Demand Rights in the Home

Perverse Parenting

The Facilitator Parent is a consistent extension of our secularist rights-based society.  Secularist rights are not freedom rights, nor civil rights, but demand rights.  "I want or need; you (society) has a duty to provide."  The entire edifice of income and property redistribution by the state is built upon the foundation of demand rights. But the application of demand rights has now moved way beyond material egalitarianism. 

Take abortion.  "I demand autonomous control over my own body.  Because I demand, a human right is at issue.  Therefore, the state has a duty to provide abortion services to meet my demands.  Anything less is unjust."  Demand rights lead to the Facilitator State--in everything.

The same philosophy is now being worked out in parenting and family life.  The role of the parent has changed from a duty of care, involving nurture, food, clothing, love, and paideia--teaching, instruction, admonition, correction, and training for adult life.  Secularist parenting is ditching the (Christian) past and replacing what is now seen as "parental imperialism" with a child-centric demand rights model.  The role of the parent is to facilitate so that the demands, wants, and wishes of the child are duly realised. 

Here is an example of narcissistic demand rights parenting:

Some parents are preparing to transition their children from one gender to the other as early as pre-school. National Public Radio interviews one Oakland, Calif. family with a young child who started life out as “Jack” but became “Jackie” by age four.  Mary Carter described to NPR the day “Jackie” told her he wanted to be a girl.

“Jackie just looked really, really sad; sadder than a 3-and-a-half-year-old should look,” Carter says. “This weight that looked like it weighed more than she did, something she had to say and I didn’t know what that was.  So I asked. I said, ‘Jackie, are you sad that you’re not going to school today?’ And Jackie was really quiet and put her head down and said ‘No, I’m sad because I’m a boy.’”

According to NPR, the child was already his older sister’s dresses on regular occasions liked wearing pink boots.  Carter then asked, “You’re really not happy being a boy? I thought a little bit longer and I said, ‘Well, are you happy being you?’ And that made Jackie smile,” she says. “And I felt like for that moment, that was all that really mattered. That was ‘The Day.’ ”

At that point Carter went to a drug store and found elastic bands to pull Jackie’s hair into small ponytails.  “And I’ve never seen such a happy child,” Carter recalls. “To go from maybe an hour before this, this child who looks so sad, to that, I felt like I’d done something right by her.”

The Facilitator Parent at work.  Whatever makes the child happy, the parent must compliantly provide.  Love has no standards, except compliance with the child's demands and choices.  It's the essence of love and justice in the secularist worldview.  But it is also gravely harmful and damaging over the longer term. 

However, Walt Heyer, an author and activist who underwent a sex change operation decades ago, regretted the surgery, and returned to identifying as a male again, says children cannot be born as one gender and identify as another by accident.  “There’s a lot of questions here. Kids are not born transgender. Childhood developmental disorder that comes out of some event or series of events or abuse or neglect or trauma or overbearing mother or father or someone or a lot of times its sexual abuse,” Heyer told The Daily Caller, referencing his reaction to a documentary about transgenders, where a little boy, who now identified as a girl, asked his mother if she would still love him if he was still a boy.

“The reason I jumped off the couch is because that’s what happened to me. My grandmother kept cross-dressing me and loving on me as a girl and not as the boy God made,” he said.

Although both of Jackie’s parents are supportive of the child’s decision, Jackie’s older sister, Chloe still refers to her younger sibling as “Jack” from time to time and James Christian, Jackie’s father admitted he sometimes misses his little boy.  “I look at the old clothes and the old pictures and I will miss Jack. And that’s probably never going to go away. That’s just going to take some time,” he told NPR. [The Daily Caller]

Some time indeed.  Meanwhile, poor Jack will be picking up lots of subterranean signals from his family about who is really is.  Mum and dad perversely indulged him; he will likely end up hating his parents.

On the other hand, it has to be acknowledged that the Carters are being perfectly consistent with the prevailing and established secularist religion of our day.  In the end, there are no rules, no templates, no God-given laws to abide by.  The only other option is the worship of the autonomous human will and its demands.  Those who hate God's truth and wisdom, love death, says the Proverb.