For the Record: Parental Rights

 

From New Adventures of Superboy #1 (January 1980). Art by Kurt Schaffenberger, via Wikipedia.

When Republicans talk about "parents' rights", they don't mean parents' rights to support their kids in growing up--they mean parents' rights *against* their kids, rights of an owner over a possession.

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 24, 2023

Pretty sure I really mean that. People affecting to believe in a big sociocultural wokery conspiracy trying to change "our society" (the society those gents thought they owned) are at bottom angry with their kids or grandkids or nieces and nephews, for being smarter and stronger and better looking and eventually getting more sex no doubt (that's the human condition all parents must live with), but more particularly for challenging their authority—not just for being irreligious or sexually different, though those obviously matter when they happen, but especially for being broad-minded, not narrow, liberal for want of a better word, going beyond what the previous generation wanted to allow. I'm not saying all conservative parents are like this, either, or that only conservative parents have conflicts with their kids, but that this particular kind of conflict is directly connected to this particular kind of political conservatism.

Love and Merit, Love and Merit

Go together like a Stick and Carrot?

Lon Chaney and Mary Philibin in The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Via PaxRomano.

The Sage of Cleveland Park may have arrived at the stage of blaming Dad, who always liked you better than me, for why he's so fucked up:

Verbatim David Brooks, "Love and Merit", New York Times, April 24 2015:

Parents unconsciously shape their smiles and frowns to steer their children toward behavior they think will lead to achievement. Parents glow with extra fervor when their child studies hard, practices hard, wins first place, gets into a prestigious college. This sort of love is merit based. It is not simply: I love you. It is, I love you when you stay on my balance beam. I shower you with praise and care when you’re on my beam. The wolf of conditional love is lurking in these homes.

Or maybe he's having a fight with his own kids who complain that he always made them feel worthless by not praising them and he's trying to make an argument that it was for good reasons, not that he just wasn't paying attention. (The acknowledgments to The Road to Character say "My ex-wife, Sarah, has done and continues to do an amazing job raising our three children", suggesting he himself has rarely seen them at all, at least until they started showing up dressed for dinner instead of being put to bed during the cocktail hour.)