The Right to Choose
We might typically associate the above words with the abortion debate, but I use them in a different sense. I use them because I believe it’s important to remember that there is a whole class of individuals to whom the most fundamental and basic rights and choices are denied, in the here and now, not some distant past.
Take the case of Clayton Giles, a fourteen-year old currently involved in a bitter dispute with his mother involving a tangled web of custody issues and nonsensical court rulings that have pushed Clayton to take action in the form of a hunger strike, hoping to “make the courts aware that kids are human, not property, and that we deserve to be heard at the same time as our parents.”
The fact that one must go on a hunger strike to try and make the point that kids are human beings capable of making their own decisions seems typical of the absurdity surrounding the treatment of young people by the law today. In Clayton’s case, for example, he is unable to leave the country on vacation, or even get a learner’s permit without his mother’s permission; (although after a long and arduous legal battle he is now able to live with his father, he is still required to get permission from his mother for many things).
Clayton resides in Canada, but the situation is much the same here in the United States. Indeed, Clayton should be thankful for his sympathetic father—I recall hearing about a case here in the States where a young person on a hunger strike had his rights violated by his parents, who had him force-fed intravenously. While one might sympathize with such parents (scared that their children might die of starvation), the fact remains that parents can only do this to their children because they are under that magic age of 18, and because children aren’t recognized as much more then property. (Or maybe the better analogy would be that children are recognized as pets. After all, there are limits and regulations regarding what you can do to your pets, and a certain minimum standard of care expected for pets by pet owners. But even pets are protected against physical abuse, something that cannot be said for children in many places within the U.S.)
The denial of basic respect for the rights of young people is further compounded by the absurdity that, being viewed—as they are—by the legal system as something below the status of human (or “person” or “citizen” or whatever you might want to call it, the particular word not really mattering because I’ve heard three different legal definitions of “citizen” alone!), that these enslaved young people don’t even get the luxury of choosing their master when their parents get divorced. No, you see, these young people are “too immature” to make such decisions, too “ignorant” to take such matters into their own hands.
I suppose that it was in the same manner that the emancipated black people of the South were too “ignorant” to be able to vote, and thus the governments had to protect themselves by passing laws requiring special voting tests exclusively for black people, requiring them to deal with such absurdities as memorizing the whole Constitution of the United States (a document which I doubt a majority of the American population has read even ONCE). After all, those “emancipated” blacks had to be held to a higher standard for their own “protection” and the protection of local governments, just as youth seeking emancipation before the magic age of 18 today (only those 16 and above qualify mind you—so much for “liberty and justice for all”!) have to be held to a higher standard for their own protection and the “protection” of local governments (who, one deduces, need protection from swarms of highly-interested and motivated young people seeking to participate in the affairs of the adult world “before their time”). Thus, the mockery that is our youth “emancipation” (ha!) system is explained.
While the entrenched forces may at times seem too powerful to overcome, and the question “what can we do?” might at times seem to lack a sufficient answer—this is not one of those times! We should all do our part to encourage Clayton Giles in his effort to bring greater respect to the rights of the young. His email address is <claytongiles@home.com>. I’d also encourage you to visit his site at <www.legalkids.com>, which has a message board, guest-book, daily journal, and more items of interest (such as how to contact the court currently denying him his rights). And since it was his page that inspired the present article, it seems fitting to end it with a quote from this brave and eloquent young man, regarding the lack of choice children have in divorce situations:
“The lawyers claim that all children are incapable of making rational decisions about where they should live after their family breaks up .... They could avoid the expensive applications and trials by letting us say what we want but then they would not make any money off our parents. But just because some kids can’t explain why they want something, doesn’t mean that they don’t know what they want. We want to be heard.”