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Freedom's
Orphans
Contemporary
Liberalism and the Fate of American Children
by
David L. Tubbs
Princeton, 248 pp., $60
"Won't
somebody please think of the children?!" That the writers on The
Simpsons chose this exclamation as the representative "family
values" battle cry reminds us that, when child welfare advocates
open their mouths, many hear the hysterical plea of Reverend Lovejoy's
wife. But what happens when a whole society operates on the assumption
that Helen Lovejoy is a crank--that kids will be fine no matter what
adults do?
Of
course, most Americans do not, in fact, believe this. But it appears that
much of elite America does. And according to David Tubbs, our courts and
universities fail to adequately take the needs of children into account.
In championing vast personal liberty for adults, he contends, postwar
political theorists and jurists have left children to fend for
themselves. And this new volume delivers a scorching criticism of modern
political and legal theory and practice.
Tubbs
differs from the Lovejoys in two crucial respects. First, as he notes,
his "book contains no religious 'agenda'" and makes no
theological arguments. In fact, Tubbs was inspired to write it by his
entirely secular government job as a child-support investigator. It was
there that he realized that "contemporary liberal thinkers were
minimizing or denying the importance of what were previously considered
essential elements of children's welfare." In graduate school at
Prince-ton--a doctorate in political theory being the second difference
from either Lovejoy--Tubbs then developed a penetrating response to
modern liberalism. Now he is a fellow of the Witherspoon Institute and
professor at King's College, Cambridge, and Freedom's Orphans is
the first fruits of his labors.
We
all know that children differ from adults in many crucial ways. Besides
their evident physical immaturity, Tubbs reminds us, children are
"mentally, morally, and emotionally" underdeveloped. Unlike the
autonomous, self-sufficient adults at the focus of modern political and
legal theory, children are highly impressionable and depend on others for
everything--and not just material goods. Their central need is a proper
upbringing so that they can become self-reliant adults.
Liberals
used to recognize this, urging special care for those whom Hubert
Humphrey described as being at the dawn of life. But over
time--especially in the wake of the upheavals of the 1960s and the rise
of "Me Generation" ideology--liberal thinkers made adults'
personal freedom central. Well-intentioned and initially subtle, this
shift ultimately produced contemporary liberalism's marriage to lifestyle
liberation, "a preoccupation with rights for adults" and
disregard of "competing social interests, including some fundamental
to children's welfare."
Tubbs
traces this development to Isaiah Berlin's famous 1958 essay, "Two
Concepts of Liberty," which advanced the idea that
"negative" freedom was (in Tubbs's words) "more humane and
more likely to further human dignity." Tubbs describes
"negative" freedom as "unhindered choice," the result
of "moral reticence," the reluctance to "distinguish
between the good and the bad use of legally protected freedoms."
In
the face of Soviet impositions of "the good life," Berlin's
fears were understandable. Less explicable, however, is why current
theorists such as Amy Gutmann think it impossible to "specify
objectively the good life" or why George Kateb argues that
"there is no good life." All of this is in stark contrast to
the traditional conception of liberty, so-called "positive"
freedom, which Tubbs describes as "self-governance or
self-direction," the freedom to resist temptations, irrational
desires, and external pressures in order to guide one's own actions
toward authentic fulfillment. Surely, Tubbs insists, we can distinguish
"better lives from worse lives."
"Negative"
freedom seems to have won the day, however, and what Berlin started in
political theory Ronald Dworkin has championed in legal -theory. Arguing
for a "moral" reading of the Constitution that seeks to treat
all people and their choices with "equal concern and
respect," Dworkin claims that paternalistic laws (against
prostitution, for example) and content censoring (of pornography, for
example) are unjust. Since freedom should be understood in a "negative"
sense without any reference to good or bad, the state can make no law
that shows preference or disdain for citizens' choices.
One
problem here is that these theories recognize no one but the
self-sufficient, autonomous adult. As Tubbs notes, there is an
inexcusable failure among "jurists and political theorists to
consider the interests of children in even a perfunctory way."
