Issues Tearing Our Nation's Fabric The Center for Reclaiming America

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Parental Rights
Chapter Sixteen

When President Bill Clinton issued an executive order on April 21, 1997, instructing the directors of several federal agencies to give special attention to the health and safety needs of America’s children in the development of new policies and regulations, conservative and Christian organizations around the country immediately went on alert. The president’s order requires federal agencies to analyze and explain the effects of any new rules relating to children, explain how such changes will impact young people, and explain why such proposed actions are preferable to alternatives currently in practice.

The risk is not that the Clinton Administration isn’t concerned with child welfare, but that the White House has demonstrated from the beginning a very different view from most Americans of "the rights of the child." The president’s order, which establishes an inter-agency task force on children’s health and safety, is precisely the kind of bureaucratic and regulatory vehicle government liberals have used before to challenge parental rights and turn the government into a national nanny.

Over the past forty years we have witnessed the growth in this country of two overlapping trends in public policy regarding child welfare, both of them damaging to the traditional view of family autonomy and parental rights. In the first case, government has bypassed parents in order to impart its own judgments, views, and politically correct vision of truth. Often they have given bureaucrats rights of in loco parentis (to act in the place of parents) and assumed, even in such sensitive issues as access to birth control and abortion, authority that belongs to the family alone. The state wishes to give rights and freedoms to teenagers and teachers while withholding them from the lawful parents.

In the second case, which includes co-sponsorship of agreements such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, government has persistently tried to justify making intrusions into the family and interfering in basic parent-child relations by invoking other authority, such as the UN. At the same time, the state has attempted to lower the age of maturity in children, to recognize children as young as 15 as adults, thus taking away from mothers and fathers the God-given right to train, nurture, and discipline their offspring.

The Rights of Children

The government’s attempt to grant independence to children is simply one more expression of the liberal’s fixation on absolute "liberation" and the elimination of all forms of authority. Children might enjoy unlimited freedoms for a time; government might enjoy its ability to manipulate young minds; but such a move would undoubtedly place children at even greater risk and, at the same time, destroy the "innocence" of youth.

An example of the threat to parental rights can be seen in policies already being used by public libraries in many states. The American Library Association (ALA), one of the most liberal lobbying groups in the country, has announced that it is formally opposed to any restrictions on children’s rights to check out or use any material in the library, whatsoever, including pornographic books, films, and internet web sites, or other books and materials expressly for adults.

Under the guise of fighting "censorship," the ALA refuses to listen to parental objections. Parents may not even view the check-out records of their children; they may not request that certain materials be withheld from adolescents; and the organization’s official policies specifically deny parents control over the child’s "intellectual freedom."

Nowhere is the danger of such policies more clearly visible than in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, passed by the UN General Assembly in 1989. While American lawmakers have managed, so far, to fight off all attempts by the UN delegation and cultural liberals to force the United States to ratify this treaty, to date the U.N.’s campaign to win passage continues. According to the United Nation’s Children Fund (UNICEF) the U.S., Cook Islands, and Somalia are the only three nations yet to ratify the treaty.

UNICEF describes the convention as the "first legally binding international instrument to incorporate the full range of human rights —children’s civil and political rights as well as their economic, social and cultural rights." The convention, according to UNICEF, grants children "the right to freedom of expression . . . freedom of thought, conscience and religion," along with "the right to freedom of association."

The rights of parents are not so well spelled out in this document. For example, on "freedom of association," the treaty states that "No restrictions may be placed on the exercise of these rights other than those imposed in conformity with the law." It is not clear how well parental claims to authority would fare against their children’s competing claim to virtual autonomy under the terms of the treaty.

Pro-UN policymakers try to hold conservatives who fight against this dangerous convention up to public scorn and ridicule, resorting to name-calling and claiming our reluctance makes America look silly. But the dangers of the misguided principles and policies within the text of the convention simply cannot be overstated. And, according to the U.S. Constitution, once any treaty is agreed to by Congress, it is not merely a guide to behavior but the "supreme law of the land."

Genuine Risks

The attacks on parental rights are already mounting in this country. Consider the situation at East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania’s J. T. Lambert School. In 1996, 59 sixth-grade girls were paraded to the nurse’s office and forced to disrobe and undergo vaginal examinations. Most of the girls had never been exposed in this way and were traumatized and humiliated by the experience. When parents protested, the school at first denied they had conducted such an exam; but when the students made it clear the exams had occurred, the school officials reacted defiantly, saying that by the laws of Pennsylvania, they had the right to administer physical exams without parental consent. But never had the parents imagined that a routine physical would include a vaginal exam.

