The Proprietarian Fallacy
On the Dangers of Assuming Parents Own Their Children
Running Society on a Broken Legacy System
A bit of context for you: Our constitution and a wide range of legal precedent describe our civil rights system as a “complex system”. Apparently, the term complex here means “a system that can be ravaged and brought to a state of complete rubble by a particularly malevolent person acting alone”. And it seems we are in the midst of an intense push to bring our social systems back to a very basic, old-school level. Every day, I read about some controversy over the legal premise that a child belongs to a family, and the resulting fight to determine whose judgment should count more – the parents’ or the child’s? It’s been argued by a growing number of academics that the so-called “parental rights movement” has grown to the point where our national discussion around the issue of family law has shifted from one where parents have a presumptive role to one in which the common law presumption of parental authority is ancient enough to be considered almost constitutional. In such cases, we are talking about legislation that effectively strips children of self-determination, bodily autonomy, and citizenship, as constitutionally recognized persons (Dillard, 2010; Woodhouse, 1992). See Mason, 1994.
This isn’t about families. This is a coordinated propaganda effort to eliminate marginalized people from existence. It is a theme that has continued to the present because children are treated as objects rather than as fully autonomous human beings with parents who have corresponding fiduciary obligations to them (Maillard, 2010; McGillivray, 2011). So we see it at work in right-wing reporting on the “education crisis” and the attempts to shame schools over things like this propaganda stunt at the WSJ, in the form of an op ed titled “Why Johnny Can’t Read Anything Other Than Pronouns” (Riley, 2026). And we see it at work in the United States Supreme Court’s shadow dockets, where, earlier this week, the Court ruled in the cases of Mirabelli v. Bonta, 615 U.S. (2026), and Malliotakis v. Williams, 615 U.S. (2026), on March 2, 2026.
Governing society based on emotions or politics is a sure way to bring it down. When corporations face significant obstacles, they address them by applying the scientific method to identify the root causes of failures and making as many fine-grained decisions as necessary to prevent them from happening again. Applying the same investigative techniques to the socio-political factors that are the underlying cause of the social unrest that has developed, the parental rights movement is seen to be an obsolete legacy system that has broken down and is nothing more than a red herring to reinforce a patriarchal and Christian Nationalist worldview. The proprietarian assumptions that underpin the childism that has developed in the West are deep-seated and have been made worse by the culture wars over education. The Supreme Court has not helped address the problems that have arisen, and the human cost of the damage to the affected children and families has been extreme. This report provides a detailed analysis of the issues involved.
