Cognitive Abuse

So I was supplied, last night, with a copy of Touchstone magazine.  Patrick Henry Reardon, the senior editor of the magazine, published one of his parashioners letters, a gesture that can only be taken as a token of praise for the perverse and despicable speech acts cited in the contents quoted below:

Every Friday night in Oak Park, a small group of anti-war protesters gathers in front of the Presbyterian church to hold up signs and sing sentimental songs from the sixties.  My family and I were off to the movies to celebrate our son's eighteenth birthday.  The drive took us past the protesters, and since we were stopped at the light, we found ourselves reading their signs.

"Violence Never Solved Anything!" proclaimed one.  "It solved Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Libyan-based terrorism, and the Taliban," I suggested to my companions.

"Who Would Jesus Bomb?" asked another.  "Sodom and Gomorrah," answered my son.

It was a Proverbs 22:6 kind of moment.

If you're skeptical that a human being could be so morally depraved as to congratulate their child for recommending the slaughter, by bombing, of the population of multiple cities, for (possibly) some kind of sexual immorality, take a look at Proverbs 22:6:

Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.

Perhaps this child should be taken away from his parents by the state?  This is cognitive abuse.