Red Ryder BB Gun:

Set in the 1940s, "A Christmas Story" depicts a series of family vignettes through the eyes of 9-year-old Ralphie Parker, who yearns for that gift of all gifts: the Daisy Red Ryder BB gun.

This was boyhood before "bang-bang you're dead" was banned. Family life prior to "One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dad, Blue Dads," and Christmas without the ACLU.

If children could choose their families, most would opt for the kind depicted in this film, where mother is a homemaker, father is a regular working stiff, and between them they have zero repertoire of psychobabble to rub together.

Although clearly adored, Ralphie is not encouraged to express his feelings. Instead, he is urged to show restraint and is disciplined when naughty. And horrors: The little boy even has his mouth washed out with soap and water for uttering the "F" expletive. ("My personal preference was for Lux," reveals Ralphie. "But I found Palmolive had a nice piquant after-dinner flavor – heady but with just a touch of mellow smoothness.") When he refuses his food, Ralphie is also guilt-tripped about starving Biafrans.

Such parenting would fail every progressive commandment. By today's standards, the delightful, unprecocious protagonist of "A Christmas Story" would be doomed to an emotional abyss – and certainly to heavy doses of Ritalin for day-dreaming in class and for being all boy in general.

Despite his therapeutically incorrect upbringing, Ralphie is a happy little boy. For "progressives" – for whom it has long been axiomatic that a traditional family like the Parker family is the source of oppression for women and children – this is inexplicable.

Perhaps the first to have helped conflate the values of the bourgeois family with pathological authoritarianism was philosopher Theodor Adorno. Adorno's formulations on authoritarianism have informed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The consensus among rights advocates has been that the traditional family's hierarchical structure disempowers children. The solution has been for the state to destabilize the parent-child relationship through policies that would define and limit the power of the parent while increasing the power of the child.