesion'. When both the police and social services were finally forced to take action they made sure that the ethnicity of the perpetrators was kept well under wraps and denied that this had anything to do with Islam when it became obvious to all that those involved were men of Pakistani origin. There is no question that children continue to be let down by the agencies designed to protect them and it is clear that much of this is to do with political correctness, especially where immigrants are concerned. The whole system is rotten and must be replaced by decent people not infected with the disease of political correctness and multiculturalism" [source].

"The nanny state ... so obsessed with Political Correctness, box ticking, form filling, they have missed the bigger picture, the health and wealth of the children they are supposed to be helping. Time for Nanny state to back off and let parents make decisions" [comment at source].

"Parliament should assert clearly that parents not the State has [sic] responsibility, primarily, for their own children. But has not Parliament itself legislated for the very laws that have, bit by bit, undermined this totally essential, natural situation where it is the parent who first and foremost has both control and responsibility for the child. We have a way too mighty State that needs shrinking, and at the same time everyone must be told to step up and take personal responsibility for their own offspring. This is [a] huge cultural and legal problem that we need to chip away at, bit by bit, to shrink the State and 'grow' responsibility amongst the relatively few who have insufficient" [comment at source].

"A system that does not recognize the existence of male and female would be free to ignore the parentage of any child. You might be recognized as your child's 'legal guardian', but only if the state agrees to that. Anybody can be a guardian to your child if the state decides it's in the child's 'best interest'.  In this vision, there is nothing to prevent the state from severing the mother-child bond at will. In such a scenario, the state controls all personal relationships right at their source: the biological family. The abolition of family autonomy would be complete, because the biological family would cease to be a default arrangement. The 'family' would be whatever the state allows it to be" [source].

"The true goal of the left is to decimate Christianity; they intend to do this by any means, even if the price is Sharia law. Socialism always starts out with noble intentions but ends in tyranny. Collectivism = Communism/Socialism = Totalitarianism (as delineated by Sartre to Marx to Mao to Stalin right on up to Obama). By definition, collectivism degrades the status of the individual and places salvation as an exclusive phenomenon of collective humanity, with the individual having zero status. This is why the collective left is perfectly willing to accept as moral the cold blooded murder of hundreds of millions of individuals under Communist dictators... not to mention the cold blooded murder of the unborn in holocaustic proportion. Collectivism/Socialism decimates the whole concept of a personal relationship with Almighty God; it absolves personal responsibility and degrades the individual to a simply algorithmic sub-process in the overall scheme. Collectivism (Socialism) is indeed the antithesis of Christianity" [comment at source].

University of Central Lancashire Study:  "Based on FOI requests to 114 local councils, [the University's study] showed that, since Baby P, there has been a huge increase in the number of cases where social workers have intervened because of 'concerns' raised by teachers, health visitors, doctors or members of the public that something suspicious might be going on, even if this may be only a small bruise on an arm or a neighbour overhearing a mother and father shouting at each other. Thanks to such 'referrals' ... social workers investigated no fewer than one in five of all children born in 2009/10.  But ... many of the cases I have investigated over the years were set off like this, leading to tragic outcome where social workers successfully based their case almost entirely on those initial ill-founded suspicions, without having to produce any further evidence to support them" [source].

Charlie Gard

"If an unaccountable omnipotent state can take away the power of life from babies what else can it also 'justify' taking away? ... Then there is the rest f the population. Why not neglect the old, infirm and poor because it is the cheaper option?" [source].

"[A]ny trial should be in front of a jury to deal with the question of fact and to decide what is morally correct. Twelve good me (or women) and true are more likely to understand the major issue here, that a hospital (backed by the state) is trying to legally kill a British citizen [sic] and human being" [source].

