Parents usurp the rights of their children

I have presented the moral argument that parents that consign their children to religion at an early age are usurping their children’s rights. There are people who will not see the logic. In this iteration I am trying one more time to explain.

Ok then let us work some more on the premise that children’s rights are usurped. I base this on the moral argument that every person is entitled to the right to autonomy and the right of self determination. Parents are guardians and are thus responsible for guarding their children’s “open future” as argued by philosopher Joel Feinberg.

One such principle is that proposed by Joel Feinberg in criticizing a US Supreme Court decision that permitted the Amish to end their children’s public schooling at 14, two years short of the legal limit.

The Court majority accepted the Amish argument that the continued existence of their 19th century religious farming community was at stake: if their children attended public high school, they would be less likely and less able to take up their roles in the community. Feinberg argued that the Amish violate their children’s “right to an open future,” namely, the right to be “permitted to reach maturity with as many open options, opportunities, and advantages as possible.”

This complex right has as its general basis the right to autonomy or self-determination, that is, “the sovereign authority to govern oneself, which is absolute within one’s own moral boundaries (one’s “territory,” “realm,” “sphere,” or business”).”

Of course, like other adult rights, the child’s right to autonomy is a right-in-trust, to be fully granted when a child has developed the capacities necessary for its exercise. On this view, it is a principal parental duty to help a child to develop the capacity for autonomy.

URL: http://tinyurl.com/2tf5rd (for the full 24 page paper)

Ever hear of any Amish female, or for that matter male, astronauts? How about concert pianists? Molecular biologists? I don’t think there are any women like this or we can be sure they would be famous and we would know about them. Instead there are girls who tip toe out of their parents house in the dead of night to escape from their religious gulag.

http://www.tkbventures.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19&Itemid=31

Amish children are relegated to a life of menial farm labor because of a zealous regard for the religious practice rights of their parents. To hell with the children, let’s give preference to preserving the parents religious rights. How brainwashing children ever got defined this way is beyond me. Because the only substantiating argument the Amish parents could offer were verses from the bible. How in hell that got to be accepted in a court of law, never mind our Supreme Court, is distressing. The bible is a legal document?

Which immediately should raise the question: why should an anachronistic backward ignorant religious sect that was put down at gun point by the Swiss in the 17th century deserve such high regard by people today? Let Anabaptism sink or swim by it’s own merits. The legislators and Supreme Court judges who allowed this oppression don’t pay any price. It is the children who suffer. They bear the total injustice of this situation.

It is not just the Amish that see their children as instruments of their scheme to perpetuate a religion. I think the Pope is also definitely an advocate of using children as instruments of his scheme to keep Catholicism going. Else why all the hysterical objections to family planning?

Posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 11:18 pm in Children's rights.
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