If you are like me, you are tired of hearing about Elian Gonzalez. This case does, however, provide a disturbing picture of who we are as a culture as well as an important lesson. The photograph of the heavily armed federal agent in full riot gear as he approached the petrified child while he hid in a closet moved me deeply. This tiny six-year-old, the victim of an international dispute, was roused from his sleep at 5:00 in the morning to the noise of government officials with machine guns busting down the door of his home. I wonder how many times that happened to him in Cuba?
The pictures that followed on Saturday, April 22, showed Elian smiling while being held by his father. Some interpreted this as an indication that he was happy to be reunited with his father. I would suggest that after such a traumatic episode, any familiar face would have caused him to smile.
Several times over the past ten years, the front pages of our newspapers have presented stories of children who have been forced to leave a residence that they have known as home. Most of these cases were adoptions that became complicated when the biological mother reconsidered the adoption. After perhaps years in the home of the adoptive parents, the child was forced to leave the only home he or she had ever known. The court system, representing our government and our people, has demonstrated through these cases that biological parents will have rights regardless of what is in the child's best interest. Even though the case of Elian is somewhat different, the government's intervention was frighteningly similar.
I find it disturbing that the federal government would consider child custody an issue under its jurisdiction. Even though the United States has agreements with other countries to return abducted children, the state department rarely intervenes when US children have been illegally carried overseas. This selective attention to such cases causes me to speculate that our current administration had something to gain by intervening - intervention not because of what was best for the child, but because of what was expedient for a political party. That is unconscionable.
As was true with the other high profile custody cases that I mentioned, little was said in this case concerning what was best for this six-year-old. Elian would not necessarily benefit from being with his father. His parents were separated, he had seen his mother drown, and evidence suggests that the father was consenting to the defection. Not to mention the fact that Elian appears to have found a loving mother figure and home with his cousin, a connection necessary to overcome the trauma of being lost at sea and witnessing his mother's death. Yet in spite of this, government authorities argued for the "rights of the father."
In principle, I believe that a child is usually better off with a biological parent, but cases such as the Gonzalez case are extenuating. I argue that a parent's rights should not supercede the best interest of a child. In fact, painful as it may be, a loving parent would forego his or her rights when it was in the best interest of the child. I am neither a lawyer nor am I an expert on international law, but what this case shows me is that our government, again, seeks its own at the expense of a child. Because our government represents us, this is a sad commentary on who we are as a people.
