Elián: Clinton Administration Is Sanctioning Child Abuse

The treatment of Elian Gonzalez by the U.S. Department of Justice is nothing more than state-sponsored child abuse, said a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute.

"President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno are both willing accomplices in the ongoing and flagrant child abuse against Elian," said Edwin A. Locke, an internationally known professor of psychology and management at the University of Maryland.

Locke said that Juan Miguel Gonzalez, Elian's father, should be ashamed that he allowed his boy to be snatched by gun-toting government storm troopers. And he should be even more ashamed to be willing to return his son to a totalitarian dictatorship where Elian will be owned by the state.

"If Juan Miguel had any sense of decency, he would be ecstatic that his son has the opportunity to grow up in a free country," Locke said. "If he wants his son to grow up in a dictatorship, that alone makes him unfit to be the boy's father. Can there be any more flagrant a form of child abuse than condemning your own son to a life of slavery?"

Locke added that children are not property but sovereign beings with the same fundamental rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as adults, and anyone who would deprive a child of these rights is committing a crime.

"Individual rights take precedence over parental rights; that is why we take children away from child-beaters," said Locke. "Stripping a child of all rights for the rest of his life is much worse. The moral principle on which America was founded is that individual rights are sacred and inalienable. If we do not uphold this principle, we become just another second-rate nation -- soon to disappear in the dustbin of history. Sending Elian back to Cuba means betraying the soul of our nation."


The following has been produced by the Ayn Rand Institute's MediaLink department. Visit MediaLink at http://www.aynrand.org/medialink/.

The author is a contributing writer to Capitalism Magazine.