OPINION – A lot of people are currently worked into a lather over who should hold the reins of power and how that power should be wielded over us. It never seems to occur to them to ask whether the government should wield that power in the first place.

That question falls to a handful of problem-solvers looking for solutions that actually limit the state’s power over us.

Instead of delegating more power over our lives to politicians and the bureaucrats who serve them, we should all be thinking of ways to reduce the state’s influence in our lives.

This can only happen when we take greater personal responsibility and stop delegating solutions to government.

Three very predictable things happen when we trust politicians to solve our problems.

First, they require that we delegate a portion of control over our lives to them by increasing government power in a particular area. Our personal freedom shrinks correspondingly.

Second, they must find a way to fund their solution – however big or small. Since taxation is how they get their funding, the costs associated with government solutions always come from the taxpayer’s pocket.

Third, the tendency of every government solution is to become institutionalized – meaning entrenched – and to grow. The term “mission creep” perfectly describes the process by which the state assimilates larger and larger portions of our lives.

A good example of what this looks like can be found in the current attempt by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activists to force Utah schools into advocating for homosexual behavior through a federal lawsuit.

Equality Utah has filed suit claiming state curriculum laws prevent teachers and students from having what they call “positive” discussions regarding homosexuality. Given the historic nature of compulsory government-sponsored education, it’s not surprising activists would seek to weaponize it in order to shape societal attitudes.

Few have explained this trend as well as Daren Jonescu, author of “The Case Against Public Education.”

He relates how the origins of government education flow from the Prussian model of schooling, in which education took a back seat to the creation of a compliant and uniform citizenry. Prior to the creation of government-run education, a rational individual learned to live according to his own will through practical knowledge, self-reliance and moral independence.

The purpose of the compulsory schooling system was to undermine individual sovereignty and moral perspective and to break them to the will of the collective, meaning the will of the state.

Jonescu summarizes what government schooling is accomplishing, in a nutshell:

It is the legally enforced diluting of parental authority over the raising of children, with intellectual and moral lessons, goals, and methods regulated by the government. It is usually undertaken in government buildings away from the family home, and under the supervision of various levels of government agents trained in accordance with government standards to represent and administer government policy regarding the proper rank-ordering of society, the attitudes and skills deemed by the government to be most socially useful, and the pre-emptive extinguishing or subduing of beliefs, attitudes, and behavior judged to be undesirable to the government for any reason.

It shouldn’t be too difficult to understand how such indoctrination would dilute a student’s natural ties to family and replace those bonds with obligations to a government-created social structure.

Jonescu warns that this would also serve to teach young minds to learn to submit to and depend upon the opinions and judgments of the abstract collective rather than developing the capacity for independent thought.

LGBT activists are seeking to capitalize on the compulsory nature of our public education system to replace parental and moral authority with their own obligatory social control backed by state force.

They are seeking to replace factual correctness with political correctness.

Try as they might, the punitive advocacy groups will never succeed in transmuting sinful acts into goodness through legalistic means. They are simply using the compulsion of the state to compensate for their inability to persuade others that right and wrong are now defined in purely legal terms.

Evaluation of and disagreement with certain practices does not constitute hatred toward anyone. However, using government force as a bludgeon to silence peaceful disagreement and compel acceptance is a deeply hateful act.

Problem-solvers who wish to intervene on behalf of their children may wish to examine their alternatives and remove their children from what’s becoming a state-sponsored mind laundry.

Begging politicians and bureaucrats to “fix” this problem utterly fails to take into account how it became a problem in the first place. Stop delegating your authority to the state and prioritize those responsibilities best kept in your own hands.

It’s not the path of least resistance. There are definitely sacrifices that accompany the assumption of personal responsibilities. So what?

Freeing your life from the control of others is worth the price.

Bryan Hyde is a news commentator, radio host and opinion columnist in Southern Utah. The opinions stated in this article are his and not representative of St. George News.

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @youcancallmebry

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