Ernest Hua <hua@chromatic.com> writes:
The same can be said of the children of the more politically correct. My opinion is that religion is a waste of time and resources, and therefore, those who force their children to be religious is doing precisely the same harm you allude to.
Of course they are.
That is strictly MY opinion. If there are enough of me around, should we be allowed to force the government to take children away from their religious parents? More mildly, can the government "protect" a child from religious ideas?
What gives the society more rights to regulate how the child shall be brought up, except the narrow interest of protecting the physical safety of the child? It is not even clear that the government may force a child to accept secular ideas that may violate the child's religious background, even if the government has a compelling secular interest in doing so.
This is the usual smokescreen the "parents rights" lobby brings to the bargaining table. Rather than make the debate over the rights of the child, and what resources the state should make available to the child to protect those rights, they make it a contest between the parent and the state to see who gets to violate the child's rights the most. Since most people regard parents as more benevolent than the state towards children, the parents automatically win without the reasonableness of their behavior ever coming under discussion. So instead of arguing whether children should have access to education, libraries, computers, and other resources in their own right, we get the usual endless debate over whether the state or the parent should exercise the absolute iron-fisted control parents all seem to think is such a wonderful thing, with anything other than state collaboration with the parents wishes being represented as the state usurping the parental role. Been there. Done that. And as the Scottish would say, "It's Crap."
Yes, we would like fewer Hitler's in the future. But should we NOT let the people decide how the raise their children because there is some risk of a few of them turning into future Hitlers?
Again, children have a right to go to libraries, get educated, and use telecommunications resources without interference by EITHER the state or their parents. As is usual, the people who are against children having these rights try to sell everyone the notion that the only choice is between their two handpicked and equally unacceptable alternatives - iron-fisted state control or iron-fisted parental control of everything children do. We see the same rhetoric at work with things like curfew laws as well. The question is always phrased as "should the state or the parents set curfews." Whereas, the real question is "Should police or parents have the right to harrass a 17 year old who is out in public, behaving himself, simply because it is 9 PM at night?" The best way to raise "Fewer Hitlers" is to have a generation of children who lack the internalized rage produced by being walked on like doormats by numerous authority figures while they are growing up. This includes both parents and representatives of the government. -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ mpd@netcom.com $ via Finger. $