To Whom Do Our Children Belong? (2)
Today we are pleased to share the second instalment of an important work from Geoff Thomas, “To Whom Do Our Children Belong?” You can read the first instalment here.
Geoff was the pastor at Alfred Place Baptist Church in Aberystwyth, Wales, for fifty years. He is retired, and the author of many books and articles, having been a frequent speaker at conferences throughout the world. He still preaches at the Chapel he attends in London, as well as travelling extensively to speak in different churches.
We continue with an answer to the question posed, “What is Caesar able to do?”
(1) Caesar can prohibit the killing of the unborn child or he can permit it.
In 1979 China passed the law that limited to a single child the number of children parents could have. To enforce existing birth limits, provincial governments could, and did, require the use of contraception, abortion, and even sterilization to ensure compliance. They imposed enormous fines for violations. Local and national governments created commissions to promote the programme and to monitor compliance. China also rewarded families with one child, in accordance with the instructions on further family planning issued by the Communist Party Central Committee and the State Council in 1979, these regulations awarding 5 yuan per month for families with one child. Parents who had only one child would also get a “one-child glory certificate.”
But what authority do politicians in the western world seek? We learn that “New York State has signed into law an abortion-rights bill that is close to what many have been campaigning for in the UK. This is pretty much what the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, and other pro-choice organisations that are supporting the #WeTrustWomen campaign, have been asking British politicians to support.” These are the words of Ann Furedi, the head of the Britain’s largest abortion provider, the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS). Just to be clear, the Caesar who at this time in history is ruling in New York State has introduced legislation to permit abortion literally up until the birth of a child… and the “#WeTrustWomen campaign” want the same thing in Britain.
The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) supports this extremist abortion campaign, but, with a change of leadership, some are demanding a move away from this kind of barbarism. The RCM took this decision without the support of its members and many midwives believe that it is time to reverse that decision. The head of the RCM, Cathy Warwick (who is also on the board of Trustees of Britain’s largest abortion provider, BPAS) took the decision, without the backing of the rest of the RCM, to advocate for abortion up until birth.
Abortion is always wrong and a great sadness, but abortion at this late stage is particularly gruesome. Not only do children routinely survive outside of the womb from about 22 weeks gestation (5 months), but at 40 weeks (9 months pregnant) a child can often survive with no medical assistance. This is because at this stage, the child is ready to be born. Now Caesar is saying, “I give my permission for that child to be killed.” So there are consequences for the life of the unborn child especially if many believe that that child belongs to Caesar.
(2) Caesar may punish parents for remarks they make in their own homes.
In other words there are consequences for family life if children consider that Caesar is their supreme head. Fifty years ago in Guzhen, China, a 15-year-old Red Guard named Zhang Hongbing heard his mother make derogatory remarks about Chairman Mao. Drilled in loyalty to the great leader, the boy told the authorities. A few days later she was shot by an execution squad. Zhang remains distraught to this day. “I killed my mother. I’m tormented by this!” Spies in the home! Children giving their first obligation to the political leaders of their country.
Is this so far from our experience? In November 2020 Humza Yousaf the Scottish justice secretary announced that he wished to make changes to hate crime legislation. That is, he desired that within the home “stirring up hatred” against people with protected characteristics, including disability, age and sexual orientation, or stirring up hatred against Muslims, should be punishable with up to seven years in prison. Where are we going? Will there be in ten years via shaming, social media and political timidity – to statute books all over the ‘free world’ legislating against chat around the table by batty old aunts or grandparents?
(3) Caesar can give a new definition of marriage.
Do the politicians determine what marriage is? Feminism and the LGBT movement is a powerful movement in politics. There are at least 200 chairs of gender and queer studies in American universities. There is the feminist slogan, ‘the personal is political.’ Feminists are defining the family, marriage, children and private life itself. Its goal is the denial of privacy, specifically family privacy, Stephen Baskerville has written (The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties and the Growth of Government (Angelical Press, 2017), pb., 395 pp.). The book illustrates the ways in which the state, under feminine influence, attacks the married heterodox family. As a family is a strong unit, supported by Christianity, then it represents the surest check limiting government power, and thus it comes under attack by Caesar.
