Politics

FLASHBACK: Hillary Compared Marriage, Childhood To Slavery

REUTERS/Kathy Willens/Pool

Philip DeVoe Contributor
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Hillary Clinton once compared the institution of marriage and the dependency of childhood to slavery in an academic journal.

In December of 1973, Hillary Rodham — fresh off a juris doctorate degree from Yale University — was at the forefront of the nascent children’s rights movement.

The movement’s goal was simple: give children the rights they deserved. Most activists believed that children were owed the basic rights of good living conditions and loving parents.

The future secretary of state believed that children were owed the rights her contemporaries championed, but she also believed they were legally owed much more, and her article “Children Under The Law” was her manifesto about childhood oppression.

In the article, published by the Harvard Education Review in December of 1973, Hillary began by explaining the rationale for “depriving people of rights in a dependency relationship” — where people are “incapable or undeserving of the right to take care of themselves and consequently need social institutions specifically designed to safeguard their position.”

“Along with the family,” Hillary continued, “past and present examples of such arrangements include marriage, slavery, and the Indian reservation system. The relative powerlessness of children makes them uniquely vulnerable to this rationale.”

Clinton went on to say that children should, in order to combat this “enslavement,” be permitted to appeal their adulthood before a judge, or essentially be allowed to prove that they deserve all the rights of their parents.

She even says that a child can sue his parents if he disagrees with them, and that a federal judge can step in and rule on these domestic disputes.

The article received a flurry of national attention in 1992 when her husband Bill ran for his first term as president. At the time, Clinton supporters dismissed the focus on Hillary’s past as meaningless, since she wasn’t the one running for office.

Now, however, Hillary is the Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 presidential race, not to mention a fixture in American politics, and the essay raises serious questions about what kind of America Clinton foresees.

The Clinton campaign declined to comment. (RELATED: Hillary On Abortion: ‘Deep-Seated Cultural Codes, Religious Beliefs And Structural Biases Have To Be Changed’)