The Problem of Big Mother: Swedish Government Attacks Homeschoolers

Posted on December 7, 2010, 9:11 am, by Admin, under Favorites, Middle Class, Miscellaneous.

Ellen Key

Sweden has a problem. It’s not “Big Brother”. Specifically it’s “Big Mother”. Christian Newswire ran this press release today from the Home School Legal Defense Fund: Swedish Government Jails Homeschool Father

Their “crimes”? The jailing took place because of an unauthorized overnight visit. But it started for these reasons -

One and a half years ago Swedish police boarded a plane where the Johanssons were leaving the country for Annie’s home country of India. The police had no warrant and did not charge the Johansson’s with a crime.

Authorities cite homeschooling, a few untreated cavities, and the Johansson’s decision not to vaccinate Domenic according to the Swedish recommended vaccination schedule as the reasons given for the continued separation.

One wonders how a “recommendation” can become a violation worthy of seizing a child into state’s custody? It is obviously a case of anti-family statism run amok. While the former communist nations of Poland and Hungary move towards explicitly prolife and profamily policies, Socialist Sweden seems to becoming more like the former “Soviet Union” with regard to the priority of the natural family in society.

It was not always this way – even for “Socialists” in Sweden. Once upon a time (up till the 60′s) there was a powerful lobby in Sweden that protected the family. They were known as the “Swedish Socialist Housewives” and Allan Carlson of the World Congress of Families documents their story in the book “Third Ways” (see below) . This strain of Socialism defended the role and institution of the housewife as vital to the family and the state. An early inspiration of the movement, Ellen Key, had encouraged women to aspire to motherhood and her vision inspired generations of these women who were not ashamed to be considered “housewives”. Had they maintained their influence, it is more doubtful this atrocious injustice would have occurred. To be sure, Key’s influences were not “Christian” but they did, at least, champion Motherhood and did not transfer the maternal vocation to the arms of the “Social Services”.

What happened to deny the “Swedish Socialist Housewives” their right to be mothers? For quite some time after World War II a very small percentage of women entered the workforce, prefering to serve in their homes. The drastic change occurred when groups we would consider “at odds” aligned to destroy motherhood in Sweden.

Socialists of the Alva Myrdal variety (equity feminists) who hated motherhood and wanted to create an androgynous society joined with ”Libertarians” and struck a bargain to work together to change the income tax structure. After decades of Myrdal’s machinations and propaganda, that was the final blow necessary.

Previously the income tax scheme favored families where men worked outside the home with subsidies allowing the mother to remain in the home to care for her family. The income tax code was changed to remove support for the family. It drove women into the workforce – teaching, health care, and “social service”. “Motherhood”, you might say, became detached from real mothers and it’s vocation was then bureaucratized into its present form.

The seizure of this child is simply Big Mother at work pursuing the vocation transferred to her by those who sought to eliminate natural mothers and deny them their rights. Ham handed, overreaching, and outrageous as this act may seem, it is nothing other than the logical outgrowth of a society that hates the family.

May God deliver this family – and Sweden! And us because we too are well along the path.

You can read more about what “might have been” regarding Sweden as a pro-family country in Carlson’s book below -

Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies – And Why They Disappeared (Culture of Enterprise)

Freewheeling capitalism or collectivist communism: when it came to political-economic systems, did the twentieth century present any other choice? Does our century? In Third Ways, social historian Allan Carlson tells the story of how different thinkers from Bulgaria to Great Britain created economic systems during the twentieth century that were by intent neither capitalist nor communist. Unlike fascists, these seekers were committed to democracy and pluralism. Unlike liberal capitalists, they refused to treat human labor and relationships as commodities like any other. And unlike communists, they strongly defended private property and the dignity of persons and families. Instead, the builders of these alternative economic systems wanted to protect and renew the “natural” communities of family, village, neighborhood, and parish. They treasured rural culture and family farming and defended traditional sex roles and vital home economies.

Carlson’s book takes a fresh look at distributism, the controversial economic project of Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton which focused on broad property ownership and small-scale production; recovers the forgotten thought of Alexander Chayanov, a Russian economist who put forth a theory of “the natural family economy”; discusses the remarkable “third way” policies of peasant-led governments in post–World War I Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania; recounts the dramatic and largely unknown effort by Swedish housewives to defend their homes against radical feminism; relates the iconoclastic ideas of economic historian Karl Polanyi, including his concepts of “the economy without markets” and “the great transformation”; and praises the efforts by European Christian Democrats to build a moral economy on the concept of homo religious—“religious man.”

Finally, Carlson’s work explains why these efforts—at times rich in hope and prospects—ultimately failed, often with tragic results. The tale inspires wistful regret over lost opportunities that, if seized, might have spared tens of millions of lives and forestalled or avoided the blights of fascism, Stalinism, socialism, and the advent of the servile state. And yet the book closes with hope, enunciating a set of principles that could be used today for invigorating a “family way” economy compatible with an authentic, healthy, and humane culture of enterprise.

List Price: $ 25.00

Price: $ 20.23

Tags: Family Wage, Homeschooling, Income Tax, Libertarians, Motherhood, Pro Family, Pro Life, Socialists, Sweden, Swedish Socialist Housewives

Thoughts from Pastor Chuck Huckaby