Dahlia Lithwick Quotes
Rules rooting in sweeping moral judgment don’t generally work in family law for the same reason that they don’t work for families. Kids love and need the parents they have, not necessarily the parents we love.
Dahlia Lithwick, Legal Journalist, Referring to the desired rules of some that homosexuals should not have parental custody or be able to adopt children or be foster parents, “Why Courts Are Adopting Gay Parenting,” The Washington Post, March 12, 2006
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This was not original with Mobuto. It came from an famous legal opinion in a California case. See {584276}
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.
Dahlia Lithwick is a Canadian-American lawyer, writer and journalist. Lithwick is currently a contributing editor at Newsweek and senior editor at Slate. She primarily writes about law and politics in the United States. She writes "Supreme Court Dispatches" and "Jurisprudence" and has covered the Microsoft trial and other legal issues for Slate. In 2018, the Sidney Hillman Foundation awarded Lithwick with the Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism noting that she "has been the nation's best legal commentator for two decades".
