“It’s as bad as slavery.”
Cathy Seipp shines a light on what Michael Newdow is up to when he doesn’t have his panties in a twist over two words and a pause:
“You’re taking one person’s life and ruining it to make another person’s better,” says [father’s] movement leader Michael Newdow, who also laments the fact that “women can choose to end a pregnancy but men can’t.” Personally, I don’t think Newdow should have any custody or visitation rights regarding his daughter, since he never married her mother (nor should he be therefore required to pay child support), but he’s angry that he couldn’t (for instance) take the daughter out hunting for frogs late one night because her mother said no: “It’s as bad as slavery.”
The solution, according to Newdow and his allies, is for each parent to make all decisions for the children during their own custodial time — which might sound reasonable for a few seconds until you consider the real-life applications: Mom RSVPs for a birthday party or class outing but the event is scheduled for dad’s time; Dad says that’s his time and he doesn’t feel like chauffering the kid to the activity. Children are reduced to pieces of property — which is indeed how they were historically regarded (property of their fathers, that is) until the mid-19th Century.
I suggest that any parent who thinks “parental rights” are more important than a child’s best interest should be automatically disqualified from being the custodial parent. Parental rights are an absurd notion in relation to children anyway. It’s certainly a basic human right not be awakened several times a night by someone screaming at you — any guard who made the same demands on prisoners that all infants make on their parents would violate the Geneva Convention several times over — but if that “right” took precedence over the child’s right to be cared for, humanity would have died out long ago.