| Week of September 15, 1996 | by F.R. Duplantier |
"Recognizing the irreplaceable role of parents is essential to keeping the power of the state in check."Parents trying to protect their children from the "degraded popular culture" of our time often discover that "their own government is part of the problem," say Cathleen Cleaver of the Family Research Council and Greg Erken of the organization called Of The People. "Increasingly, parents are demanding that government policies support, rather than undermine, their authority." That authority has been "significantly undermined" in recent decades, say Cleaver and Erken in a recent issue of Family Policy, a publication of the Family Research Council. They see examples of this trend in "laws giving minors access to abortion and birth control without parental approval, and in looming threats like the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child." They also see signs of usurpation in "the state's increasing propensity to substitute its judgment for that of parents in matters relating to the upbringing and education of children."
Cleaver and Erken concede that children have rights, but stress that "parents traditionally have been considered the proper custodians of these rights until their children reach adulthood." This tradition, how-ever, is under attack. "Courts have begun to grant children 'choice' rights like adults in select areas, most notably by guaranteeing access to birth control and abortion. This has served as a compelling precedent for other state policies which prevent parents from controlling minors' choice rights." The irony is that "the so-called 'children's rights' movement threatens to destroy a child's most precious right: the right to childhood innocence."
Cleaver and Erken acknowledge that schools necessarily operate, to some extent, "in loco parentis," the assumption being that "parents have delegated partial authority to the school. But, when school officials contradict the will or values of parents, they exceed their delegated authority and substitute their judgment for that of parents." They cite several examples of such usurpation. One of the most notorious cases involved a middle school in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, where, earlier this year, school officials subjected 59 sixth-grade girls to invasive gynecological exams against their will and without the consent of their parents. Another incident occurred at a public school in Stephens County, Georgia, where a counselor drove two adolescent sisters to a birth control clinic during school hours to provide them with birth control devices without their parents' knowledge.
Utopian thinkers from Plato onward have "looked upon the parent-child relationship with suspicion at best, and more often as the crucial obstacle to ultimate state power over the individual," say Cathleen Cleaver and Greg Erken. "For even if the state is successful in dissolving all other institutions which mediate between the individual and the state -- such as local government, the church, and private associations -- it must still contend with the family unit." Cleaver and Erken warn parents to be on the alert against government policies that undermine "the natural bonds between husband and wife, and parent and child."
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