Depending upon the State to instil these virtues of morality, self-reliance, personal responsibility, and respect for others is a pipe dream. Sure, not every parent will be an ideal role model in these areas, but I would far rather trust them to ‘train up a child in the way he should go’ than rely on government bureaucrats and politicians pushing radical ideological agendas to do so.

One thing that is now crystal clear is that the radicals and militants are fully and ferociously targeting our children. No wonder we hear so much today about grooming and the like: it is all part of the war on children – and parents. The aim is to separate kids from their mothers and fathers and let others with nefarious agendas take over.

These folks have made known their dislike of the traditional family, and how children must be ‘freed’ from the ‘harmful’ values, convictions and beliefs of their parents. They are quite open about all this. And this has been going on for quite some time. As Anthony Esolen wrote in Defending Marriage (Saint Benedict Press, 2014):

It is not the State that defines what marriage is; nature has done that. It is not the State that determines the good of the family; nature has done that, too. It is not even the State that creates the village or the parish. Households have done that. Before there was ever a gross national product, there was economy, the law of the good of the oikos, the household. The ancient Greeks, who bequeathed to us both the term and the reality of democracy, understood that the individual as such was something of an abstraction. You belonged to a family, a household, a clan….

Totalitarian regimes since Plato penned his Republic … have always been aimed against the family, and for good reason. The family is the single greatest bastion against the power of the State. That’s not because of ‘individual’ rights. It’s because the family claims precedence in being and in nature. It is itself a society anterior to the greater society.

We are aware of the old African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.” It means that the surrounding community has a role to play in the development of a child. In its context, it is quite true, and it refers, for example, to other male adults teaching a boy how to hunt. Obviously in a small African village such communal help in training and nurturing children makes perfect sense.

There are several problems when we seek to replicate that wisdom in contemporary Western society. One, we of course do not live in small, close-knit communities. Instead, we may be scattered many miles from extended family members and friends. Letting complete strangers have a role in raising our kids is just not a useful option.

But more importantly, those who most often use this mantra today have something much different in mind when it comes to the raising and socialising of our children. What they almost always mean is having the State take over the role of mum and dad in parenting, educating and training our children.

The classic example of this of course is found in the 1996 book It Takes a Village by Hilary Clinton. Unaware parents might have thought she was giving us some helpful parenting tips, but more savvy readers instantly knew what the real agenda was. For example, a year after the book appeared radio talk show host Dale O’Leary discussed the book.

In The Gender Agenda: Redefining Equality (Vital Issues Press, 1997) she looked at the feminist activism and those pushing the androgyny agenda (men and women are fully interchangeable) and warned of its consequences. Toward the end of her book, she asked what can be done to stop the gender agenda. She said this:

The first step is obviously exposure. Gender feminists have left a paper trail, and they must be made to eat their words. Gender feminists who hid behind family language need to be exposed. A perfect example of this kind of deception is Hillary Clinton’s book, It Takes a Village, which is full of wonderful, apparently profamily wisdom. Underneath, however, one finds the gender feminist ideology.

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