Politics are implemented also in the pressure put on women to enter the workplace. The influx of new workers drives down men’s wages and forces them to work longer hours thereby spending less time with their family. With both parents working, pressure is put on them to place their children in daycare. It is obvious that feminists advocate universal daycare because they claim that it would liberate women from the home. Daycare has become a feminist sacred cow and to criticise it has consequences. For example, when child psychologist Jay Belsky questioned its effects on children we are told that ‘not only his research but he himself was personally attacked in the media and academy and effectively ostracized from his profession.’ Yet a number of studies have found that the longer children spend in daycare, the poorer their academic performance.
See the radical anti-parent agenda behind daycare in Hilary Clinton’s statement ‘Every home and family should be taught, through parenting education and family visitation by social service intermediaries, how to raise children.’ What will Caesar teach them? What values will he give them? What will he set before them to admire and love? A leading child psychologist advocates daycare claiming that ‘Children who have been in daycare . . . think for themselves and want their own way . . . They are not willing to comply with adults’ “arbitrary rules”’.
(4) Caesar can undermine the high calling of fatherhood.
Christian marriage esteems fatherhood and allows children to have fathers with paternal authority who exercise their authority over their children. Without them they would have mothers alone. Hence the feminists’ criticism that Christian marriage is an institution of patriarchy while single motherhood and divorce are made to seem good in themselves. Religious freedom to promote Christian marriage as an ideal is threatened with hate crime laws. The words ‘discrimination’ and ‘harassment’ are frequently used in describing it. Christians are targeted when they express their views on homosexual activity.
On February 14, 2019 the French parliament voted to banish the words “mother” and “father” from official paperwork in the education system to tackle discrimination against gay parents. Gay marriage became legal in France in 2013. On all official forms involving children mention must be made solely in these terms ‘Parent 1’ and ‘Parent 2’. A psychoanalyst, Jean-Pierre Winter told Le Figaro, “We are only at the beginning of a process that will neutralise the difference between the sexes up to the elimination of mentions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ on identity papers.”
(5) Caesar is setting himself up as the supreme head and example to children.
What are the consequences of this for the majority of children in the world who are living under dictatorships, or who are confronted with dominant secular humanism? Who then do they have as their role models? Here is a clue to their thinking.
In the United Kingdom the Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition is the world’s oldest international writing competition for school-children. It started in 1883 and now some 12,000 children take part. Each one of the judges in recent years has read seventy of the essays. One of them wrote, “and with every essay my heart sank.” Not because of the quality of the writing which was excellent. The creativity was exceptional. The imagination of these boys and girls surprised him, “but oh the sorrowfulness of these young spirits. These kids were so depressed! One essay alone was infused with a sense of optimism, and that was written by a Christian boy from Kenya about a church outing. The rest sounded so sad, so pessimistic, so full of foreboding. Children wrote like prisoners on death row” (Matthew Parris, ‘Out of the Mouths of Babes’, The Spectator, 8 December 2018, p. 21). He concluded, “The consensus from these essays is that the future’s a choice between environmental devastation or world war.” If the best role model is Caesar then what a dark world it is for many.
(6) Caesar is no friend of Christian schools.
If children belong to Caesar then can there be any place for Christian schools? There are socialists who hate independent and private schools. They want to confiscate their assets and forcibly integrate them into the state system, but the right of parents to choose to educate their children outside the clutches of the state is important. There is much advantage to educational competition which independent academies provide. They supply a corrective, a safety valve, a laboratory for innovation and a conservation area. Subjects such as classics survive thanks to independent schools. Destroying excellent independent schools will not make bad ones better.
What can Caesar do? He is under obligation to reward those who do good (Romans 13:4). However, what if he opposes those who do good? For example, he can close places of worship. He can get in the way of groups of parents setting up free independent schools. It happens all too often. Let Caesar do good as we seek to do good. Let him encourage Christians to gather safely and legally. Let Caesar remove such shackles from successful free school and academy groups whose results are excellent, schools where 50% of the children come from disadvantaged backgrounds but are having the top results. Our children do not belong to Caesar.
(7) Caesar can set himself up as the doctor and healer of misbehaving children.
