Last month, Mayor Tom Potter of Portland signed a document written by children and youth with the assistance of a few adult advisors, called "The Bill of Rights for the Children and Youth of the City of Portland and Multnomah County". 

This "bill" has the distinction, in the long tradition of progressive youth politics, of being the first such "bill" to be adopted by any city in the United States.  Being part of that tradition, it is hard to resist slipping into outright cynicism concerning the origin and aims of the Portland "bill".  It is obviously awkward to attack "child rights", especially when children are the authors of these lists of demands.  The difficulty involved in resisting it, is why youth rights is so important to the left.

The most powerful and core affirmation of the progressive "rights" movement is always "equality":  "oppression" is thus always conflated with "inequality", "justice" is the rectification of "oppression" so defined, and "rights" are the elements of that programme of rectification of "injustice" so defined. 

For this reason,  "youth rights" has for a long time been very important to egalitarian politics.  The Young Communist League, 1998, "The Youth and Student Bill of Rights", illuminates the connection:


The Green Party of San Diego County Platform, "Youth Rights", seeks to resonate with the principle, received as self-evident, that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness":

All human beings have the right to a life that will let them achieve their full potential. Young people are one of the least protected classes of human beings, yet they represent our future. We must ensure they have an upbringing that allows them to take their place as functioning, productive and self-actualized members of their community.

The Green Party supports the rights of youth:

Youth are important to the left, because they are not equal to adults.  This makes them readily exploitable by a perspective that conflates "inequality" with "oppression".  Our society resists the "independent existence" of children, we deny children the vote, we over-rule their desires and compromise their privacy in our homes, we discipline our children with warnings and punishments as we see fit.  This is what is meant, if the left says "Young people are one of the least protected classes of human beings". 

The agenda for correction is always a wish-list for tax-supported entitlements, and designs for social reform, to correct the structures that support this "oppression". 

The Portland bill is far from being the most radical example of "Youth rights". And yet, it shares with youth-exploitive progressivism, a similar assessment of children and youth. 

Predictably, "Mother" and "Father" are never mentioned in the Portland bill, because they represent continuity with the religion, culture and values of the Family conceived as an integral but independent institution, which sustains the unequal treatment of "our children".   However, a child's "right to privacy in our homes" is featured prominently, because this represents the ideal of independent existence that we value so dearly in our adult society.

As in all such declarations of "youth rights" in the past, the Portland "Bill" contains no condemnation of those who use their positions of trust, as teachers and governors, to publicly and viciously ridicule and humiliate children for the religious guidance that they receive from their father and mother.  Indeed, we are promised intolerance for teaching our children that no one is doomed to be a slave to his sexual desires, if such an attitude is labeled "insensitive".

Notably, the document contains a few great ironies.  Contrary to the general theme, that children who "speak out" are actualized future-adults with entitlement to be treated as such, the "bill" says:  "We recognize that children should not have control over specific medical decisions".  Here indeed is a way to save children from grave injustices, if only we insist on a child's right as a child, not to be made responsible for specific medical decisions.  And yet, the community denies that parents should even be notified of such decisions, much less that they should have authority sufficient to decide; and it is not the intention of the "bill" to overturn this.

Such scant and grudging acknowledgement of the weakness of children accentuates the basic weakness of all of these documents.  Children have an implicit right to be treated as children, derived from their obvious dependence upon the love of their father and mother, to which they have an evident right (in the authentic sense of that word).

Youth are denied their rights as children, when the city and county provide shelters that perpetuate, and enable immersion into, a decadent and dangerous sub-culture of self-destruction, crime and criminality.  These misguided projects are complicit in robbing children of their rights, when they are prevented, or refuse, to inform or confer with parents, sometimes to the grave endangerment of those they seek to help, especially in the case of the mentally ill.  Our schools also interfere in the same way, or find themselves forced to do so.  Every school in Portland presumes that is a matter of their own discretion whether to advise parents of their child's enquiry for birth-control or abortion, or to consult with parents prior to dispensing legal opinions or sexual identity counseling to their child.  Even the public library may refuse to advise parents of materials checked out to a child, or even of a child's over-due materials or fines. 

Parents in Portland are frequently told that they do not have the right to ask what the mayor asks every morning: "how are our children doing?".  In doing so, these institutions not only presume to themselves an authority to which they have no proper claim, they oppress the rights of the child.

Due legal process should be demanded for any case of exception to the child's basic right to the protection of attentive parents - but the "bill of rights" is built on corner-cases and exceptions, ignoring foundational issues.  The false and romantic assertion is implicit throughout that, unless a child is treated as autonomous and self-determining in the context of his home, school and community, he is oppressed.  Rather, oppression is the act of depriving the weak of their rightful protection, subjecting them to forces that exploit or harm them either by act or by willful inaction. 

Progressive "youth rights" does not seek to correct the oppression of children.  Instead, the ideal that guides it is so-called civil emancipation, which when referring to children accomplishes nothing but to excuse appropriate authority from its civil obligation to care for children.  Progressivism ignores what is self-evident about children - that they are the most cherished, protected and hopefully regarded class of people in any sane society, including our society. 

But we are losing our sanity.  Because youth-exploitive politics does not understand what justice demands on behalf of the weak, it does not protect the family and its special and unequal structures of nurture.   Instead, it seeks to replace that fortress with demands of future funding out of which they may build a dystopia in which all people are treated as children, and where children have no regard for father and mother.