Save the children

Society’s obsession with individual rights, says author David Tubbs, has taken a heavy toll on our youngest citizens | Marvin Olasky

Dane Cooper

David Tubbs contends in his new book, Freedom's Orphans: Contemporary Liberalism and the Fate of American Children (Princeton University Press, 2007), that the great expansion of individual rights in American law over the past six decades came with little attention to what the exercise of these rights means for children.

Tubbs, a professor at The King's College, New York City, criticizes liberalism's tendency to make freedom for adults trump competing social interests, including the well-being of children. He shows that liberal political philosophers and legal scholars have ignored or discounted some of the harmful effects on children arising from the exercise of these rights.

He also argues that the prevailing "nonjudgmentalism" in matters relating to adult sexuality has had negative effects on children, yet American society has never had a sustained political discussion about (for example) the proper limits of adult freedom to produce and distribute films portraying sexually sadistic actions.