Liberty and Parental Rights
[I’m putting together a post on a specific parental rights question, and it reminded me of this post of mine from 2011, which I thought I’d rerun.]
Some comments on recent posts have suggested that libertarians should support a broad notion of parental rights. I haven’t written at any length on parental rights (except as to the special case of parental free speech rights), and my thinking on this is far from definite; and of course I surely can’t speak for libertarians generally. But as somehow who is in many (though by no means all) matters a presumptive libertarian, I thought I’d say a bit about this. Note that I’m speaking in this post about what I think the right rules ought to be, not about what we should understand our Constitution to say with regard to this question.
1. To begin with, though parental rights are seen by the law as part of parent’s “liberty,” it’s an unusual sort of liberty. The strongest case for liberty arises when people seek the right to do what they please with their own bodies, labor, and property, and the bodies, labor, and property of consenting adult partners (whether sexual, familial, business, or otherwise).
But parental rights are the rights to control someone else’s actions. My child is not me. He is not my property. That I have the right to, say, alter my own body (or hire someone to do it for me) or to choose spiritual healing over traditional medical treatment doesn’t tell us much about whether I should have the right to alter another person’s property, or deny another person medical treatment—even if the other person is my minor child.
2. Moreover, parental rights don’t just involve the government refraining from action (e.g., by not arresting me for false imprisonment when I physically restrain my child, the way it would if I tried to do that for an adult). Rather, they sometimes involve the government taking affirmative coercive steps to support parents’ rights.
The law often makes it a crime to entice minors from their parents, even when the minors are happy to go. It lets police forcibly return runaway minors. Some statutes threaten children “who persistently or habitually refuse[] to obey the reasonable and proper orders or directions of his or her parents, guardian, or custodian” with being adjudged “ward[s] of the court.” And some court decisions go so f
Article from Reason.com
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