"The court decided that Charlie's best interests could not be represented by his own parents, and appointed a 'guardian' to represent him ... was it necessary to appoint a guardian ...? There was no disagreement between Charlie's parents, who believed ... that 'they, as his parents, should speak for Charlie in court hearings that are deciding his fate'. This accords with the government website on 'Parental rights and responsibilities', which lists 'agreeing to the child's medical treatment' as a parental responsibility - and of course, every responsibility has a reciprocal right" [source].

"GOSH has irreparably tarnished its reputation by allowing its doctors to play [G]od. The only people who have the right to decide Charlie's future are the two who brought him into the world, not doctors, the hospital, judges or juries. If these parents had been responsible for injuring the baby, they would have been arrested, charged, tried and punished by officials who would have held them responsible for causing him harm. How, then, can it be justified for officials to prevent the parents taking him abroad to try to save his life? This is a travesty of justice, appalling hypocrisy and double standards" [comment at source].

"There is something very sick and wrong with a society that ignores the trauma, terror, pain and grievous bodily harm caused every day to little girls suffering FGM, yet expends so much time, energy and the full force of the law to intimidate and frustrate loving parents who want to find help for their baby" [comment at source].

"A shocking case [re Charlie Gard] in which some person or persons unknown, with the power to do so, decided that the child would die, no matter how hard the parents tried to save him. There is something very disturbing about the refusal of every authority to relent on the grounds of compassion, and the failure of the government to interceded on the grounds of the laws cited [in this article]" [comment at source].

"In both the Ashya King and Charlie Gard cases the parents were plainly loving, well-informed, capable, ingenious and resourceful parents. As such they should have been free to take advice from any doctors they chose, then act according to their best judgment in the interests of their child. To me it seems blindingly obvious that the critical decisions that had to be made were parental. And therefore should have been theirs" [comment at source].

Social Care: A Poem

by Anne Murray

"It has become apparent that, in this modern day,
our health and social services are rife with compliancy.

"And if you dare to tell them, this system isn't right,
Prepare yourself for battle; you're going to have a fight.

"They twist and turn the subject; to them we're all the same,
They will take away your dignity, and blacken your good name.

"Then you'll be abandoned, to suffer a bureaucratic fate,
Targeted by the social sharks; that use our babies as bait.

"The destruction of the family will be their only goal,
It has become apparent: the social care system has no soul"

Withdraw Thy Foot...

"God gave children to parents, not to the State, to love, nurture, teach, discipline, and train up into adulthood.  It does not take a 'village' or the 'Collective' or State-run 'Care' homes to raise a child; it takes a loving and biological/adoptive/foster family.  Please see the article Communism and the Family for the ideology underlying the 'Collective'.

"The issues are:... [continue reading]

"And he that stealeth [a child], and selleth him..."
(Exodus 21:16)

"The words of a talebearer are as wounds,
and they go down into the innermost parts of the belly"
(Proverbs 18:8)

"Every fool will be meddling ... Withdraw thy foot from thy neighbour's house:
lest he be weary of thee, and so hate thee"
(Proverbs 20:3b; 25:17)

"Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? There is more hope of a fool than of him"
(Proverbs 26:12)

"Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees,
and that write grievousness which they have prescribed"
(Isaiah 10:1-3)

"Woe to them that devise iniquity, and work evil upon their beds!
when the morning is light, they practice it, because it is in the power of their hand. ...
So they oppress a man and his house, even a man and his heritage"
(Micah 2:1-2)

"It is impossible but that offences will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come!
It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea,
than that he should offend one of these little ones"
(Luke 17:1-2)

"Let none of you suffer ... as a busybody in other men's matters"
(1 Peter 4:15)

"Never, anywhere in the Holy Bible will you find God giving civil government
any authority to rear or direct the rearing of children ...
God told parents, not the government, to 'train up' their children."
(Laura Rogers, Societal Structures vs. Restructuring, as quoted in Berit Kjos, Brave New Schools, p185)

© Elizabeth McDonald     https://www.bayith.org     bayith@blueyonder.co.uk