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The Christmas holidays are now over, leaving your kids safely back in school—to the probable relief of some parents. For such child-phobic adults, a new and innovative solution to the problem of home child-care is now available: Why not fail your forthcoming Compulsory Fitness to Rear Children Test and have them stolen away from you forever by the now-quite-literal Nanny State?

Late last year, a paper of truly breathtaking moral superiority appeared in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy titled “The Kids Aren’t Alright: Expanding the Role of the State in Parenting” by an “objectionably intolerant” (more on that particular phrase anon) U.S. PhD candidate named Connor K. Kianpour. Kianpour first sets out his stall to the effect that, whilst children’s rights are innate and inherent, parental rights somehow do not really exist. This being the case, it should be considered perfectly fine for the State to intervene and take children away from their parents if it is deemed in the kids’ best interests. Fair enough if their dad happens to be Josef Fritzl.

However, Kianpour goes way further than the common sense position of barring King Herod from rearing his own hatchlings: From hereon in, infants should be taken away on the sole basis that their mums and dads happen not to share the “correct” opinions and political beliefs in life. And what are these “correct” opinions, you may well ask? That’s easy. They’re the exact kind of opinions a progressive academic like Connor K. Kianpour happens to hold.

Gay Abandon
In his paper’s second section, “THE PROBLEM OF OBJECTIONABLY INTOLERANT PARENTS,” Kianpour argues anyone who holds racist or homophobic attitudes should be legally barred from parenthood. Why? Connor tackles homophobia first. As there is a “nontrivial chance that the child of a strongly homophobic individual could be gay,” such parents will “not [be] in a position to manifest love” to any such hypothetically homo-baby if and when they grow up and crawl out of the closet.

Of course, chances are, a homophobe’s kids will grow up hetero, as most people do, but this doesn’t matter, as “By the time a homophobe learns that a child of theirs is gay, the child will already have developed significant attachments to them, and it will be exceedingly difficult for other adults who are not homophobes to step in and situate themselves in a loving relationship with the child,” thus pushing them into severe mental trauma.

But what about banning racist parents from reproducing? This surely cannot be justified on similar grounds, as the chances of two very white people like, say, Scarlett Johannson and Eugène Terre’Blanche, accidentally giving birth to a baby Eddie Murphy are slim indeed, as opposed to “nontrivial,” as with the chances of them siring a gay or trans baby (or “theybie,” as I believe they are now called). Therefore, new spurious reasons have to be invented by Connor instead.

As we all know, parents are generally thought to be required to love their children unconditionally, even if said child happens to be Connor K. Kianpour. But just imagine if, on a purely hypothetical basis, two pure white Aryan Nazis happened to magically produce an infant who strongly resembled Idi Amin. Hypothetically speaking, would they still love him? No. So, even though they would actually give birth to a baby who looked like Thor, when Baby Thor grew up to realize his parents were racists, he may stop and consider the fact that, if he impossibly happened to look like Idi Amin instead, his appalling bigoted parents might well immediately lynch him. Or, as Kianpour puts it:

The racist parent who provides an abundance of affective care to her white child fails to love her child unconditionally since if the child were Black the parent would not provide that same affective care. Even if a white racist [no other races are capable of racism at all, you understand…] is capable of providing her white child with an abundance of affective care, the child would have her interest in self-respect threatened to the extent that she is aware her parent would not provide her this affective care were she Black…. Thus, racist and homophobic parents alike are unfit to rear children because they are incapable of loving, or at least unlikely to love, their children unconditionally…. [This concept] would also indict sexists, ableists, xenophobes, and the like for the very same reasons.”

Moreover, even if a white homophobe’s child grows up to be neither black nor gay, in our modern, multiethnic, multi-gendered Western societies, there is also “a nontrivial chance that a child will associate with an individual who is gay, or Black, or what have you.” This being the case, if “queerphobic” parents don’t want their daughter hanging around with, for example, some mentally disturbed trans-extremist kid in the year above who keeps on urging her to saw off her breasts with a bread knife, then this too is extremely harmful to her (or soon-to-be “his”) emotional and social well-being.

Bigoted parents have no right to prevent their kids from mingling with such “important associates,” another reason why “objectionably intolerant” adults of the kind Kianpour happens not to like should have their kids hurled into the back of a van by social workers immediately.

