The nuclear family is the enemy of leftism since it is the ultimate non-state support and control system.  No wonder America's leftists have managed to enact a long list of laws challenging the nuclear family.  The latest comes out of New Jersey, which implemented a law holding that police may not notify parents that their children were caught smoking pot or drinking alcohol.  This is not random stupidity; it's part of a pattern.

A recent articulation of the leftist hostility to the family comes from the trained Marxists at Black Lives Matter.  Before BLM deleted their "What We Believe" page (which lives on at the Wayback Machine), it stated:

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and 'villages' that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

If that village remark sounds familiar, you're old enough to remember Hillary Clinton's 1996 book, It Takes A Village, which said society, not families, raise children.  Most people understood the book to be a demand for more government involvement in raising children.

In 2013, Melissa Harris-Perry, an MSNBC host, was explicit about the fact that it's society, not the family, that should be responsible for inculcating values in children:

"We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we've always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven't had a very collective notion of these are our children," she says in a spot for the network's "Lean Forward" campaign. "So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities."

Although many states require parental consent for piercings, tattoos, and tanning beds, the trend among leftists has been to prevent parents from having a say in things integral to their children's most significant physical and mental health issues: birth control, abortion, and so-called "transgenderism."  This operates at both the federal and state level.

Under federal law, Title X and Medicaid, teens do not need parental consent to obtain birth control.  According to the Guttmacher Institute, 23 states, plus D.C., explicitly allow minors to get contraceptives without their parents' consent.  Your 13-year-old daughter can get the Pill without your ever knowing it, even though the Pill is an extremely powerful hormonal modifier that's never been fully studied for political reasons and a 13-year-old's emotional unpreparedness for a sexual relationship.

When it comes to abortion, only 37 states require that parents must be involved in the decision.  That means that in 13 states, your daughter is on her own — or maybe the pedophile who got her pregnant is in on the decision with her.  (In California, the law was that parents at least had to give consent, but a court permanently enjoined that policy.)  You, the parent, just aren't sufficiently important to be part of this decision.

In recent years, transgenderism is the hot new area in which parents are being excluded from having a say in their children's physical and mental well-being.  In New Jersey, for example, schools do not need to tell parents if a student has decided that he is really she.

These laws ignore the fact that, for girls, peer pressure figures largely in their announcements about their "gender identity."  Children with Asperger's syndrome and autism are also easily made to believe they're transgender.  As a general matter, America's leftist public schools are pushing transgenderism on children behind their parents' backs.

Given this trend, it shouldn't be a surprise that New Jersey has now decided that parents don't need to know if their children are getting into trouble with pot or alcohol:

It's a world without consequences thanks to a new statute, signed into law on Monday by Democrat governor Phil Murphy, that prevents law enforcement officials from informing parents when their minor children are caught smoking marijuana or drinking alcohol. 

The legislation was attached, at the last minute, to a package of bills intended to legalize recreational marijuana for adults, a measure approved by voters last November.

[snip]

If that wasn't insane enough, cops themselves could face criminal penalties for alerting parents that their children were caught using illicit substances.

Families will only be contacted if their kids become repeat offenders, which is likely of little comfort to parents, who were blindsided by the legislation and never given the opportunity by lawmakers to offer any feedback. 

The Democrat party might want to consider a new slogan: "All your children are belong to us."  And the rest of us might want to have our own slogan: "Be afraid.  Be very afraid."

Image: Underage drinking.  YouTube screen grab.