MSNBC Host Under Attack for Saying Children Shouldn’t Belong to Parents

MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry.

Tuesday, 09 Apr 2013 06:01 PM

By Greg Richter

MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry lit a fuse among critics when she recorded a commercial saying children should belong to their communities, not their families.

In a spot for the network’s “Lean Forward” campaign, the host, who also is a political science professor at Tulane University, said that the notion of children belonging to their parents or families has prevented adequate money from being invested in education.

“Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven't had a very collective notion of 'these are our children,'” she says. “So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”

That did not sit well with conservative pundits and the public alike.

Radio host Glenn Back called it a “parody of reality so far beyond what we have ever thought as a nation.”

But Rush Limbaugh said it was nothing to be surprised at. The idea is nothing new with the left, he said, but now it can now be expressed without fear of being thought “lunatic” or “extreme.”

“She's not worried that a majority of people are gonna disagree with this,” Limbaugh said. “But this is Marx-Engels, ‘Communist Manifesto.’ The nuclear family has always been under attack by communists, by leftists. The nuclear family — just like religion — must be destroyed, and in its place, ‘the community,’ the collective.”

“It's bad enough that ‘Lean Forward’ already sounds like an ad for Mao's Little Red Book, then to have your network's hosts talk about your children being part of the Collective is just spooky,” Media Research Center Director of Media Analysis Tim Graham told Fox News.

Intially, Harris-Perry’s only response was in a short tweet on Monday: “Matthew 5:44.” That’s the verse that urges Christians to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them.

Today, she tweeted that those who “are *still* tweeting me” about the issue should read her response on MSNBC’s website.

In the article titled “Why caring for children is not just a parent’s job,” Harris-Perry repeatedly notes that the whole community is responsible for the raising of children, not the parents only. In the initial promo she didn’t use the word “only.”

“So those of you who were alarmed by the ad can relax,” Harris-Perry wrote. “I have no designs on taking your children. Please keep your kids!”

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