Hundreds of thousands of English schoolchildren are receiving one particular mind-control drug. That drug is methylphenidate – Ritalin. An article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that most of them shouldn’t be. In America millions of children take it as one of a range of psychiatric drugs, some prescribed for children as young as two. The symptoms of their disorderly behaviour are not all accepted as a medical condition. Family difficulties and social problems can cause them to act in a way that is defined as Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. It is quicker and cheaper to control the kids with drugs. Many of them are in daycare centres with their parents working and there they are chemically subdued to make their behaviour acceptable to their carers. That is far less embarrassing for the parents than being called from their place of work to collect a toddler who has behaved boisterously. Doping baby-sat toddlers into docility is more common in America but there is an attempt in the United Kingdom to reform the Mental Health Act to empower doctors to make anyone submit to treatment if he or she displays ‘any disability or disorder of the mind or brain, whether permanent or temporary, which results in an impairment or disturbance of mental functioning.’ In other words, Caesar could decree that doctors may force medication on children who have even moderate learning disabilities, or who simply can’t concentrate in class. Under such legislation three quarters of a million of British children could be drugged kicking and screaming into conformity. Of course, some children can be helped by drugs but these practices should not be resorted to as a matter of routine.
(8) Caesar attempts to set himself up to be the husband of the single mother.
Caesar does not believe that there is a God-given pattern for ordering our sexual and reproductive lives. So he is open to the invention of all kinds of relationships. California Department of Education invited public comment on a draft for new teaching in its schools. The draft included teaching about sexual relations, sexual orientation and gender. In chapter five, line 925, it states, “Some students may be non-monogamous and the term ‘partner(s)’ may be used to be more inclusive.” According to one resource for LGBTQ terms and definitions, recommended by GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network), the polyamorous sexual orientation is defined as “the practice of, desire to, or orientation toward having consensual non-monogamous relationships (i.e. relationships that may include multiple partners). This may include open relationships, polyfidelity (which involves more than two people being in romantic and/or sexual relationships which is not open to additional partners), amongst many other set-ups.”
In chapter 3, Line 1847, the draft recommends the book Who Are You? for pre-K–3rd graders as a “guide” to develop their gender identity. This book introduces young children to the idea that gender is a spectrum. This means genders are unlimited and ever-expanding, rather than confined to two biological genders. In the book, gender is described as, “boy, girl, both, neither, trans, genderqueer, non-binary, gender fluid, transgender, gender neutral, agender, neutrois, bigender, third gender, two spirit…” In Chapter 5, line 643, the draft introduces sexual orientations as a spectrum as well. LGBTQ+ is defined as an ever-changing spectrum with expanding concepts to include “queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, allies and alternative identities (LGBTQQIAA).” Other sexual orientations introduced in Chapter 6, Line 938 include “pansexual and polysexual.”
Many parents have never heard quite a few of these terms before and many of them are not in the English dictionary. While parents may assume that they can opt out of this instruction, as they can with sexual health education and HIV prevention, this simply is not true. Instruction about gender or sexual orientations that is implemented through the adoption of the framework is exempted from parent notification and opt out requirements (California Education Code 51932b). According to The California Safe School Coalition, state law provides that “instruction or materials that discuss gender, sexual orientation, or family life and do not discuss human reproductive organs and their functions” are not subject to parental notice and opt-out laws.
How successful is Caesar going to be, having described all these relationships, in encouraging well-knit, cohesive and faithful families? Norman Dennis is famous for breaking one of the great taboos of the sociological world when he published his Families without Fatherhood. There he showed how single parenthood was linked with serious deprivation among children, ranging from poor performance at school to a greater tendency to be involved in crime. There was an outcry because such conclusions got in the way of the right of single women to have children or of married women to choose divorcing their husbands.
Why do single parents seem to have less success than married couples in imparting moral values to their offspring? They live in the absence of a male role model. The children do not have the experience of observing and benefitting from the caring successful co-operative relationships between a man and a woman. There is the dependence on welfare, and often an embattled and adversarial relationship with Caesar, a single mother without resources fighting the welfare and benefit agencies, housing authorities and the like. “Us and them.” The mother is trapped in a dependency culture without love. There is resentment, not gratitude.
Rewards seem to go to those who can best bend the rules or break them without being found out. Caesar is not a good husband if you are married to the state. It is a cruel and loveless marriage, grasping on the one hand, grudging on the other. So what is the effect of this on any children? “An adolescent boy would be likely to regard society as his enemy and to see his relationship with it as simply one of mutual exploitation. He would have learnt morality at home, but it would be the ethics of the streetwise chancer, not the morality of a caring father” (Clifford Longley).
So our children do not belong to Caesar. He has no children.
