SINCE ELIAN GONZALEZ was rescued on Thanksgiving Day 1999, most liberals and many conservatives have been certain about what to do with this boy whose mother died trying to bring him to America: Send him back to his father in Cuba.
For the record, I acknowledged from the outset that, all things being equal, a child who loses his mother should be with his father. But from the beginning, I also rejected the certitude of those demanding that Elian be sent back to Cuba. Did the mother’s dying to bring Elian to freedom count for nothing? Were we really prepared to send a child to a parent in a totalitarian state before knowing what that parent really wanted? Without ever meeting the father on free soil, from where did the certainty derive that he was a fit father — after all, he hadn’t been married to Elian’s mother in Elian’s lifetime, and the boy’s custodial parent had been his mother. How could anyone be certain that the father did not want his son to escape Cuba? Finally, once the father did not come for his son for months, and Elian began bonding with relatives in Miami, especially with a surrogate mother, shipping this boy to his absentee father in a country he could never return from seemed less and less morally justified.
In light of all these questions, why did nearly all liberals advocate sending the child to a father about whom they knew nothing and to a place to which no child should have to be returned?
One reason was the post-1960s liberal hatred for anti-Communists. While few liberals actually praise communism, ever since the Vietnam War, liberals have fought anti-communism with much greater zeal than they have fought communism. There were two major cold wars. One was between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the other was between anti-Communists (mostly conservatives) and anti-anti-Communists (nearly all liberals). Liberal hatred of anti-Communists could be seen these past months in the liberal loathing of Cuban-Americans. Whereas liberals and Democrats usually worship the ground American minorities walk on, they have only contempt for Cuban-Americans — because of that community’s anti-communism.
The other reason for liberals’ passion in this matter is less obvious but no less deep. Contemporary liberalism tends to attach enormous importance to blood ties.
This is illustrated by the attitude of virtually every liberal organization toward adoption, an institution that is living proof that love and values are infinitely more important than blood. The feminist and pro-choice movements are generally hostile to adoption — they see it as undermining birth mothers’ “natural” right to keep their children, and they fear that encouraging adoption discourages pregnant women from having abortions. And social workers and other “child protection” agents, nearly all of whom are liberal, do everything possible to discourage adoption.
In December 1999, ABC television’s John Stossel devoted his weekly special to the difficulties child welfare professionals place in the way of couples wishing to adopt children. The next day on my radio show he told me that his own producer had refused to produce that show. Why? “Because she is a liberal,” a member of a group, Stossel explained, that values blood relations and therefore usually disdains adoption.
Compounding liberals’ preoccupation with blood is their preoccupation with race. Liberalism holds a belief heretofore associated most visibly with Nazism — the identification of race with culture. Thus, it places enormous importance on biological “heritage,” deeming it imperative, for example, that foreign-born adopted children be immersed in their racial/ethnic group’s culture (though never their birth parents’ religion).
Liberalism’s commitment to blood ties is so deep that liberals in child welfare work have led the movement to return children to abusive biological parents and have so strongly opposed interracial adoption that it can fairly be said that many social workers actually prefer a child to have no parents than parents of a different race.
This is why you will so often hear references by news people to Juan Miguel Gonzalez as Elian’s “biological father”: That fact is decisive to them, even though they know nothing about him or his relationship with Elian. Yet, I strongly suspect that if Juan Miguel had been Elian’s adoptive father, liberal passion on the father’s behalf would have been dramatically reduced.
Nevertheless, liberal opposition to anti-communism and love of blood cannot explain the 66 percent support by Americans for the Clinton administration’s violent raid on the family that loved Elian. Clearly, a significant number of conservatives must also support this raid, and as their support cannot be attributed to pro-Castro or anti-anti-Communist sentiments, it is probably rooted in respect for blood ties.
Most conservatives pride themselves on holding “family values,” and what could be more in keeping with that than returning a child to his father? Furthermore, many religious conservatives believe that blood ties have religious significance. Thus, despite the fact that conservatives, like liberals, know nothing about the father or his relationship with Elian, and despite all the facts they do know — for example, that returning Elian to Cuba after so long in America will doom him to psychological abuse by a Communist regime kicked out of the World Psychiatric Association for using psychiatric drugs on political dissidents — many conservatives assume the words “biological father” settle the issue.
So, once and for all, let us correctly define family values. They are the belief that the nuclear family is the linchpin of civilization, that every child has the right to have a father and a mother committed to each other in marriage.
Family values, therefore, do not embrace either single parenthood deliberately entered into (as opposed to resulting from abandonment, divorce, or death) or two “parents” of the same sex. Family values have nothing to do with blood: One’s spouse and in-laws, for example, are full-fledged family. Any family-values advocate who would rather children be raised from birth by one biological parent than by a non-blood mother and father holds blood values, not family values.
As for religion and blood, I will speak only from my tradition, Judaism. To cite but three examples of Judaism’s holding values to be more important than blood:
P The Talmud categorically states that “Whoever raises a child in his [her] house is considered to have given birth to the child” (italics added).
P Judaism holds that the mother of Moses, the greatest Jew who ever lived, was the woman who raised him, the non-Jewish daughter of Pharaoh (Megillah 13a).
P By Jewish law, a child must honor a person who teaches him moral and religious values above a parent who does not.
Distorting family values to mean blood values will serve only to ruin more children’s lives. If conservatives do not understand this, America’s future is as bleak as Elian Gonzalez’s probably is.
Dennis Prager, a writer and theologian, has a nationally syndicated daily radio talk show based in Los Angeles. His essay “Blood Versus Love,” in Think a Second Time (HarperCollins), recounts how the Illinois Supreme Court took 4-year-old “Baby Richard” from his parents and gave him to a birth father he had never met.
