Beautiful and positive and good? Or sexy but dangerous?
Parenting comes in a kaleidescope of different approaches, styles, and backgrounds. A one-size-fits-all attitude which insists on lock-step uniformity or conformity simply is not fair to the children. The key ingredient is loving, committed care. But if "Big Brother" is the judge, what will be his litmus test? Will pink be proscribed, if your experts want a blue hue? Will alternative colors get branded REJECT, just because you can't see the beauty all around? Just because you can't hear the music, or smell the roses as they bloom?
The dictionary defines nurturing as feeding, nourishing, or supporting during the stages of growth, as children or young. In other words, to foster growth; to rear. To raise. To bring up. To train, educate, guide, instruct. One's education. One's breeding.
The question for us today is -- is there a single "right way"; is there a single "politically correct" style of parental love? Or for that matter adult romantic love, sexual love?
The social science gurus often are blinded by the prejudices, the group-think of the particular zeitgeist then in vogue. Using themselves as the guide, their whole worldview becomes a projection of a private mindset (emotional, cognitive, sexual, etc), unique to themselves. They picture themselves as unbiased, enlightened administrators, and in so doing, they fall prey to the myopia and idiosyncratic rigidity that dominant creeds so often slip into.
What is the norm? What is a "healthy environment" for children? Whose measure do you use in defining what is `aberrant` or `abnormal` -- whether sexuality, or lifestyle, or taboo-breaking, or racial orientation, for that matter? Does socio-economic status (SES) make a given love or sex relationship "at risk" --- or is a given couple just "different" and therefore vulnerable -- prey to the intervention of statist Big Brothers?
My plea to leaders would be for a flexible, pluralistic approach which is tolerant of diversity, even to the point of fostering a range of parenting styles, traditions, and attitudes. Love comes in a rainbow of different gaits and speeds and manners. Nature offers a veritable profusion of multiplicity and variation. And human life, too, is at its best when it respects and "permits" --- yea, when it truly fosters a spirit of loving acceptance of good parenting, regardless of bygone prejudice or social taboos, vis-a-vis the prevailing norms regarding sexual endogamy and exogamy of a given period and locale.
An analogy
The Manchester school of economics demanded an end to the stifling, paralyzing involvement of the statist centralizers with their obsessive insistence on control, control, control. The Manchester school exposed the Statist centralizers for craving the power to plan every detail of private life, they alone had the genius to design their "planned economy" -- and they alone had the genius and skill, as omnipotent administrators, to impose their plan, using all the force and power of the state, upon all creation under their control.
Similarly, the omnipotent administrators in the "love department" define any love or family at odds with their own conformist agenda as queer, at risk, perverse, or an unhealthy environment for children. In the states, not long ago, what prosecutors labelled "offensive to public morals" was often in actuality more a matter of someone "daring to stand up against prevailing prejudice."
For the sake of the children, for the sake of the children's children, I say THANK GOD there are courageous souls who dare to stand up against stifling prejudice, and hatred, and narrow minded "omnipotent administrators."
Couples who truly love each other, no matter what the price, are the only authentic social services for children, young people and families.
