Backlash over White House Claiming All Children ‘Are Our Kids’

WASHINGTON (Churchmilitant.com) – Conservatives are slamming Joe Biden after he equated government “rights” over American children to parental rights during a press conference on LGBT laws held last week.

Biden made this statement in response to a query about Republican-led states enacting legislation protecting children from permanent genital-mutilation procedures and surgeries.

After Laura Barrón-López, White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour and CNN political analyst, posed a question, Vice President Biden proffered a lengthy response, which included the statement, “These are our kids. These are our neighbors. It’s cruel, and it’s callous. They’re not somebody else’s kids, they’re all our kids.”

Biden’s response, which was quickly transformed into a promotional video for the White House’s social media, received a great deal of criticism.

Elon Musk, owner and chairman of Twitter, replied, “You are the government. They are NOT your kids.”

Seth Weathers, CEO of Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right Beer, retorted tersely, “Go to hell.”

Comedian Tim Young responded, “Mao said they were his government’s kids too.”

Podcaster Luke Rudkowski also piled on, saying, “Jeffrey Epstein supports this message.”

Alec Lace, a father of four, tweeted, “Children Do Not Belong To The Government. Children Do Not Belong To The State. Children Do Not Belong To The School System. Children Belong To Their PARENTS as a blessing from God.”

RNC Research posted, “The idea that kids are ‘not somebody else’s kids, they’re all our kids’ is now one of the Biden administration’s main messages. Kids belong to their parents — NOT the government.”

Social media influencer Matt Wallace said, “We truly are at the end of the empire when our 90 year old child sniffing president with a crack addict son is claiming all of the transgender children are his kids. Does that mean he wants to shower with them? How is this even real life?”

Blaze TV Host Chad Prather replied, “This coming from a man that doesn’t acknowledge his own granddaughter.”

According to paragraph 2223 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “Parents have the first responsibility for the education of their children.” 

Contempt for this truth, as shown by Biden’s White House, is not a new phenomenon. The Church specifically dealt with the problem of an overreaching modern State in Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Rovarum:

The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error. … Paternal authority can be neither abolished nor absorbed by the State; for it has the same source as human life itself. “The child belongs to the father,” and is, as it were, the continuation of the father’s personality; and speaking strictly, the child takes its place in civil society, not of its own right, but in its quality as member of the family in which it is born. And for the very reason that “the child belongs to the father” it is, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, “before it attains the use of free will, under the power and the charge of its parents.” The socialists, therefore, in setting aside the parent and setting up a State supervision, act against natural justice, and destroy the structure of the home (§14).

In Divini Illius Magistri, Pius XI re-emphasized Leo XIII’s sentiment, writing, “On this point, the common sense of mankind is in such complete accord, that they would be in open contradiction with it who dared maintain that the children belong to the State before they belong to the family” (§35). The pontiff further cautioned, “History bears witness how, particularly in modern times, the State has violated and does violate rights conferred by God on the family” (§38). 

Biden, although claiming to be a practicing Catholic, openly contradicts the Church’s teaching on parental rights. But as Pope Leo makes clear, parental rights are not just a matter of divine revelation; rather, they fall under the realm of “natural justice” as well. So Biden’s claim that the State has the same rights and authority over children as their fathers and mothers do opposes both natural and divine law.