Dworkin's major work, Freedom's Laws, makes almost no mention of
children. So if Dworkin is to show all citizens "equal concern and
respect," what about children's unique needs? Might the free choices
of adults to broadcast pornographic images diminish children's ability to
develop the self-control necessary for healthy adult relationships? And
doesn't this show that some conception of human flourishing ("the
good life") is required?
But
emphasis on personal liberty isn't the only culprit. Another strand of
late 20th-century thought--feminist political theory--has contributed
significantly to the plight of America's children. Tubbs considers the
work of one prominent feminist scholar, Susan Moller Okin, who argues
that the archetypical figure in political thought is the adult man--women
and children are ignored. To remedy this, she has developed some Rawlsian
themes that just political regimes order inequalities to serve the least
well off and keep positions of power and wealth open to everyone, and
argues that the traditional family is unjust for limiting the role of
women. She advocates a genderless society where women will be able to
succeed on the same exact terms as men.
While
some of Okin's goals may be admirable, she forgets that her feminist
critique is supposed to be advanced on behalf of women and children.
Her advocacy of equal respect for all family forms (including same-sex
parenting and single motherhood "by choice") flies in the face
of social science that shows children do best when reared by their
married mother and father. Some aspects of "gender," at least
when it comes to parenting, appear built-in. Moreover, Okin argues that
single women have a right to bear children outside of marriage and then
deserve vast governmental assistance. But Tubbs persuasively argues
against "the idea that a benign and omnicompetent welfare state can
assume the role of an absent parent in many thousands of
households." He exposes Okin's failure to apply consistently her own
principles of justice to meet children's needs.
Even
more devastating is his scathing criticism of recent jurisprudence that
assumes there is a constitutional right to nonmarried sex. He begins by
discussing the "right to privacy" in connection to
contraception. Though the rationale may seem foreign to most people
today, states actually made laws against contraception in order to
promote stable marriages and reduce fornication, adultery, and
illegitimacy. Without contraception, people were less likely to sleep
around. But in a series of cases beginning in 1965, the Supreme Court
denied any legitimate public purpose in contraception laws, and
manufactured rights--for married couples, then nonmarried adults, and
finally minors--to sexual privacy and reproductive liberty that somehow
excluded regulating the sale of contraceptives.
Tubbs
observes a disturbing trend: The justices focused solely on the adults
having sex and not at all on the children sex produces. Furthermore,
little attention has been paid to the crucial distinction between the
desirability and constitutionality of any particular law.
Tubbs
also identifies a perplexing inconsistency in the Supreme Court's
rulings: When it comes to First Amendment cases dealing with the rights
of adults to "expression" (often in the realm of
"indecency"), the Court regards children as psychologically and
morally resolute, resistant to the raunchiest material, capable of simply
"averting their eyes." But when it comes to First Amendment
cases dealing with prayer in schools and other religious matters, the
Court proclaims the same children to be impressionable infants
defenseless against the peer pressure of praying classmates.
The
Supreme Court gets the risks and benefits of sex and religion exactly
backwards: Sexually explicit material has immediate sensual appeal,
arouses without consent, and leads to a host of negative consequences
when acted upon by teenagers. Meanwhile, religious activity normally
requires a supportive community and significant prodding ("Say your
prayers!" "Go to church!"), and social science reveals the
great societal goods that religion serves. The only explanation for the
Court's discrepancy is ideology--a sheer preference for the liberty of
adults, when it comes to pornography, coupled with hostility toward
religion in the public square.
In
the end, Tubbs suggests that the negative effects suffered by children
could be reduced if we realized that lifestyle liberty is not the only
good at stake. While Tubbs does not suggest that children's needs should
always come before adult interests, he urges political and legal
theorists to embrace a pluralistic conception of value that includes
adult and child welfare. Sacrifices and trade-offs will have to be
made, but adults cannot always come first.
At
times dry and unnecessarily detailed, Freedom's Orphans is
nonetheless a critically important book that should spark debate within
the academy, the courts, and our legislative chambers. It makes it clear
that sexual liberation and secularist impulses carry a high price to be
paid by the nation's children. Perhaps there is more to Helen Lovejoy's
plea than we thought.
Ryan
T. Anderson, assistant editor at First Things, is a Phillips
Foundation fellow and assistant director of the Program in Bioethics at
the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, N.J.
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