Columnists Joe Mathews argued that California must make “raising your own children illegal” and mandate “universal orphanhood,” to achieve an equitable and “just society completely free from bias,” the Ventura County Star reported.
“If California is ever going to achieve true equity, the state must require parents to give away their children,” Mathews began the column.
Mathews wrote that the idea follows logically from belief in the “equity lens” that Gov. Gavin Newsom uses to make decisions.
He argued that each person’s parents confer too many advantages and disadvantages in life to render possible an equitable society.
“Fathers and mothers with greater wealth and education are more likely to transfer these advantages to their children, compounding privilege over generations,” Mathews wrote.
“As a result, children of less advantaged parents face an uphill struggle, social mobility has stalled, and democracy has been corrupted,” he added.
Yet, Mathews does not contend that the state should raise everyone’s children to eliminate these advantages and disadvantages, but that “the rich and poor should trade kids” and “homeowners might swap children with their homeless neighbors” to redistribute privileges.
Although some may view the proposal as “ghastly” and “totalitarian,” Mathews said he thinks it a “quite modest…fusion of traditional philosophy and today’s most common political obsessions.”
He appealed to Plato’s Republic, in which Socrates argued that the guardian class should raise their children in common to eliminate sex distinctions, nepotism, and all other natural feelings that compete with loyalty to the satte.
Plus, he wrote—in a section that, hopefully, reveals the author’s satirical tone—that Justice Amy Coney Barrett supported “safe haven” laws allowing women to turn their babies over to authorities after birth.
“My proposal would merely make mandatory such handovers of babies to the state,” Mathews wrote. “Perhaps such coercion sounds dystopian. But just imagine the solidarity that universal orphanhood would create.”
Universal orphanhood would bless the Democratic Party with another social program, “Foster Care for All,” would free men and women from the need to find stable marriages, and would help “dismantle white supremacy and outdated gender norms” by removing parents who have opposed these goals.
“A few contrarians, lost in the empty chasm between American extremes, might object to this rational proposal on emotional grounds,” Mathews wrote. “They might argue that pursuing your own conception of family is fundamental to freedom.”
“But don’t pay those critics any mind,” he concluded. “Because they just can’t see how our relentless pursuit of equity might birth a brave new world.”
