Part 5 (2/2)
Her contemptous tone toward the family unit continued throughout her paper with her conviction that the interests of a family--its culture and beliefs--unfairly subsumed, and thus undermined the best interests of children. Taken one way, this is Jeffersonian individualism on 1960s recreational drugs. Taken another, it is a pointed denigration of families steeped in religious tradition or a particular culture, whether they be Ha.s.sidim, evangelical Christians, or recent refugees from Kosovo.
Another pa.s.sage was so d.a.m.ning that it became the focus of damage control in the 1992 election: The basic rationale for depriving people of rights in a dependency relations.h.i.+p is that certain individuals are incapable or undeserving of the right to take care of themselves and consequently need social inst.i.tutions specifically designed to safeguard their position. It is presumed that under the circ.u.mstances society is doing what is best for the individuals. Along with the family, past and present examples of such arrangements include marriage, slavery, and the Indian reservation system.
John Leo's subsequent rationalization of this pa.s.sage was based on a quick dismissal of it as a piquant, but fair, description of the evolution of the legal concept of dependency. But Hillary herself is not so easily disguised. Children's helplessness in society must be seen, she wrote, ”as part of the organization and ideology of the political system itself.” It is not enough to say that between the give and take of powerful interests like business and labor, children get left behind. She saw a more sinister conspiracy at work--a theme which is an indelible part of her hard-drive. She perceived the hidden hand of ideology., a power elite that for whatever reason is actively anti-child. In other words, the opposition is not just wrong, it is morally perverse and out to repress good and maintain the rule of the suppressive elite.
Her early writings are also shaped by a radical academic Marxism and feminism. Christopher Lasch, one of the few intellectuals to take her writings seriously enough to criticize them, wrote a trenchant article on these Hillary essays in Criticism on the eve of the election. ”Though Clinton does not press the point,” Lasch writes, ”the movement for children's rights, as she describes it, amounts to another stage in the long struggle against patriarchy.”*11 One of Hillary's legal models was a 1972 opinion by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Douglas dissented when the Supreme Court upheld the right of Amish parents to exempt their children from compulsory schooling, on the basis of religious freedom. Douglas noted, somewhat mildly, that there were two parties with stakes in such decisions, the parents and the child. Given that the ”education of the child is a matter, on which the child will often have decided views,” and he or she may want to ”be a pianist or an astronomer or an oceanographer,” it is reasonable to seek the view of the child.
This is a relatively modest step, given that the law recognizes the child as a person (a consideration that neither the late Justice Douglas nor Hillary Clinton has ever conceded to the unborn).
It is a huge leap, however, from the judicial consideration of the child's needs and desires, and the litigation of these needs and desires by the child. Yet Hillary has been anxious to make that leap. The same woman who later forbade her daughter Chelsea from piercing her ears would advocate giving children the same rights in court as adults.*12 ”Ascribing rights to children,” Hillary wrote, ”will not immediately solve these problems, or undermine the consensus which perpetuates them. It will, however, force from the judiciary and the legislature inst.i.tutional support for the child's point of view.”
Using children to force judicial mandates and legislative change is at the core of her phiosophy. That goal would have to be accomplished, of course, by adults acting on the children's behalf.
But what is the ”child's point of view” and who will determine it?
Hillary qualified and defended her views in her 1978 essay ”Children's Rights: A Legal Perspective.”
”The fears,” she wrote, ”that many people have about the formulation of children's rights arise from their concern about increasing government control over such intra-family disputes. A letter sent out several years ago about the Child and Family Development Act urged persons to oppose the proposed bill because it would, according to their writers, allow children to take parents to court if they were ordered to take out the garbage.”
The real issues, Hillary argued, are far more important, and were already embodied in legal doctrine. ”There are, for instance, a line of cases in which a child either wished or required a certain medical procedure that his or her parents refused to provide.” Hillary cited cases in which courts allowed minors to receive abortions without parental consent, and the rulings of courts to override the refusals of Jehovah's Witnesses to allow their children to have surgery and blood transfusions.
”I prefer that intervention into an ongoing family be limited to decisions that could have long-term and possibly irreparable effects if they were not resolved,” she states. ”Decisions about motherhood and abortion, schooling, cosmetic surgery, treatment of venereal disease, or employment, and others where the decision or lack of one will significantly affect the child's future should not be made unilaterally by parents.”
In other words, don't get so worked up. Children's rights will be invoked only for the serious stuff, like terminating pregnancies, which school to attend, breast implants, whether to work in a saloon, the things that really matter; not for taking out the garbage or any other frivolous dust-up between parent and child. In Hillary's world judges, social workers, and other ”real” experts will only play a decisive role in the things that matter, the parents can still be involved in the little things.
