In 1989 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which was subsequently signed by representatives of 140 countries and ratified or accepted by 193, with the notable exceptions of Somalia and the United States. This was not the first time that obligations towards children had been expressed in terms of rights; an earlier Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child had been adopted by the League of Nations in 1924, although in its five brief points it never once used the word “rights,” speaking instead the language of duty: the child “must be fed,” “must be sheltered and succored,” “must be protected against every form of exploitation,” &c. The 1959 UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child is similarly spare in using the language of rights, mentioning them twice under Principle 1 and not at all in Principles 2 through 10. By contrast, the CRC consists of 54 articles in which “rights” are referred to 26 times and the obligations of “States Parties” mentioned 110 times.
These differences between the CRC and the two earlier documents are significant in that they represent an historic shift which Michael Ignatieff has described as the Rights Revolution, Francis Fukuyama as the Great Disruption, and what I have elsewhere referred to as the dawn of the choice-enhancement state.
It is worth noting that, especially in the US, the CRC is controversial because it would seem to bring the state too deeply into the legitimate sphere of family intimacy. Such reservations have thus far successfully prevented the US from ratifying the Convention. Even among the signatories, several states, including the Vatican, have explicitly qualified their acceptance for various reasons. Indeed it is not altogether clear that recasting parental or societal obligations towards children as rights represents genuine progress in ensuring the latter’s well-being, especially if we do not curtail the tendency to view all rights as policed by the courts.
In one sense, of course, no one can doubt that children have the right to be loved and cared for by their parents. Yet the primary agents for fulfilling this responsibility are the parents themselves, and not the “states parties” which have signed the document, though the latter certainly have an obligation towards both parents and their children under their general mandate to do public justice. It is worth noting that the word authority appears only three times in the text of the 1989 Convention and each time refers to legal or judicial authority. When used in the plural form, authorities always denotes political authorities. Noticeably absent from all three documents is a recognition of the primacy of parental authority in nurturing the child towards maturity.
I have just completed the first draft of a manuscript on the subject of authority, office and the image of God. In the course of researching and writing this, I have become convinced that we need to reconfigure the ongoing conversation surrounding authority so as to recognize that it resides in an office – or, better, offices – given us by the God who has created us in his image. Accordingly we would be better served, in speaking of parental obligations towards their children, to focus on the authoritative offices borne by each, namely, father, mother, son and daughter.
What will a shift to the language of authority gain for us? I believe it will enable us better to account for the full complexity of the relationship between parents and minor children – necessarily an ever-changing relationship as the children grow to maturity. It will also help us to distinguish between the legitimate authoritative offices of parents and government, recognizing that, while both presumably intend the child’s best interest, the secondary authority of government is necessarily limited by the primary authority of parents. It is thus not a matter of opposing freedom, say, of parents to the authority of the state but of recognizing that different agents possess authoritative offices whose demands are different yet, properly understood, mutually supportive and equally worthy of respect.
November 15th, 2011 | 5:46 pm | #1
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November 15th, 2011 | 6:57 pm | #2
It does indeed take a village to raise a child, but not in the way liberals think.
First they broke the village – having destroyed everything that holds communities together and provides the cohesion.
Now, they want to exploit what they’ve done by making themselves – the central planners – into the village-substitute. Only the goal here is not the same as the goals of a community; they do not intend to support or nurture. They intend to control and bully.
I am reminded of – was it Isaiah Berlin who spoke of Napoleon finger-painting with soldiers across the canvas of Europe? (Wish I could remember the quote)….families are now to be reduced to things for the elite to “paint with”.
The equality of man is not compatible with central planning. The only one qualified to give moral commandments from on high is God.
November 16th, 2011 | 2:47 pm | #3
A pastor that I know pointed out in one of his lectures the levels of authority (or at least the levels of authority besides God, who’s authority is a bit of a given). He noted that God established the authority to start with the family, then the community, than the regional influence and then finally national authority (as far as decisions of a family are concerned).
Today we kind of have a skewed view of authority. I think that what Blake pointed out had some kind of correct analysis in that what was once considered “a village” is now something completely different. When people think about community authority, they look to the national government and state authorities on how to run their family unit. No longer is “the village” the close knit community that we once had, it has now become a nationalized and separated, distant “village”.
Blake and I differ on the cause of this, he claims it’s a liberal scheme, but nonetheless the overall analysis is accurate.
How many people do you know that know every person on their street? I know only a handful of my neighbors. When my family moved to a new house, there was no one on the street to greet us and welcome us to the neighborhood.
“communities” hardly exist anymore. Luckily, many churches do provide a place for community where followers can go for council and help from the community, something that isn’t provided secularly.
November 16th, 2011 | 8:07 pm | #4
Livingston, I agree with your pastor, although I would define community somewhat more extensively than he does to include families, marriages, churches, states, schools, businesses, &c. None of these has ultimacy or can claim the highest loyalty; this belongs to God alone.
The phenomenon I discuss is not exactly part of a liberal plot, which sounds needlessly conspiratorial. However, I do think that liberalism — in the broad sense — has everything to do with it, in so far as it tends to reduce all communities to mere voluntary associations, denying any intrinsic differences among them. Thus the state is a product of a social contract, marriage becomes a mere private contract between two partners rather than an institution, and so forth. The difficulty with Blake’s analysis is that it locates liberalism on the so-called left only, while in North America both rightists and leftists are heir to the broader tradition of liberalism.
November 17th, 2011 | 9:02 am | #5
The phenomenon I discuss is not exactly part of a liberal plot, which sounds needlessly conspiratorial.
It is not that I am suggesting that liberals want to destroy communities simply because they are vicious. I apologize if I made it sound that way.
They want control, they want to change the way things are done, and they want to eradicate all that they see as being wrong with the traditional way of doing things. The problem is, they are not careful about how they evaluate what ought to change, nor are they careful about constructing plans with attention to unintended consequences. The more their policies have failed, the more they have responded by simply insulating themselves from feedback.
The result is a situation that is quite frankly ridiculous. For instance, to cite only one of so many examples: parenting classes exist in every major city. This is what has replaced the support structure that existed before the sexual revolution decimated families and neighborhoods. If you go to one of these parenting classes you will undoubtedly find that every kid there has divorced parents, and usually one parent (the one who is there) takes care of the child, while the other parent behaves very badly, and by all accounts causes a great deal of mischief. But the parenting classes will not generally involve the absent parent – however necessary it might seem (if the goal were a real solution), that’s too difficult. So instead, the usual approach is to the family (meaning the parent) sign a “contract” – a bizarre idea based on the idea that the child will behave as he ought to have been behaving all along, and in return the parents will give him something to make it worth his while. The starting presumption is that the parent needs to do more and the child needs to be bribed – and nothing at all is done about the real source of the trouble.
This is an example of a left-wing idea that might or might not have originally been a good idea, but nobody is paying attention to any of the details, so it does more harm than good in actual practice.
November 18th, 2011 | 1:36 pm | #6
Your post is a good reminder why the US needs to pass the Parental Rights Amendment (parentalrights.org) to keep the UN from alienating our God given rights as parents.
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