Recalcitrant families, benevolent states

As Glen Reynolds says, who knew a conservative backlash could cancel a progressive event demonizing homeschooling?  Somebody had better get to work on a law about that kind of dangerous speech.

Chesterton wrote about the importance of the family as a bulwark against state coercion in "The Superstition of Divorce," in which he also ridicules the principle of unlimited personal liberty as "all windows and no wall":

The ideal for which [the family] stands in the state is liberty. It stands for liberty for the very simple reason with which this rough analysis started. It is the only one of these institutions that is at once necessary and voluntary. It is the only check on the state that is bound to renew itself as eternally as the state, and more naturally than the state. Every sane man recognises that unlimited liberty is, anarchy, or rather is nonentity. The civic idea of liberty is to give the citizen a province of liberty; a limitation within which a citizen is a king. This is the only way in which truth can ever find refuge from public persecution, and the good man survive the bad government. But the good man by himself is no match for the city. There must be balanced against it another ideal institution, and in that sense an immortal institution. So long as the state is the only ideal institution the state will call on the citizen to sacrifice himself, and therefore will not have the smallest scruple in sacrificing the citizen.