Case in point is Israel, which has a very low threshold to get into the Knesset, meaning that Netanyahu is beholden to tiny hard-right parties to stay in power.
Research seems to suggest that the child penalty is primarily due to gendered expectations around childcare. Wikipedia has a good summary en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_p...
Child abuse is illegal by definition, is the thing. Saying that, for example, children can sue their parents for conversion therapy is the same thing as banning conversion therapy, except that you’re changing the enforcement mechanism.
What does that mean in practice though? Children have the same right as anyone else to not be compelled by the state to follow a religion. Parents *legally* cannot compel religious observance through violence, deprivation, or other abuse.
Slavery analogy aside, the idea of a progressive tax code is that more tax burden falls on those with the means to pay it. A family with children has less disposable income than a single person with the same income and should be taxed at a lower rate.
But the rationale isn’t that children are the property of their parents; part of it hinges on the evidence of conversion therapy causing harm to children. It’s already an accepted principle that the state has an interest in protecting children
This isn’t exactly true, though, hence the Mormon child abuse sects getting raided by the Feds. The problem is that illegal child abuse is defined too narrowly.
First of all I should clarify that I was making a normative statement about children not being property of their parents, not defending the legal status quo.
I feel like you have to allow that there is something qualitatively different between a parent-child relationship and a master-slave relationship, such that it’s more fair to presume that parents have their children’s best interests in mind.
For developmental reasons children aren’t always competent to make their own decisions, so the responsibility for those decisions has to be assigned to someone.
