Two American Childhoods

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, August 30, 2023

 

We often seem to live in two different political worlds. There’s the one we experience in real life, in which neighbors of different political views mostly get along fine. They might avoid certain topics of conversation, particularly if there are “In This House We Believe” yard signs that rule out certain topics peremptorily. Then there’s the world we experience through our screens — the phone and the computer, in which our neighbors and old high-school friends rant wildly and there’s constant talk about the fragility of our democracy and about deep-state coups. The culture war can often seem like an online-only role-playing game.

 

I’m often tempted to dismiss, in the name of the normalcy all around me, the insanity presented to me on the screens — even if I know that that normalcy has a lot of troubling trends. But there’s one trend that really indicates the depth of America’s cultural divide. Americans can no longer speak coherently about “our kids.” In fact, progressives and conservatives are engaged in a war of criminalizing the other side’s parenting.

 

A happy neighborhood, and a happy country, does talk about “our kids.” Well-funded after-school programs are good for “our kids.” A refurbished public playground is good for them too. “Our Kids” is the title of a book by the famous sociologist Robert Putnam. Putnam was focused on the class divide: The kids of well-connected parents see their blunders turned into harmless learning experiences, while the kids of poor parents make the same mistakes and their lives are changed.

 

But the culture war has changed in recent years. It’s true that progressives have long worried about conservatives and religious people brainwashing children. And conservatives have in turn worried about progressive parents that indulge and corrupt their own children. And the wars over school curricula have been with us for a long time. But they’ve picked up new urgency in recent years. Any elementary-school library can see its contents subjected to a painful public audit.

 

It is now becoming clear that conservatives and progressive parents view each other as a danger to children; a danger that needs to be handled with the intervention of the law.

 

Conservatives have launched their successful counteroffensive in World War T, making it criminal for doctors to prescribe off-label puberty-blocking drugs or perform surgeries that remove functioning sexual organs and replace them with nonfunctional facsimiles. The media have dutifully found the progressive families who are abandoning states such as Texas and Missouri over the issue.

 

But liberals can play that game as well. California’s attorney general sued a school district in its state for its policy of notifying parents when children request to be addressed by new pronouns or a different name. Michelle Goldberg, writing in the New York Times earlier this year, acknowledged why parents might be uncomfortable with their kids experimenting with new gender identities at school that they hide at home. But she landed on supporting the role of public schools and teachers in helping children develop private lives into which their parents cannot see.

 

Meanwhile, the State of Massachusetts denied a married Catholic couple the chance to foster a child because of their religious convictions. Noting that they were otherwise “lovely people,” the state determined that the couple “would not be affirming to a child who identified as LGBTQIA.” Note that it didn’t even allege that the Burkes wouldn’t love a child who identified as such. But consistent with the emerging view of sexual identity and harm on the progressive left, the state naturally disqualifies as proper parents anyone whose religious convictions trespass upon the total moral, legal, spiritual, and aesthetic equality of all sexual desires and the identities shaped around them. For Massachusetts, this is their bare minimum standard of care. And it will be increasingly codified into the laws of blue territories.

 

The sentiment of national belonging, the font of patriotism, is rooted in the idea of sharing a given territory with one another and attempting to live under the same set of laws. That’s why these wars over how we raise children are so disquieting. They make it clear that we aren’t arguing over matters of mere prudence anymore but over deep and divisive principles. We don’t really share the laws with each other but increasingly use them to restrain those people who used to be our fellow citizens but are now defined as our political and moral antagonists. We need to find a way out of this dynamic, because if there is one thing I know, it’s that parents will fight for their children unto the last breath.