The American Spectator

p> Having first dispatched with the notion of private property rights with a “me-too” smoking ban two years ago, followed up by the lollapalooza Kelo v. New London eminent domain case, my home state of Connecticut has upped the ante to new heights of socialist nanny-statism. It took all of three hours for state representatives to pass a bill that, if the State Senate concurs, could send adults to jail for up to a year for serving alcohol on their property to those under 21 years of age. p>Here in a state where business owners and consumers are deemed too stupid to make their own decisions about smoking, while others are thought too slothful to develop their private property into proper tax-revenue generating real estate, parents are now on notice that they do not have the right to decide how to conduct child-rearing in their own homes. p>In 21st century America — at least here in the northeast where home-schooling is not the norm — citizens long ago ceded many of their parental rights to the state in the form of public education. Under the watchful eyes of numerous counselors, dieticians, psychologists, and a host of administrators, the profession formerly known as teaching has become an arm of a bloated bureaucracy, forcing the worst of the liberal agenda down the throats of our children. p>From the noxious fumes of multiculturalism, to feminist and homosexual indoctrination and the big-daddy of them all, sex education, public schooling is, in many ways, the moral antithesis of what most parents would teach their children had they the time or inclination. p>Yet, in the spirit of comity, we have not only permitted this abomination but lavishly funded it, as communities have bowed to pressure from rabid union officials who gobble up education dollars like ravenous wolves and now control virtually all aspects of public education. p>And although my state has mandated that doctors now be included in the decision, schools can recommend potentially dangerous and mind-altering drugs to ward off what was formerly diagnosed as boyhood. But don’t worry, Connecticut schools no longer serve carbonated beverages. p>So, if we have voluntarily relinquished one our most important duties — the moral education of our children — to the state, why should further usurpations in that area be of any concern? The answer here in Connecticut regrettably, is that some parents now feel that it is the right and duty of the state to make such decisions for them. p>At a local restaurant the other night, I heard a father bragging that he physically threatened a store owner who had twice sold liquor to his under-aged son. Yet it never seemed to occur to the man that it was his son who had initiated the purchase and so should share in the consequences, or that it was his parental duty to instruct his children in the proper use of alcohol. But why should he, when this is apparently now the responsibility of the nanny-state?