Nij writes:
quote:
I am not equating them except in the area of denial of rights. If you kill your child through your silly healing ideas, you have denied their rights. If you rape them because of whatever mental issues you have, you have denied their rights.
Then you are equating them. Don't pretend that you're not. Step up to your argument and own it. If you didn't mean to equate the two, why did you bring it up? That doesn't mean they are identical, but it does mean that you think the logic we use to conclude it is bad for one is the same logic we use to conclude it is bad for the other.
quote:
That is the sense in which they are equated. None other. So please, stop dodging the question, and answer: are all denials of a child's rights okay, or are there limits?
If that is your question, then try to stick to that. By deliberately inserting an example that you know to be highly incendiary and will necessarily suck up all the oxygen in the room, you guaranteed that nobody was going to be thinking about the question of issues of consent and would only be thinking of rape.
Indeed, parents are responsible for the upbringing of their children. If we can agree that it is inappropriate for the state to enforce a strict standard across all aspects of upbringing, then hopefully we can also agree that it is inappropriate to allow absolutely anything. If you feel the need to introduce an outrageous example in order to prove that point, then you should make sure that you, too, consider it to be an outrageous example. It isn't enough to simply say that you're not equating it because you are. Instead, you need to point out that one is a case of hyperbole brought forward simply to point out the fact that there is a line between everything and nothing and we're simply arguing over where that line is to be drawn.
One thing to help show that is to then identify the general area where you think the line is to be drawn and discuss the difficulties in determining what belongs on what side. Clearly parents get to decide certain physical aspects of their child's life. But at what point does a parent's perogative go too far? We may not agree with the specific way in which a parent feeds a child such as by always kowtowing to the child's whims such that the kid is only eating things like hot dogs, mac-and-cheese, and peanut butter and jelly, but how can there be a complaint if the kid isn't malnourished? Yes, the kid's palate is going to be very limited and there's a good chance that he or she is going to have a hard time maintaining a good diet as an adult, but that isn't up to us to determine.
It would seem that we need to determine what "harm" is and then define if that "harm" is something that is problematic. What is, "Well, I wouldn't do it that way," and what is, "That's really hurting"? It's a hard choice, and we see this coming up in other places such as vaccination.
Rrhain
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