Note that the Clintons play right into Goldberg's hands.

Remember Hillary's dictum (purloined, allegedly, from African tribal wisdom), "It takes a village to raise a child"? That is too easily interpreted -- especially given Hillary's oleaginous self-righteousness -- to mean that parents can, and should, be overruled when they contravene the village's (the government's?) will.

Or Bill's short-lived surgeon general, Jocelyn Elders, who said, "every child [should be] a planned and wanted child." Being interpreted, what can that mean but that children who are unplanned, unwanted, or both should be aborted?

The smiley-Hitler face on Goldberg's book is, in fact, a bit of PR genius: If fascism ever does come to America, it will come For Our Own Good, and those who bring it will smile unceasingly.

Vepx ..., I think you are confusing some basic considerations about the public good and the tension of societal versus individual well being.

Yes, parents need to be overruled by society if they abuse their children. In my opinion, abuse also includes indoctrinating them with a worldview that will be clearly harmful to them ... that may include some homegrown religious nutcases, leftist phamacophobics who deny their children antibiotics or even sufficient nutrition, but more importantly a lot of orthodox and/or rural muslims who deny their female offspring basic individual liberties. Unfortunately, when you want to discuss these issues rationally, you have to be differenciated and nuanced, unless you have extreme positions of an extremely libertarian or extremely regulated, socialist society.

Re. the (admittedly catchy) smiley face, even Goldberg makes no attempt to defend it ... that pretty much sums it up.

"that may include some homegrown religious nutcases, leftist phamacophobics who deny their children antibiotics or even sufficient nutrition, but more importantly a lot of orthodox and/or rural muslims who deny their female offspring basic individual liberties."

Well, of course you run into the "who decides" what is a nutcase, what is a pharmacophobic and what is an orthodox muslim. It's always a difficult line to draw, like is spanking a child a form of child abuse? Many people say yes, but the government doesn't want to tell parents how to discipline their children. If anyone DOES try to tell parents how to raise their kids, it's the liberals, and that is the point I think Mr. Goldberg was trying to make. The republicans, for all their flaws, seem to be against that sort of thing. Don't get me started on the libertarians.

Well, I think the idea that it is solely or primarily liberals who wish to tell others how to raise their children is plainly wrong.

I'm thinking here of intelligent design in the classroom, abstinence-only education, homophobia and its manifestations, and other favorite stalking horses of the right.

The differences between left and right in this nation are significant enough without inventing more, like the idea that only one faction has the desire to raise future voters in its own image.