Set aside the whole abortion issue. Set aside the fact, which Hillary herself presents, that courts will not hesitate to override the rights of parents to advance their perceptions of the health and safety of the child. The larger issue is that given the sort of lawsuit-crazy society in which we live--and I write as a lawyer myself--we know the answer is, yes, children will sue their parents over taking out the garbage, how late to stay out, and what clothes to wear and there will be lawyers who will argue that taking out the garbage is involuntary servitude.
Hillary seems utterly oblivious to the fact that in our legal system, any new right that is created is certain to be explored to the farthest frontier of absurdity. This, after all, a legal system in which suits have been filed on behalf of children against Disneyland over the trauma of being taken on a backstage tour, only to see that their beloved cartoon characters are really people in costume.*13 This is a legal system in which a girl sued a county school board for $1.5 million after being allowed to play football, only to be injured in the first scrimmage.*14 This is a legal system in which a teenager won a $50,000 award from his school when he snagged his teeth on a basketball net while making a slam-dunk, losing two teeth.*15 This is a legal system in which a California law allows children to live on their own as adults, and a Florida judge granted an eleven-year-old the right to ”divorce” his parents.*16 Whatever the extenuating circ.u.mstances, all too often law that addresses human tragedy ends up as social farce. If children were given full rights to sue, parents would become the targets of the suits of the future. Hillary also seems to have no concept that the adversarial process of lawsuits will turn parent and child into defendant and plaintiff, and bitter lifelong enemies.
Although she may have a better appreciation of the civil justice system now than when she wrote these things, Hillary also seems to have been oblivious to the reality that the cost alone of a lawsuit is enough to sink most family budgets, forcing parents to sell their homes or liquidate their retirements to fight their own children in court, or just to keep them in the family. Nor does she seem cognizant that lawsuits are ill-suited to resolve disputes over a parent-child issue because of the months or years of bitter wrangling a suit can eat up. It is not unusual for suits to drag on for years before final resolution. By the time a suit can finally be resolved in a child case, the original issue will be often moot. Many children will be well on their way to independence.
Hillary's kiddie rights solution builds on the extension of adult rights to children made in 1967 by the U.S. Supreme Court Gault decision. Gault, however, involved the rights of juveniles charged with serious crimes. (Hillary obbliquely criticized the Court's refusal to require jury trials for juveniles. Unanswered is whether she would empanel a jury of adults, or true peers. If children have rights, why not a jury of other kids, perhaps a jury of twelve-year-olds?) The courts, even while extending procedural protections to children, have always recognized the limits of treating kids as adults.
Hillary does not. She notes that children's rights are enforceable only vicariously, dependent as they are ”on adults to represent them in claims to achieve their rights.”
It is at this moment that Hillary puts her philosophy of family socialism on parade. ”Although there are difficulties attached to making the law more discriminating, they do not seem to be any greater than the problems lawmakers confront in many other areas.
Deciding what kinds of crop aid should be given for a particular year to various regions affected by different weather, pests, and prices is not easy either, but it gets done.”
It is astonis.h.i.+ng that any parent could believe that raising a child is as simple as deciding on aid to farmers, but Hillary and her husband have been politicians and wards of government most of their adult lives. Perhaps it is understandable that she would have such a warped and disconnected view of families and normal life.
In a 1977 Yale Law Review critique of The Children's Cause, by Gilbert Steiner (on which she bestowed mild approval, though registering disappointment with it for having a ”cautious att.i.tude toward government involvement in child-rearing”), Hillary called for a series of national experiments.
”If Albert Shanker wants the teachers to control day care programs, let him have an experimental grant for a few ears .... The Children's Defense Fund might be given financial support to coordinate programs under varied community control models.”
Why not experiment with a few children? Hillary expresses complete openness toward experimentation with children in a variety of ways with the exception, perhaps, of any program that would lessen the dependency of families and children on public programs, such as school choice. (Though, of course, the Clintons would later send their own daughter to the same expensive private school attended by the children of Senator Bill Bradley and Was.h.i.+ngton Post reporter Bob Woodward.*17) What comes through in these essays is the arrogant voice of the social engineer, the activist who believes that reshaping the most intimate of human relations.h.i.+ps is as simple as rotating crops.
There is more than a little foreshadowing here of Hillary's future effort to centralize the management of Arkansas education from the governor's office in Little Rock, and of her great socialist health care debacle in President Clinton's first term.
