Daniel J. Elazar Quotes
Divorce, which was once no more than tolerated out of necessity, if that, has now become a right. Everyone is now free to divorce as easily as is possible. Yet it cannot be said that divorce does not infringe upon the rights of others. The rights of children to be raised in a family environment are clearly damaged by divorce, but this is not deemed to be a serious enough infringement to limit the right of divorce
Citizen of U. S. & Israel
Daniel J. Elazar, 1934-1999, Political Scientist Secretary of the American Political Science Association, President, Israel Political Science Association, Member, U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, Founder and President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Changing Conceptions of Rights in the United States and the West, 1994
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This was an amazingly controversial quotation. At first glance it seemed like a typical position that a very conservative, anti-government politicization might take—the government should not interfere with a parents bringing up their children. However, there was a more ominous part of the quotations. While everyone in America would certainly agree with Paul that the Government does not “own” the children, there are few who would agree with the point that follows—that the Parents “own” the child. Paul reveals the normally hidden aspect of his politics—that he is highly influenced by the extreme, Biblical Literalist Fundamentalist Christians and Jews. In the Old Testament, the Father really did OWN the child. The latter was his chattel. A father had the legal and duty-bound power of life and death over his children. Most American Christians and Jews have long since abandoned the literal biblical notion of children being owned by a father and today see a child as a person who can sometimes need the protection of the state just like any other citizen. And there are occasions where the child must be PROTECTED from the parents who may be acting within their fundamentalist notions of Biblical rights and duties, but not with their civil rights and duties. Ownership, of a child is not one of the modern civil rights of parents.
Daniel Judah Elazar was a political scientist known for his seminal studies of political culture of the US states. He was professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and Temple University in Pennsylvania, and director of the Center for the Study of Federalism at Temple University and the founder and president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
