The State is your mother, children. Disregard the mother and father who gave you life, as well as God in heaven above, and listen to what the government wants you to believe!

Yes, this is a real opinion article that WaPo gleefully ran.

In their search for issues that will deliver Congress in 2022, conservatives have begun to circle around the cause of "parents' rights."

Yep, this is the first line of said article.

"Parents' rights" is put in mocking scare quotes, because the authors don't believe there is such a thing.

After lamenting the rise of angry parents who are tired of the indoctrination of their children, the authors write this:

Yet what's actually radical here is the assertion of parental powers that have never previously existed. This is not to say that parents should have no influence over how their children are taught. But common law and case law in the United States have long supported the idea that education should prepare young people to think for themselves, even if that runs counter to the wishes of parents.

A few thoughts before we continue wading through this garbage:

First, does U.S. case law trump, say, religious convictions?

Will you tell Jewish and Christian parents that they have no duty or right to train their children in the way they should go, and to protect their children from ideas that run counter to what they believe the Creator of the universe has commanded?

Consider Deuteronomy 6:6-7:

And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.

Ah, says the keyboard warriors, but those are just those fascist Christo-centric oppressors! Who cares what they think?

Okay, how about telling Muslim or Hindu parents that they don't have a right to voice concerns when the State is teaching their kids graphic details about men having sex with men, or that they are evil based on the melanin levels in their skin?

Second, this assumes that the teachers are impartial educators with no ideological axe to grind.

We all know this isn't true. Everyone has a bias, and teachers have some of the most impassioned dogmas – especially when it comes to the woke, neo-Marxist religion.

Do parents have a right to keep religion out of their kids' schools? Because when little Jimmy is learning about the 84 genders on the rainbow spectrum, he's being taught a religious faith with no bearing in objective science or history.

Woke teachers have no interest in teaching kids to think independently, but every intention of teaching them what and how to believe.

With this is mind, let's continue:

When do the interests of parents and children diverge? Generally, it occurs when a parent's desire to inculcate a particular worldview denies the child exposure to other ideas and values that an independent young person might wish to embrace or at least entertain. To turn over all decisions to parents, then, would risk inhibiting the ability of young people to think independently.

If you teach your kids that say, Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and there is no way to God except through Him, then you are a dangerous criminal and it is the sacred right of the State to "emancipate" your children from you.

Only the religious worldview of the woke, secular State is the correct one, you dirty heathens!

After decrying how conservatives are making up all their grievances (because an article about total State control is proof of how conservatives started the culture war!), the writers say this:

Knowing that every vote matters, the GOP has increasingly relied on a strategy of voter suppression. Simultaneously, Republicans have worked to ensure that their base turns out in force by stoking White racial grievance.

Yep, those racist Republicans!

You can tell that these people have a firm grasp on reality and can totally be trusted with teaching our children what is right, true, and noble!

Parents can opt out of the public system if they wish, and pay to send their children to private or religious schools. But even there, parental rights remain subject to state regulation and override.

If this were 1776, George Washington would be grabbing his musket and rowing across the Delaware at words like this.

I get what they're saying: there is a power given to the government (by the PEOPLE) to frame proper curriculum for children.

Say that a tiny majority of powerful people wanted to teach that boys can be girls and girls can be boys. Say that the vast majority of people denied this ridiculous notion.

In a healthy democratic society, such curriculum would be nixed immediately by a government working to protect its people.

What WaPo writers Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire (like all woke cultists) fail to understand is that they are the elites, and that they are using the government as a strong man to steal children away from their parents.

One needs only look at the USSR to learn what happens next!

"For many of us far behind the iron curtain, communism and its rituals—salutes, slogans, flag ceremonies—in some ways replaced religion. By kindergarten, I learned that we were supposed to be atheists. 'Do you believe in God?' I would ask my schoolmates, surveying all of them. One girl told me that she did. 'It's wrong,' I said. 'There is no God and we shouldn't believe in him.' I looked down upon my great grandmother from the countryside when she prayed in the morning and at night." – Katya Soldak, Forbes writer