Several interesting threads have made me wonder about this question. I believe people have the right to believe whatever they want no matter how reprehensible that beleif may appear to others. And so long as they don’t break the law in acting upon those beleifs they shouldn’t be penalized for having such beleifs.
But should parents have unlimited rights in teaching their children to be biggoted? Is there a point where teaching a child ‘bad’ things becomes child abuse? And is there any way that the state should react in order to avoid such abuse of children within the state?
I believe it is already considered child abuse for a parent to fail to provide education to a child, but would it be correct to consider it child abuse for a parent to teach racism to a child, and should the state have some power to intervene if this was happening?
One of the great troubles of freedom is that people are free to do things that others consider terrible. This cuts both ways, especially when it comes to raising a child.
I can’t think of a fair system for taking away children of biggots, other than hoping that the children eventually rebel against their parents, as so many do. But as you say, as lon as they don’t actually harm anyone, then there’s not much that can be done.
Certainly the way to defeat bigotry is not to legislate how people raise their children. That is a giant step in the wrong direction.
Would it be child abuse to teach your kid to be Jewish/athiest/gay/creationist/vegetarian/anything else?
No, the state can’t tell people what they’re allowed to teach their children outside of a school curriculum. Imagine the standard that would set.
I think this really nails it, as bigotry, being a problem (probably) as old as man himself, will take a loooong time to correct. The key to “solving” this problem being time, patience and education, not legislation. Baby steps in the right direction. Once you start looking at mandating how people think, you’ll do more harm than good.
This is one aspect of bad parenting which has never concerned me much.
As a child, I attended a fundamentalist Christian school. A certain percentage of the parents who sent their children to this school did so out of fear that the bigotry they were teaching at home might be dispelled by the children meeting real “queers” and other “undesirables” in public school.
Teenage rebellion saved the day in most cases. Parents who didn’t want their children associating with blacks found out to their horror that their kids were dating them, and others discovered that their kids were friends with gay people, or, in one memorable case, coming out as gay themselves.
There were a couple cases of kids remaining bigotted after they grew up, but it seemed that the more intelligent the kid, the less likely they were to keep to mom and dad’s beliefs once they were old enough to see for themselves that what they’d been taught was not true.
So, having seen it for myself, I’m not all that concerned. Yes, the stupid ones will stay racist/homophobic, but they probably weren’t going to amount to much anyway. The smart ones realize quickly that mom and dad lied about Santa, and they lied about gays being evil, too.
Have faith in humanity. Once the kids get out in the real world, they see the light. Try as they might, mom and dad can’t shelter them forever.
Oh for crying out loud. No it isn’t. If you taught your children to attack minority kids at school, they would at the least be removed from school and you would most likely end up having a long session in family court. If you refused to potty train your children and instead taught them to squat in the nearest corner, same story. We as a society have long since established that there are minimum standards for parental quality before we take your kids away in a last ditch effort to protect the species. Removing children from evil, abusive shits is a giant step in the right direction, for society and the kids.
The problem is defining who is an evil abusive shit. People are perfectly willing to take kids away from physically or sexually abusive parents. But we rarely take them away from emotionally, financially, or educationally abusive ones because someone always brings up the bogeyman that “they’ll take your kids next!” Because after all, the same mechanisms that would label a Grand Wizard of the KKK an unfit parent would surely spring into action if you told your kids the flat tax was a good idea. And so we end up with a system in which you are free to scar your child for life, with malicious intent, as long as you don’t beat them (very severely) or rape them.
So now we’re defining child abuse as expressing the “wrong” opinions in front of your children? And who gets to decide which opinions are acceptable? Thought police, here we come.
I agree with Lissa. Children grow up and learn more than what their parents teach them. If they are at all intelligent, they will sift what they’ve been taught and keep some and throw some out, or at least make adjustments. If that weren’t true, most of my generation would still be almost instinctively racist.
Society has the responsability and takes for itself the power to ensure children are educated allready. Should it also take the responsability and powers to ensure that children are brought up in such a way that they can be worthwhile members of that society?
Should somone be allowed to teach their child to be a thief or criminal? Should they be allowed to teach their child to act hostilely towards people of a different race, or members of the opposite sex, or of a differing religion?
Sketch, if you would please, the profile of a “worthwhile member of society”. Avoid generic terms like “bigotry” without qualifiers. I have recently seen the word used to describe those who don’t like bicyclists on public roads. It is too generic to be useful.
Enjoy,
Steven
A “worthwhile member of society” is anyone whom society’s members considers ought to receive all the benifits of being a member of that society. Generally laws exist to determine when someone stops being a worthwhile member of society and in the most extreme cases takes away that persons membership of society by placing them in prison or even exicuting them. So a worthwhile member of society is one that does not engage in criminal activities to such an extent that they require removal from the society for a period of time in order to protect society from them.
So people in prison are those who have been determined as well as can be to not be worthwhile members of society, they are not irredeemable in most cases. People who act in a criminal fashion are reducing their worth to society, whilst those who work for the benifit of others are increasing their worth to society. The criminal system is the closest we have got to a measure of worth in society, but is not perfect. So an innocent in prison is a worthwhile member of society dispite being treated as if they weren’t, whilst a guilty person who is free is a worthless member of society dispite the fact that they are not treated as such.
So teaching someone to become a criminal is teaching them to become a worthless member of society.
So when consensual adult sodomy was criminalized(up until a very short while ago) it would have been an offense under your system to raise someone as openly homosexual with intent to practice sodomy with their partner upon reaching adulthood? This would have resulted in custody being revoked because they were raising their child to be a “worthless member of society”?
Enjoy,
Steven
Hostilely or violently? If the latter, isn’t that a simple, criminal act? If you are teaching your children that certain peolpe are “bad” and should be shunned, then no, the state has no right to intervene.