I’ve just come across a blog that’s new to me – MandM, by Kiwis Matt and Madeleine Flannagan, who describe themselves as Evangelicals and currently Presbyterian. A recent article on the blog by contributor John Tertullian comments on a recent Sunday News article about the purported attitudes of Wairarapa youths. John suggest that the objectification of children as useful sources of benefit income is a form of child slavery:
Children are being brought into the world as “earners”. Their worth and dignity only extends to their causing the state-funded “free” money spigots to open for the parents. To maintain the return, all one needs do is keep them with a semblance of life; as long as they are barely breathing they are useful and tolerable as “earners”. At this point there is simply no difference from the impersonal objectivisation of children for economic gain that we decry in ”Third World” countries and the England of Charles Dickens. The children born into the “families” described above are equally destroyed. They may even suffer worse.
The same politics of “guilt and pity” that protest so vehemently against child labour in Third World sweatshops is producing the same realities here at home. But because “we” are the ones doing it, somehow different standards apply. We, after all, are Enlightened Ones. Our Human Rights utopia has brought us this world, so it cannot be really bad. Just a few minor tweaks will see us right.
Your thoughts? I see a connection with the post I did for Catholicism Pure and Simple recently.
Joyful Papist 