Over the past few months Oregon has gotten in the news for a variety of reasons relating to the highly contested boundaries between the state’s right to enforce its own views of public health and the right of parents to refuse care for their children that they disapprove of for one reason or another.  Speaking purely personally, this is the sort of fight that I view in similar respects to that of Aliens vs. Predator, a fight between two predatory and abusive authorities where I do not necessarily want either party to win outright, as either a state or parental authority that was able to proceed unchecked would present a major threat to the well-being of children.  At least in this particular case we are dealing with authorities when both of them seek to provide what is best for children but where there are severe disagreements as to what constitutes that well-being.  A great many contemporary medical procedures are favored by public health advocates but which have at best dubious or doubtful health benefits, while parents may often have ideological commitments in addition to an interest in the physical well-being of children, just as there are ideological commitments that are involved in the state’s efforts at enforcing public health which are often not entirely praiseworthy.

Since its beginning, public health has always been deeply connected with politics.  Cases like that of the tragic “Typhoid Mary” showed where administrative punishments were administered to people without due process and in a highly biased and inconsistent fashion.  The combination of dubious scientific ideas about health and a lack of scruples when it comes to respecting individual rights has made the behavior of public health advocates, or the use of public health arguments by other government agencies, including those agencies which claim the right to remove children from their parents, a highly dubious matter.  It is by no means paranoia to be concerned about the implications of giving more power to agencies which show a lack of concern for the rights of parents and a lack of understanding of the dodgy and contestable ground on which their own arguments and justifications for their behavior stand.  That said, there are plenty of parents whose bad behavior justifies the existence of powerful public authorities with jurisdiction including that of defending the best interests of children.

In such a case, and in many other such cases, it is not always easy to know what the best interests of children are.  Given their immaturity, we do not allow children to define their own best interests, which may involve late nights spent watching tv shows or movies or playing video games and eating junk food and may not involve education or moral development.  And it is clear that we do not trust either the state or parents to know and to act in the best interests of children without scrutiny.  Moreover, we know that institutions that are meant to serve the interests of those who are vulnerable often attract the interest of those who wish to exploit others, a grim reality that we are continually reminded of when teachers or priests or other authorities are found to have abused and exploited children.  This presents us with a deeply difficult problem of trust, where children are unable to defend their own interests and well-being, often not very aware of accepting of what is in their best interests in the long-term (not being long-lived creatures and not understanding the long term all that well), and where anyone who would speak or act on their behalf can be reasonably suspected of having some sort of ulterior motives involved in their advocacy.  It is by no means clear how these solutions are to be resolved in a satisfactory way given the conditions that now exist.

Nor does this exhaust the problematic nature of the right to refusal as it relates to a society that both demands ideological safe spaces and the respect for our own views and refuses to respect the rights and legitimacy of those who disagree with us.  For example, we live in a world where businesses owned by leftists glory in their refusal to refuse service to those whose views are right-of-center.  We also live in a world where people in various states face severe legal trials should they refuse business to privileged sexual minorities.  Obviously, these two practices are at odds with each other.  Either businesses can or cannot refuse service to people on political or ideological grounds.  If they can, they can harm their material interest but preserve some other interest that they may value more.  And if they cannot, this right to refusal does not belong to anyone either on the right or left or whatever other direction they may be in.  We do not at present have either a legal or a cultural consensus about how far the right of refusal rests, and on what grounds it is acceptable to refuse service to someone.  “No shirt, no shoes, no service” may have originally been adopted as a way of countering hippies, but it demonstrates that people have long wished to provide services only to those whose lifestyles were acceptable to them, and it is no different now.  Again, how are such matters to be resolved in a situation where neither the courts nor the state nor private enterprise is trusted to act without scrutiny and regulation?  What a mess we have gotten ourselves into because we wish to claim rights that we deny to those who disagree with us.