In a 1978 article Hillary wrote that the federal school lunch program ”became politically acceptable not because of arguments about hungry children, but because of an alliance between children's advocates and the a.s.sociation of school cafeteria workers who seized the opportunity to increase its members.h.i.+p.” Children, she concludes, deserve similarly ”competent and effective advocates.” It doesn't seem to matter to her that the cafeteria workers were not interested in the children, but the power of their work force. Children and their real interests don't seem nearly as important to Hillary as the power of the political lever they represent.
Just who will the children's advocates be? It is doubtful the field of kiddie rights would attract the likes of a Johnny Cochran. There would be no money in it. Who could afford such a practice? Those ”interested adults” who would answer Hillary's call to arms could only be a certain type of self-professed public interest attorneys, inspired, sustained, and directed by groups like the Children's Defense Fund. Or if cla.s.s actions or punitive damages could be added to the equation, perhaps the contingent fee trial lawyers, who have been such good friends to Bill Clinton throughout his political career, could be incentivized.
These advocates, to the extent not motivated by high fees, would come to each case not essentially as representatives of the child-client, but as activists looking to see how this little boy, or that little girl, fits into a greater strategy to expand an ent.i.tlement or control how a government agency functions.
”The notion,” Christopher Lasch commented in his criticism of Hillary's writings, ”that children are fully capable of speaking for themselves makes it possible for ventriloquists to speak through them and thus to disguise their own objectives as the child.”
Hillary wrote in a 1978 book review for Public Welfare, ”Collective action is needed on the community, state and federal level to wrest from machines and those who profit from their use the extraordinary power they hold over us all, but particularly over children.”
The idea that power must be wrested from ”machines” is peculiar, ignoring that, at bottom, Hillary's children's crusade is a hard-nosed exercise in expanding power in a different direction, in the direction of public interest trial lawyers with a social engineering agenda. Children are useful, just as migrant workers and the indigent elderly are useful, as tools to pry loose the controls, to get into the guts of the machinery of law and governance.
Children are the rhetorical vehicles she still uses as first lady, whether pressing for national health care or to get Congress to pay UN dues. She writes: ”Since many of its [the Carter administration's] top policy-makers are reportedly inclined favorably towards children's programs, saving the 'family' may become the justification for, rather than remain the nemesis of, those programs.” Her use of quotes are telling. The future of the family makes for a good propaganda point.
”Apparently we share so much apprehension about potential harm to cherished, albeit fantasized, family values that programs for children must demonstrate immediate success or risk extinction.”
”Fantasized family values.” The meaning is unmistakable. The government is the real provider of values, and the real source of necessary change against traditionalist ”cherished,” ”fantasized”
family values.
When the 1992 presidential election came, Hillary's radical stance had been blurred by her own election-motivated moderated rhetoric and by the friendly treatment she received from sympathetic members of the liberal establishment press. She was able to take what should have been an embarra.s.sment in her past and transform it into a point of pride. As the wife of a presidential candidate, Hillary, the child advocate, took on Vice President Dan Quayle.
Shortly after Quayle's ”Murphy Brown” speech, Hillary attacked the vice president's observations before a San Francisco audience, saying, ”I wonder if he lives in the same America we live in, if he sees the same things we see. He's trying to blame the Los Angeles riots and blame the social problems in this country on a TV sitcom.”*18 That wasn't it at all. In attacking values disseminated weekly by the producers, writers, and directors of the Murphy Brown program, Quayle took to task a popular emblem of Hillary's own philosophy. He pointed to a growing body of empirical evidence that children raised by single parents--by a nontraditional family structure, in other words--are exposed to higher risks for everything from drug abuse to suicide and teen pregnancy.
Quayle had the full weight of social science and the facts on his side. Hillary had a sympathetic press and Saul Alinsky's tactics.
She had picked her target, frozen it, personalized it, and polarized the debate, crus.h.i.+ng Dan Quayle like a can of Tab.
Soren Kierkegaard foresaw Hillary's political tactics--of achieving radical aims under moderate-sounding New Democrat rhetoric--with an almost uncanny prescience. ”A pa.s.sionate, tumultuous age will overthrow everything, pull everything down,” Kierkegaard wrote, ”but a revolutionary age that is at the same time reflective and pa.s.sionless leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance.”
Hillary would likewise empty the oldest of human relations--the family--of its significance and its independence. Her crusade is not rooted in Blackstone or even John Wesley. It appears principled, but it is really tactical. It has a spiritual appeal, but it is really about the temporal achievement of power.
It is Saul Alinsky to the core.
SIX.
WATERGATE TO WHITEWATER.
”Ethical standards must be elastic to stretch with the times.”
-- SAUL ALINSKY, RULES FOR RADICALS.
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