Children in Need (of New Parents)
This is just a new left-wing form of moral eugenics, isn’t it? Plus, there are all kinds of unrecognized hypocrisies in Kianpour’s argument. He seems quite bigoted against non-liberals himself, to my ears; so what would happen if he happened to sire a child who grew up to be that most objectionable of things, a conservative? Or what if, as a schoolboy, Connor’s putative son happened by some remarkable quirk of fate to end up best of friends with Sixtus Rees-Mogg? Would he disown him? Reject him? Attempt to break up his relationship with the Mini-Mogg, even if it ultimately turned out to develop into something commendably homoerotic in its nature?

Kianpour doesn’t say, because people like him are constitutionally incapable of ever recognizing that they might be amongst the biggest bigots of all these days. Parenting, he continues, is “a hazardous activity that is potentially harmful to innocent others—that is, children,” just like driving a motorcar—and you can’t drive a motorcar without holding a license, lest you mow down an entire class of schoolchildren in the street one day. Should it not be the same with parenting?

If so, then further problems arise. As homophobes of the future will no longer be allowed to raise children, how do we define what a “homophobe” actually is? Someone who goes around planting nail-bombs in gay bars, or simply someone who once laughed at an old episode of Are You Being Served? Thankfully, Kianpour has discovered an infallible homophobe-hunting tool, the Index of Homophobia, “a twenty-five item questionnaire” whose answers supposedly reveal just how anti-queer you are, which I suppose he ripped out of a copy of Cosmopolitan magazine one day. Those who score between 75 and 100 on this valuable diagnostic tool are deemed “high grade homophobics” and henceforth to be barred eternally from raising a family.

Breeding Resentment
As a further safeguard, mums-and-dads-to-be in search of a Baby License (you don’t even need Dog Licenses these days…) should be subjected to checks of their “records of past criminal activity”—but not primarily to find out whether or not they’ve ever murdered anyone or planted a bomb on an airliner or anything trivial like that, oh no. The most important misdemeanors Kianpour advocates the coming Child-Stasi check for are hate crimes and acts of employment discrimination.

But again, definitions here are disturbingly subjective. What is a hate crime nowadays? Firebombing a synagogue, or once farting in a lift that happened to contain a Kenyan? People have had their name placed on official police records merely for accurately calling a transgenderist a “man who wears a wig” and suchlike in recent years, giving great scope for banning conservatives from being in a position to raise any more future voters who grow up to hold social and political attitudes similar to their own ever again: which, a cynic may say, is the true unspoken point of such proposals, to implement a hideous new form of what might be termed “electoral eugenics.”

If you don’t believe this could happen, then look up this 2012 case from Rotherham (a British town with a fine record on child protection) in which a married couple had their much-loved Polish foster kids removed from them as they were members of Nigel Farage’s old anti-E.U. organization UKIP, which social workers said was “a racist party” that had disgracefully called for the end of the “active promotion of multiculturalism.” Or you could try absorbing this 2015 case, in which an angry Family Court judge warned a UKIP candidate father not to take his offspring on any future rallies or leafleting campaigns or else, during some kind of family legal dispute.

The Parent Trap
And would Christians be allowed to raise their own kids under such a regime? Maybe not, as “background checks might also be used to determine if prospective parents are affiliated with organizations that would give us reason to believe they are objectionably intolerant…[like] the Westboro Baptist Church.” Note how the example Connor gives isn’t Finsbury Park Mosque here. Will Muslims still be allowed to have children once these proposed new laws of his come to pass? Curiously, Kianpour neglects to say.

Already in the U.K., Christian parents have had foster children they wished to adopt taken away by social workers, causing huge distress to kids and adults alike, on the sole grounds they had “expressed homophobic views,” i.e., that a family needed both a mother and a father, not a mummy and a mummy or a daddy and a daddy. When asked by social workers how he and his wife would react if one of the infants in question came out as gay, the foster father involved in this incident said it would be “hard to accept, but we would accept it,” they wouldn’t just publicly crucify him in the garden as a sex-heretic—but, according to the logic of ideologues like Kianpour, this just wouldn’t be good enough, would it?

Surely there is massive scope for miscarriages of justice here: Many perfectly innocent wannabe parents could be barred from child-rearing on the sole basis of false or malicious allegations, no? Kianpour admits this, but argues blithely that “if some individuals who would make sufficiently tolerant parents are inadvertently deemed by the licensing scheme to be unfit to rear children, that will not violate their rights since, as I argued [at the beginning of this paper], people do not have the right to rear children in the first place.”

Should Connor K. Kianpour ever be allowed to raise any children himself, I wonder? Or should he just have been strangled at birth?