Photo: Fox News
LOS ANGELES – Parents and media critics were aghast after a host for MSNBC called for collective care of a community’s children instead of parents taking care of their kids themselves.
MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry recorded a commercial for the network in which she stated that children do not belong to their parents, but are instead the responsibility of the members of their community.
“We have never invested as much in public education 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,” she says in a spot for the network’s “Lean Forward” campaign. “So part of it is 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.”
Harris-Perry’s views ignited a firestorm of anger and disbelief.
“The notion that children belong to a state government rather than their own flesh and blood is the most disturbing statement made in recent political times. Melissa Harris-Perry is dead wrong. It’s unfathomable that any true American could make such a pretentious and naively ill statement,” media communications expert, and parent, Angie Olszewski told FOX411’s Pop Tarts column. “The government can’t properly run their own budgets schools and public systems. Why would anybody think they could rear children?”
The Media Research Center’s Director of Media Analysis, Tim Graham, called the MSNBC spot “frightening.”
“It’s bad enough that ‘Lean Forward’ already sounds like an ad for Mao’s Little Red Book, then to have your network’s hosts talk about your children being part of the Collective is just spooky,” he said. “I think most parents disappoint MSNBC with their traditional beliefs that their children are theirs to love and raise as they feel is best. They don’t want to surrender their parental rights to the ‘village.’ It’s this same contempt for education beginning in the home that spurs many parents into home-schooling.”
Fox News has the full article
