The Church and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

Neither Left nor Right but Catholic

THE CHURCH AND THE UN CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD

By Stephen M. Krason

     The beginnings of the Obama administration marked a renewed effort to have the U.S. Senate ratify the long-stalled UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Signed by President Clinton in the 1990s but never ratified—which means that it has never become part of “the law of the land,” which status the Constitution gives to treaties—the Convention has been agreed to by almost all the countries of the world. Many provisions of the Convention sound appealing. It speaks about the right to life of every child. It says children may not be treated as chattel. It says that children have the right to be cared for by their parents, and it stresses the responsibilities of parents toward their children. It claims to respect the rights of parents in providing moral and religious guidance to their children. These points sound consistent with the teachings of the Church, and indeed the Holy See ratified the CRC in 1990 within months of its promulgation.

     There is really a very different story about the CRC. In 1995, the Society of Catholic Social Scientists (SCSS) sent a letter to all members of the Senate urging defeat of the CRC. Examining the often ambiguous language of the CRC and considering how various UN committees and entities were interpreting its provisions, the SCSS argued that the CRC would “subject parents to close bureaucratic supervision,” and that parents who went against “the dictates of the prevailing cultural trends” could be subjected to civil and even criminal penalties and seizure of their children by the state.” If one thinks such conclusions extreme, he should just consider the actions of countries such as Sweden and Germany—which readily embraced the treaty and whose views on children’s rights have been internationally influential—in dealing with homeschooling families.

      Article 12 of the CRC says children have the right to express their views freely on “all matters.” Does that include their parents’ child-rearing and disciplinary decisions? Article 13 asserts the right to receive all kinds of information through the “media of the child’s choice.” Does that right include sexual and contraceptive information? Does it mean that parents may not regulate their children’s television viewing? Does it mean that children have the right to access pornography? Article 14 speaks about the child’s freedom of religion. Does this mean that if parents want a child to receive religious instruction and say daily prayers that he can legally resist? Not only are there many child advocacy organizations ready to provide such help to children who are supposedly being oppressed by their parents, but some outfits that primarily view religious liberty as freedom from religion. If this seems extreme, don’t organizations go to court on behalf of teen girls so they can get abortions in spite of parental opposition? Don’t school-based clinics provide contraceptives to teens and pre-teens without their parents’ knowledge or approval? The CRC is, after all, a legal document—binding on the nations that ratify it—and it expects those nations all to legally implement and enforce its provisions.

      The SCSS letter also pointed to “the ultimate in distant, arrogant bureaucratic structures”: an international committee of ten “experts” established by Article 43 to oversee the CRC’s implementation. There is little doubt, in light of the kinds of “experts,” activists, and functionaries who have shaped and man the child welfare structures in Western nations—whose perspective inspired the CRC and who dominate UN conferences on such matters—that such a committee would be unsympathetic to sound, traditional views on the family and child-rearing.

    Noted family rights attorney and homeschooling leader Michael Farris is the president of ParentalRights.org, an organization dedicated to defeating the CRC and to securing the adoption of a Parental Rights Amendment to the Constitution (this writer is on its board), has pointed to the following additional facts about the CRC: 1) It expressly forbids corporal punishment of children, which means that parents would be forbidden to—and, I should add, likely criminally prosecuted for—spank their children; 2) The pro-CRC ABA has contended that teaching about Christianity and omitting “alternate worldviews” even in Christian schools would be against the CRC; 3) The “best interest of the child” principle enshrined in the CRC would essentially give a government operative the legal authority to override any parental decision the operative disagreed with; and 4) A nation’s allowing parents to remove their children from school sex education classes has been held by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child to be against the CRC.

     In light of the clear assault on parental rights by the CRC, one wonders why the Holy See ratified it. Indeed, when one CRC opponent tried to arrange a talk pointing out the CRC’s problems at a parish in Oregon, she was turned down because “the Church is for it.” The fact is that the Holy See included with its ratification a number of reservations, or clarifications about how it understands and interprets the CRC. Most critically, the Holy See said that it interprets the CRC in a way that “safeguards the primary and inalienable rights of parents.” It also interpreted such a provision as that calling for family planning and education services for children as only those that are morally acceptable (e.g., natural family planning). It also viewed the CRC as a way to protect the rights of the unborn child. Not long ago, Pope Benedict called for a “correct application” of the CRC.

     What the Holy See ratified was a document that it saw as protecting the true dignity of children—both born and unborn—not the anti-parent, anti-family manifesto it has turned out to be. In some respects, what has happened with the CRC has been like what happened after Vatican II in the Western world: false interpretation and faulty implementation replaced the true meaning of the Council and its actions. In both cases, too, the distortion was ideologically-driven and often orchestrated.

     To say that somehow the U.S. Senate should ratify the CRC because the Holy See has or that American Catholics are morally bound to support the CRC for that reason is like the erroneous claim of the “liberal” Catholic academics that John Boehner is a dissenter from Catholic social teaching because he favors cuts in federal social welfare programs. It confuses Church teaching with a mere policy approach. Catholics must uphold the dignity of children and the moral obligations concerning their upbringing, treatment, and welfare, not a matter subject to prudential judgment and disagreement such as a treaty. Moreover, the people who clamor loudest for the CRC are often those who are themselves ready to reject the elements most promotive of the dignity of children: marital indissolubility, a sound family life, parental rights, and even the very right to life of the child himself when in the womb.

     Those pushing the CRC’s ratification in the Senate have no interest in reservations like the Holy See’s. They are also not bothered by the UN’s troublesome interpretations of the CRC over the past twenty years; in fact, they agree with them. If the Holy See had foreseen these developments, one wonders if it would have ratified at all. A further problem is that ratification in the U.S. will have an effect scarcely felt in the Vatican City State: a changing of laws that in everyday terms will further embolden an anti-parent, anti-family child welfare bureaucracy (the so-called child protective system and others) and have deleterious consequences for millions of families.

     What the CRC, in practice, has represented is an unprecedented escalation of the assault on the family by Western elites—and thereby an attack on the very children it claims to be helping and on the moral and social teaching of the Church.

Stephen M. Krason is Professor of Political Science and Legal Studies at Franciscan University of Steubenville and Co-Founder and President of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists.