The state is your family now, little comrade

Heather Wilhelm at Real Clear Politics uses the topic of bullying to point out just how close to boiling the water is for all of us frogs.

Keeping young human beings from aggressing on one another for the purposes of establishing a pecking order, shaking down some lunch money, or just to be mean, is an age-old challenge for adult authority figures in any and all societies.  The most effective way to deal with it is to keep an eye on the urchins and step in and quell each particular situation as it arises.

As Wilhelm points out, though, as the FHers have conquered our entire culture, the effort to put the kibosh on bullying has undergone mission creep.  To be fair, as technology has advanced, bullying has taken on insidious new forms.  Still, parental involvement would be the most effective way to address that.  But the FHers have seen an exquisitely ripe opportunity to impose acceptance of all manner of "lifestyle choices" that were considered, as recently as fifty years ago, the kind of thing one ought to quietly pursue and not shove in others' faces.

She cites a recent book, “Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy,” by Slate editor Emily Bazelon, and is admirably charitable about ascribing the most benign of motives to Bazelon, who, predictably, winds up, in her tome, advocating the placing of "Heather Has Two Mommies" on kindergarten bookshelves.

But Wilhelm does get to the core of what is really going on here - namely, supplanting family and faith with the leviathan state:

The common-sense solution to bullying, of course, would be to monitor kids, discipline them in a consistent manner, and have a well-communicated zero-tolerance policy. (Bazelon, to her credit, offers a thorough profile of a program, called the Olweus method, that does just that.)

You could also teach kids that all human beings are worthy of respect and love and should not be tormented, but that might be too simple for the people who brought you Obamacare. Plus, it’s just not as fun as social engineering. “You’re asking a school to do something differently than what’s done at home and church,” Whitney Pellegrino of the Justice Department tells Bazelon. “It’s a long process.”

If that quote doesn’t scare you, nothing will. Sadly, many families appear to have checked out of the whole “child-raising” thing, and it shows. Nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum, and so, apparently, does the government’s education establishment. When families check out or disintegrate, something will move in to take their place.

In other words, meet the new parents . . . and be at least a little afraid.