"Parental Rights" is Code for Child Abuse

Don't trust conservatives who pit children against adults.

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The Senate hearings to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court are about as much of a circus as you might expect. Republicans whined that she sat on the board of a school that embraced diversity and inclusion and seemed upset that the school hadn’t banned books they dislike from its library. They claimed she was soft on crime because she extended a compassionate release to an old, sick man who had been behind bars for decades. They suggested she was overly lenient on child sex abusers. Ted Cruz did a whole presentation on racist babies.

It was a racist spectacle from start to finish. And it was a particularly shameful display because Republicans know exactly what they’re doing: By pushing the myth that Judge Jackson is pro-pedophile, they’re feeding into the QAnon conspiracy that claims Democrats operate a secret cabal of child sex traffickers that work in pizza restaurant basements and cabinets sold on Wayfair.

It’s nuts. It’s untrue. But it’s politically beneficial to the GOP to fuel the rage of a stupid, credulous fringe.

The senator who struck me the most, though, was Marsha Blackburn. She dug in on the question of “parental rights,” a conservative bugaboo that also fueled so much of the hostility to Hillary Clinton back in the 1990s when Bill was running for president. Conservative arguments for “parental rights” are one reason why the US remains far behind so many other developed and prosperous democracies on a range of issues, from education to health outcomes to really basic stuff like rates of child marriage and adolescent pregnancy. The conservative demand for “parental rights” has left millions of Americans kids under-educated; it has consigned them to physical abuse; it has denied them medical care. They have the audacity to impose laws that do such broad harm to kids and then claim the mantle of protecting them.

To be clear, virtually no one save for a handful of extremists believe that parents shouldn’t have the right to make a great many decisions about their children’s lives and wellbeing. The tension comes in when what a parent wants to do conflicts with the basic rights that should be afforded to any human being. These are pretty basic things: Kids, like adults, have a right to live without being physically hurt by anyone, but particularly by people who are more physically powerful than they are and have near-total control over their lives. Kids have a right to medical care that will protect or even save their lives. Kids have a right to a basic education — learning how to read, learning math — in part so that they can have some control over their futures. Kids have a right to live free of sexual abuse, and to spend their childhoods as children and not as wives or mothers.

When conservative senators like Marsha Blackburn attack Judge Jackson for alleged attacks on “parental rights” — attacks Judge Jackson has not actually launched — she’s saying that the issue is parents having a right to, say, not have their kids exposed to anti-racist books or curriculum at school. That’s a pretty low-stakes fight that fires up the GOP base. Underneath it, though, is a much more expansive and dangerous ideology that sees children as extensions of their parents and not human beings in their own right.

That ideology is why it remains legal for parents and even teachers to hit children in a great many (mostly conservative) US states. It’s why parents have the broad ability to pull their children out of school and refuse them a basic education. It’s why parents can refuse their kids medical care, even if that refusal makes those kids very ill and shortens their lives. It’s why child marriage remains legal in the United States, and why attempts to outlaw it have failed — Republicans have stood in the way.

Let’s be clear on what is going on: Republicans want to preserve the rights of parents to abuse their own children.

Right now, Republican politicians are accusing Judge Jackson of being soft on pedophiles, because she gave a teenager a lesser sentence than the prosecutor requested in a case in which the young man had downloaded a series of child sex abuse images from the internet. You’re not going to find me defending the downloading and distribution of child sex abuse materials; the distribution of those materials compounds the trauma of the many children who were sexually assaulted in their creation. But there is a significant difference between downloading horrific images of abuse on the internet and raping a child.

While Republicans are attacking Judge Jackson for giving a teenager a two-month sentence instead of a three-year one for downloading images, members of their own party are upholding laws that allow for the state-sanctioned rape of teenage girls by adult men: Between 2000 and 2015, more than 200,000 girls in America were married off, overwhelmingly to adult men, with their parents’ consent. Only four states — four! — completely outlaw child marriage.

"In Kentucky, we found a 13-year-old girl married off to a 33-year-old man, a 15-year-old girl married off to a 52-year-old man — I could go on and on to give you these horrific examples of these children who were married off to their rapist," Donna Pollard, the founder of Survivors' Corner and a child marriage victim who was wed at 16 to a much older man, told CBS News in 2020. "It's horrific and it has to stop now."

It’s not stopping because of conservatives who demand that “parental rights” supersede a child’s right to physical safety.

Parents of course have rights. They have the right to make difficult medical decisions for their kids, particularly when their kids are too young to be able to make informed choices themselves. They have the right to choose their child’s moral, religious, and cultural education, to implement penalties for bad behavior, to decide what reading materials their child has access to in their home and what media their child can consume. They have broad rights to shape their children’s world views (or at least try to), to control where their children go, to determine what they eat and who they interact with.

But a reasonable view of human rights also sees children as human beings, and as such, places reasonable limits on the rights of parents to impose their will on their kids. A reasonable view of human rights would afford all children the right to physical safety and to a basic education. Children in America do not enjoy the full scope of those rights, largely because of conservative politicians.

In functional families, the rights of children and the rights of parents aren’t in conflict. But we don’t make laws assuming that every family is a functional family, and that every parent is a good parent. We’ve seen over and over and over again how America’s exceptionally lenient homeschooling laws, for example, have left children at best innumerate and illiterate as adults and at worst dead — teachers and other school staff are often the only adults an abused kid has contact with outside of their homes, and, predictably, many abusive parents pull their kids of of school to cover up their crimes. Many of those homeschooled children — often those raised by Evangelical parents who follow the teachings of some of the most prominent Christian conservatives in America — find themselves being regularly hit and otherwise physically abused by the people who should protect them. Some of those homeschooled children have been killed. And yet the laws that allow abusive parents to fully isolate their children, and that even allows abusive parents to legally hit their kids, stay in place because of authoritarian “pro-family” conservatives.

The claims that Judge Jackson would undermine parental rights are false. What is true, though, is the long history of conservatives enabling child abuse by pushing a vision of “parental rights” that is expansive, radical, anti-child, and dangerous. If anyone is a threat to America’s kids, it’s the Republican Party.

xx Jill

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Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash