"This is how young people feel about [social media bans] and how it will affect their human rights."

@rlstollar.bsky.social wrote about CPS and the homeschool movement. bsky.app/profile/rlst...

If you're using physical violence to "share the good news," your message isn't one of good news. A child who is under emotional and physical distress at the hands of her parents can't consent to joining a religion. That's some very f'd up shit and they're training other people to follow their lead.

No matter what a pastor tells you, you’re not ruining kids by not spanking them. There are 1000 ways to train and educate kids in healthy, non-violent ways. You can discipline people without resorting to brutality, violence, and threats of violence. Kids are people, don’t treat them worse than dogs.

Jenny and Bob Donnelly, pastors at The Collective, training parents to gaslight and spank their children. They had a "happy spoon" with a smiley face on it for spanking. They describe giving kids lots of spankings. Lots of red flags and disturbing aggressive/passive-aggressive practices.👀

Created by homeschool lobbyist and parent Rodger Williams, Homeschooling Backgrounder is one of the newest tools deployed by homeschooling leaders and parents to ignore or discredit alumni concerns. Here’s what to know about the astroturfing project.

Happy Children's Day!! The very first Children's Day was declared in 1922 in Japan-occupied South Korea by political activist and children’s story book author Bang Jeong-hwan. International Children's Day followed in 1925, declared by the League of Nations.

🎯

'emotional infrastructure' — that's the part that sticks. you rehearse how to relate to power long before you can name it. what gets me is how rarely that conditioning needs force. comfort and approval do most of the work, and nobody remembers consenting to it.

"Once a society normalizes domination over children and yielded their obedience, it has already built the emotional infrastructure for authoritarianism." ~ @drstaceypatton.bsky.social

"The child is not outside the crisis of democracy. That child is the rehearsal space. What we do to children, we do to the future." ~ @drstaceypatton.bsky.social

Child liberation theology is a thing. Youths deserve safeguarding from abusive church leaders and from parents who chose not to know what was happening. Attention: @rlstollar.bsky.social

We talk a lot about stopping sexual abuse among church leaders. But what about the "ex-gay" SOGICE ministries that sidestep all safeguarding by calling themselves "not therapy"?

I kinda, actually love that Karen-Marie Yust says my book "The Kingdom of Children" is "blunt, provocative, and jarring in the same manner as that of many biblical prophecies" while also "would not pass muster in a seminary classroom."

"Purity culture and religious authoritarian parenting methods—both of which were central to Dobson’s teachings—enable pedophiles."

Dani Ward and @fatgirlmedia.bsky.social made new artwork for @childliberation.bsky.social! I absolutely love it. 😍

New logo and banner artwork by the amazing Dani Ward and @fatgirlmedia.bsky.social!

"There are still 47 [states] where parents convicted of crimes against children can homeschool."

"[Janusz Korczak] challenged authoritarian models of education and discipline long before children’s rights were recognized internationally."

"The case is one of many in recent years in which young people have sued officials and government agencies over climate change."

A great loss.

Evangelical Christianity’s distrust of abuse survivors and those who help them was a very popular sentiment among evangelical Christians during the 1980s and 90s and still continuing today.

The very first person who preached Jesus's resurrection was a child. Image from Joseph A. Grassi's book "Children's Liberation."

Children are not an insult.

“The New Testament opposes all forms of mere human discipleship that rely only on obedience whether to teacher, leader, or parent." ~Joseph A. Grassi, “Children’s Liberation”

"That's what Stollar is talking about here. Eschatology is not this faraway future thing- it's about how the kingdom of God comes into our world right now. It's about the systems and powers in this world, and how they need to be redeemed and transformed."

"Under the banner of 'parental rights,' conservative lawmakers are dismantling protections that allow minors to access confidential contraception and reproductive healthcare."

YES

"When we love children, we acknowledge by our every action that they are not property, that they have rights—that we respect and uphold their rights." ~bell hooks

The Supreme Court has blood on its hands.

Conversion therapy is child abuse. Queer children are images of God.

"As @rlstollar.bsky.social incisively notes, the parental rights movement does not simply want to elevate parents: it wants to deny children their own rights." ~ @brucelesley.bsky.social

"The existence of adultism in sacred texts should never be seen as blessing or baptizing evil. Adultist beliefs and practices within our holy scriptures must be identified, named, and challenged directly."

Have you read Michael G. Long's "Peaceful Neighbor: discovering the countercultural Mister Rogers"? It's full of Rogers' deeply thought out convictions about peace and recognizing the value of every child, and speaking the truth in love.

"[Evangelicals] do not value children as people. They see children as mission fields, as objects to convert rather than as people to be in relationship with."

"Places of faith should not only be speaking out prophetically against discrimination against and abuse of children; they should also be empowering children to speak out for themselves."

"Parents who refuse to acknowledge the harm caused by Christian authoritarian parenting risk alienating their kids long-term."

"In the first seven months of [Trump's] second term, authorities arrested and detained parents of at least 11,000 U.S. citizen children... That’s an average of more than 50 U.S. citizen kids a day with a parent pulled into detention."

I was interviewed by @unclosetedmedia.bsky.social on the topics of Katy Faust, the "Greater Than" campaign against marriage equality, and children's rights! Check it out:

"As the only United Nations member state that has yet to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the United States stands alone in failing to codify the most basic protections for its youngest citizens." More at @brucelesley.bsky.social's Substack:

As I told @unclosetedmedia.bsky.social, Katy Faust's rhetoric can be difficult to refute because she uses progressive rights language to advance a regressive, evangelical agenda. You have to look beneath the rhetoric at her policy ideas to understand the danger.

Child Liberation Theology's @rlstollar.bsky.social was interviewed for this insightful piece on Katy Faust and the "Greater Than" campaign's efforts to use children's rights to attack marriage equality.

For more information on Katy Faust, see my @religiondispatches.org article from 2023:

Honored to be interviewed for this important article on Katy Faust's "Greater Than" campaign, which dangerously abuses the concept of children's rights to attack marriage equality in the United States.

The solution to abuse in homeschooling MUST involve taking away homeschooling parents' absolute power over children. There's no way around that. Homeschooled children's rights must be defended by law. The homeschooling movement will NOT self-police.

"Under Trump, ICE has deported thousands of children under 18."

“He would talk about the fact that you are somebody and you are important. This was compared to my orientation of being put down or told, ‘Boy, you are not going to be anything.'"

My goal was not to say the Christian narrative about Jesus as child is a superior narrative than the other narratives about child saviors, but to highlight for fellow Christians the full implications of our narrative's claims.

This is an excellent critique of the chapter on comparative religion in my book on child liberation theology, "The Kingdom of Children." It helps me think about how I could have written the chapter to more accurately communicate my point.

Children’s rights are human rights because we all rise together.