I couldn’t help myself. I heard about the Nobel Peace Prize recipients, but couldn’t stop thinking about something else.

The Nobel laureates were chosen for their work to assure the right of children (and of girls in particular in one case) to an education. And we Oooh! and Aaah! and Coo and inveigh against those barbarians who put children to work, or marry them off to old goats at age eleven, and how enlightened we are to celebrate their liberators with one of the world’s topmost honors.

Meanwhile, closer to home, children increasingly become commodities to be

• gestated in rented wombs, where they may be
• inseminated by designer sperm donors,
• purchased to adorn our empty and sterile lives, and
• aborted by contractual stipulation if they’re “defective” goods.

Then we tart up our little girls starting around age ten or so, and get them (and now, their boyfriends, too!) their Gardasil shots. But no old goats for our daughters (at least until they’re 16). And our notion of “education” for our designer babies is “college or career readiness,” not a humane and rounded life.

So we’re civilized and they’re barbarians because we prostitute our daughters to males closer to their age and start our wage slavery ten or fifteen years later?

If anyone made an effective case that this is barbarianism, too, and that children have rights to be born free, to be raised by biological parents wherever possible, to know the heritage of those biological parents, and to have actual childhoods instead of vicarious re-enactments of how we dream our adolescence could have been, he or she would surely be branded a bigot – if not shot in the head.

So kudos to the heroes and heroines of the International Children’s Rights Institute (and a tip-o-the-hat to Matthew Dugandzic). May they irritate, and indict, and expose hypocrisy, and rip the curtain back to expose child and surrogate quasi-slavery, until there’s no mistake that some of the world’s barbarians have advanced degrees, with homes on Beacon Street or in Santa Barbara, or condos in Manhattan or Michigan Avenue, and firm control of the levers of Official, Sanctioned public opinion.

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.