Seven of the families have filed suit against the school and the local school board, claiming invasion of privacy and personal injury. In one case, the family had previously provided a document for the school’s file indicating that a complete checkup had been performed by their family physician. When the 11-year-old girl was told to undress, she informed the nurse that her report was on file. The nurse claimed the report had been lost and insisted the child would have to submit to another exam. The girl persisted and asked the nurse to call her mother or family doctor, but to no avail. She came home from school in tears—hurt, humiliated, and feeling violated by an uncaring bureaucracy.

This is but one example of the state’s view of the rights of the child. There are many others. In Stephens County, Georgia, for example, a family found that their teenage daughters had been driven to a birth control clinic by their high school counselor. Not only were they given birth control pills and condoms, but they underwent an AIDS exam and Pap smear. In the controversy that followed, it was revealed that dozens of other girls had undergone the same treatment over many years.

In cities and towns all across America, teachers, counselors, and school administrators are violating the rights of parents and invading the privacy of children. In the case of Newkirk v. Lansing, a family sued the school district for administering psychotherapeutic counseling without consent and traumatizing their son. A family in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, sued the school district for forcing their child to attend a live seminar about "safe sex" by Suzi Landolph, of "Hot, Sexy and Safer Productions," against the child’s express desire not to attend. Even though the school had not followed its own "opt out" procedures in this case, the parents were rebuffed by the local courts, the court of appeals, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case.

These few cases are but the tip of an immense iceberg of dangerous social programming threatening the rights of citizens, parents, and their children all over America. The courts have almost always sided with the schools over the parents, with the clear intent of denying parental rights and supporting the rights of government and bureaucratic meddlers to control the thinking and behavior of the next generation.

Striking Back

There are currently a half dozen separate bills before Congress under consideration and in committee aimed at restoring parental authority and limiting government’s right to interfere in the upbringing of children. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Rep. Steve Largent (R-Okla.) are the prime sponsors in the Senate and House of the Parental Rights and Responsibilities Act (PRRA), first introduced in 1995.

The bill, still in committee in mid-1997, affirms that the Supreme Court has regarded the right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children as a "fundamental right" implied by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and as supported further by rulings of the court in Meyer v. Nebraska and Pierce v. Society of Sisters. With broad support of conservative pro-family groups and Christian ministries, the bills should help to provide a stronger legal foundation for America’s families, with the aim of preventing horror stories like those above from happening again.

But the greatest security for the family is to be prepared, to stay in God’s Word, and to be aware of what’s taking place in your home, local schools, the community, and in the nation, in general, regarding the sanctity and security of the home. Congress can pass legislation, but if we are not alert, a despotic government will find ways to impose its will, as they are doing now in the attempt to authorize a UN treaty that overrules U.S. constitutional law.

Alexis de Tocqueville, who came to this country in 1831, brilliantly described the strengths and weaknesses of the American democratic system and foresaw many of the problems that have been encountered in our own time. In a nation that has enjoyed the fruits of democracy, he warned that there is a tendency to become complacent and to allow government to grow out of its banks like a river in flood, until it swamps the nation with rules and regulations and a form of centralized authority that is no longer democracy, but despotism. He stated:

Despotism often presents itself as the repairer of all the ills suffered, the support of just rights, defender of the oppressed, and founder of order. Peoples are lulled to sleep by the temporary prosperity it engenders, and when they do wake up, they are wretched.

His image describes so faithfully what we are experiencing today, it’s hard to believe those words were written more than 160 years ago. If we expect to keep our rights and freedoms, we must be informed, alert, and challenge, by law and by reason, any institution that attempts to take away parental rights.

Scripture is clear on the rights and responsibilities of parents and children. The Fifth Commandment, "honor your father and mother," is God’s standard for domestic order. For that reason, those who seek to elevate the rights of children at the expense of parents are at war with God’s original design and, therefore, with God Himself. The apostle Paul clarified and affirmed the relationship of parents and children when he said:

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with promise: that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth. And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord
(Ephesians 6:1-4).

You may contact this organization:

For further reading:

Michael Farris. Anonymous Tip: A Novel. Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1996.

On the World Wide Web:

Christian Legal Society: http://www.clsnet.com/clspage.html
Free Congress Foundation: http://www.fcref.org/
Family Research Council: http://www.townhall.com/townhall/frc/

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Copyright 1997, Coral Ridge Ministries. All rights reserved.