Parenting & Family Quote by Barbara Boxer

The power move here is the braiding of two anxieties that don’t naturally belong together: copyright enforcement and child protection. Boxer isn’t making a careful policy argument so much as constructing a moral shortcut. “If you don’t move” repeats like a drumbeat, framing hesitation as negligence. Action becomes the only respectable posture; deliberation starts to look like complicity.

The subtext is coalition-building through emotional escalation. Copyright is, on its face, a messy fight about money, control, and technology - an area where the public’s sympathy is divided and the details are boring. “Our children” is the rhetorical solvent that dissolves those complications. Once kids are in the sentence, opposition can be recast as reckless, even predatory, regardless of whether the issue at hand is piracy, online distribution, or the policing tools demanded by rights-holders. It’s classic Washington framing: take an economic interest and dress it in a protective, parental urgency that plays well on the evening news.

“It’s not going to sit well” lands as a soft threat, calibrated for politics. Not “you’ll be wrong,” but “you’ll pay.” The audience isn’t just colleagues weighing a bill; it’s donors, advocacy groups, and voters watching for signals of toughness. Boxer’s intent is to narrow the field of acceptable disagreement, turning a debate about intellectual property into a referendum on character - and daring anyone to vote no on “protecting children,” even when the policy target is copyright.