Jimmy Carter, What's Right for Children

• Citation: Vol. 20 No. 1
• Publication year: 2006

WHAT'S RIGHT FOR CHILDREN

Jimmy Carter^*

Of course, I would like to see the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child ratified. If this was unanimous, nations that have already ratified it would be much more enthusiastic about implementing it. But both political and theological objections make American ratification of the Convention unlikely.

Our country was founded on a premise that is incomprehensible to a lot of foreign visitors, and maybe to many Americans, too: We are a collection of semi-sovereign or autonomous states. In the negotiations to conclude the drafting and ratification of the United States Constitution, we left many major rights and powers with the states, and only a few were subsumed within the federal government. Because the rights of states are very precious to Americans, we have been averse for many years to the adoption of international treaties or agreements or conventions that would encroach on the rights of individual states.

There are some very strong feelings in this country about religion, too. As you know, there is a biblical ordination that the father is the head of the household. And some provisions in the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child contradict that supremacy of the father. In fact, one great argument within my own Baptist denomination is whether women are to be subservient to their husbands. A major portion of Baptists in this country believe that a woman has no right even to speak in a religious worship service. I disagree with this, but that's a premise. Given this understanding, to elevate a child, as the Convention does, to a position of near equality with a father is a very disturbing thing for some who believe in that biblical ordination of a father as superior.

There is a phrase in the Convention that tends to get around that objection because the Convention recognizes responsibilities of parents to provide "appropriate direction and guidance in the exercise by the child of the rights recognized" by this Convention. So there is an escape clause there for those who want to find it. I guess many nations of the world, 192 of them, have in fact taken advantage of that distinct clause, knowing that parents can deal with children who need direction or who need restraint or who need discipline within the family itself, and that seems to be permissible.

There is another very important circumstance that has arisen in the United States in the last few years, and that is the move toward fundamentalism in religion and in government and the increasingly overt effort to meld the two- even though Thomas Jefferson said there should be a fence or a wall built between religion and government. That statement and the premise on which I was raised as a child, separation of church and state, is being increasingly challenged and broken down. This fundamentalist tendency is becoming more deeply ingrained, not only from the church pulpit, but also within the top councils of our government.

One of the premises among fundamentalists in both religion and government is that there should be a strong aversion to any interference by a foreign government or foreign organization, including the U.N., into the internal affairs of our country. The argument is that America is indeed sovereign, and there should be no recognition of an international agreement that might challenge or decrease the right of Americans to be completely sovereign and independent. This has...