Parenthood As a Conservative Value

Dan McLaughlin writes for National Review Online about the conservative nature of parents’ rights. He focuses on Florida’s law banning children and younger teens from using social media.

I am in favor of banning kids, preteens, and even young teens from social media. The constitutional case against doing so is hogwash. That said, I’m deeply skeptical of laws such as this one because in order to function, they require an intrusive partnership between government and Big Tech to collect, deploy, and verify private, personal information in ways that are highly likely to produce undesirable and unintended consequences. Emma Camp at Reason observes: “While the bill does not specify how exactly social media sites should verify a customer’s age, with such large consequences for violating the law, it’s likely that companies will require customers to hand over their government ID, submit to a facial scan, or otherwise hand over sensitive information.” It’s good that the Florida legislature hasn’t itself created the monster here, but it has effectively ordered the tech giants to do so. We are likely to regret what this produces.

But are parental rights really just a hollow abstraction? I’d say no. …

… There is something very important missing here: The family is a good in itself. Its very existence is one of the ends for which we constitute a society and a civilization. It is more important to most people than politics or civic health. The duty of parents to bring up their children, and of parents to obey them, is deeply grounded in Christian and other faiths; from the Fourth Commandment forward, it is emphasized throughout the Bible. Catholic men are instructed in the model of St. Joseph for that reason. Strong parental authority over the upbringing of children is one of the things that parents value and children need and deserve. That’s why it’s long been recognized as fundamental to our laws, even when that meant giving parents broad latitude to bring up kids in ideas, faiths, and languages that the majority mistrusts or disapproves of.