Melissa Harris-Perry, host of her eponymously named show on MSNBC, is featured in an ad for MSNBC stating that children should not belong to their parents, but instead, to the community:
We have never invested in public education as much as we should have, because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours, and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of “These are our children”; so part of it is that we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.
On Saturday, Harris-Perry had the gall to tweet:
The trolls have been really busy the past two weeks calling me disgusting, evil & communist. ?#MustBeDoingSomethingRight
She may call those of us who know the value of parenting as opposed to being raised by the state trolls, but she shouldn’t be surprised by the furor over her remarks. To insult all of us who devote our lives to our children and also truly believe that we are completely responsible for their welfare is beyond offensive and repugnant; it is an attack on the foundations of western civilization itself.
But Harris-Perry doesn’t view children with the same reverence as we do, witness the statement from her show where she refers to the babies inside women’s bodies as “things”:
So my only worry about that, is because I feel like a lot, I mean, having an 11-year-old, I do a lot of kids reading that sort of thing. But I feel like we do that, but it`s always about private morality, right? It feels sort of like to the extent that we talk about morality in the public sphere, we talk about private morality, who you should and shouldn’t sleep with, how you should or should not dispose of things in your uterus. I mean, you know, this is — this is what we think of as morality, right? But we don`t talk about public morality, what it means.
Someone who dismisses the growing child inside as a “thing” should have the good grace to shut up when speaking of parenting, period.