Don’t ignore the rights of children

The words “parent” and “child” never appear in any of the U.S. founding documents: not in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution or, especially, the Bill of Rights. Because they do not former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia disagreed with his conservative colleagues when they created “parents’ rights.”

In the 2000 case Troxel v. Granville, a conservative plurality established a Fourteenth Amendment “liberty interest” belonging to parents in making decisions to protect their children’s human rights to such things as food, education and health care. In his dissenting opinion Scalia admonished that if conservatives wanted to establish parental rights, they would need a constitutional amendment that did so.

Since Troxel, that amendment has been proposed in virtually every Congress but has never made it to a floor vote. That has not stopped Florida Gov. Ron Desantis from surrounding himself with children and parents in signing ceremonies giving those mythical rights to the parents of Florida.

In his legislative and executive efforts to ban masks, math books and Democratic majorities, Desantis has mostly succeeded in piping away the rights of children. There can be no question that as human beings children possess, at least in the abstract, human rights to health care and education. Through his actions Gov. Desantis has effectively taken away those rights and given them to parents.

Justice Scalia recognized the illogic of “parents’ rights.” How can it be true that all adults are endowed by their creator with the same human or citizenship rights, unless and until they become parents, at which point they get more rights? To maintain this is to treat children as property in a way similar to suggesting that buying a home brings additional rights to the owner.

As human beings, not property, children have their own rights — at least as humans, if not yet as citizens. Perhaps it is finally time to grant them citizenship rights as well, if only to protect their human rights from being traded away for adult votes.

Desantis’ most recent executive actions in Florida involving textbook banning make the case for children’s rights clear. Public education is America’s gift to the world; it was invented here and didn’t exist anywhere else, until other democracies formed and recognized that public education guaranteed their future. Thank you, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.

The holders of the right to public education are two: every child, and society as a whole. Children have the right to education to fulfill their individual and unique capabilities; democratic society has the collective right to citizens educated in the duties that democracy demands of them.

When it comes to public education rights, parents have, at most, the right to have been educated themselves.

At curricular and textbook discussions across America, in school board meetings and legislative hearings, one voice is always absent — that of the students. It is their right that is being discussed, but their claims are not heard. The reason is simple: Like women and Black Americans before them, without voting rights children have no power to claim their rights, either to be heard or educated in the way most beneficial to them and to democratic society.

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum reminds us that all rights are in response to human vulnerability, and that children are the most vulnerable of all. Not because they are small and weak — many adults are as well — but because children have no power of their own to claim their rights in the way that democracies offer.

Without the power to vote out of office all the pied pipers with the bravado to steal away their rights, children will remain merely as property. Democracy needs them to be both human and citizens; it especially needs them to be so now, when the piper’s tune proves irresistible to adults.