Rand Paul Quotes
The state doesn’t own your children. The parents do.
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.
Rand Paul, U. S. Senator (Republican, KY), Statement opposing the right of the state to require vaccinations against serious communicable diseases, PBS Evening News, February 5, 2015
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Citizen of U. S. & Israel
The Supreme Court found that the U.S. Constitution protects this
This was not original with Mobuto. It came from an famous legal opinion in a California case. See {584276}
The NRA issued regulations making many forms of child labor illegal. Many opposed to the idea, saw it as an attack on the freedom of a parent to decide whether a child would or could work and under what considerations. A father could send his son to work in a dangerous coal mine 12 hours a day and boys grew up never seeing the sun shine. This point of view and “right” of the parent, actually prevailed and the Supreme Court declared the NRA unconstitutional. It took a Constitutional Amendment that passed with overwhelming popularity to allow the government to regulate sweatshops, coal mines and other conditions of child labor. Like most things conservatives opposed, the association of a program or reform with communism traditionally stirred opposition, even to something as benign as child labor regulation.
At the time, the mother had no legal rights whatsoever over the upbringing of their own children. If the father did not want the mother to nurse a child, she could not. Although born and educated in the United States, she lived mostly in England and was politically active there.
What a difference a century makes. 100 years after, this was no longer a radical anarchist position. It was the position of many conservative Republicans, Libertarians, and Tea Party types.
Randal Howard Paul is an American physician and politician serving as the junior United States Senator from Kentucky since 2011. He is the son of former three-time presidential candidate and twelve-term U.S. Representative of Texas, Ron Paul.
