As construed by the American right wing, “parental rights” is the most milquetoast way of expressing that children are their parents’ property, subject to absolute control, and not accountable to any standard outside the nuclear family unit. In an interview with Slate, “parental rights” was the phrase used by the president of a charter school board that forced the principal of a local charter school to resign after an art teacher showed sixth graders an image of Michelangelo’s David on the grounds that a tiny marble penis on a world-famous Renaissance sculpture is pornographic. Incidentally,
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