Lest we forget, on Easter Sunday, Bill Clinton, the now disgraced, impeached ex-President, sent armed goons in the dead of night to remove the terrified child from his loving family and deliver him to the merciless tyrant Castro.
Posted on 12/07/2003 3:32:47 PM PST by Holly_P
Elian Gonzalez, who floated in Florida's waters four years ago on Thanksgiving, was 10 years old yesterday. The media spectacle that surrounded his arrival and departure has given way to obscurity; the world has forgotten Elian.
Those who ignore Elian's legacy may be driven by guilt: Most Americans opposed granting him asylum in America and their complete repudiation of the Statue of Liberty's Emma Lazarus poem was accompanied by unrelenting assurances that he would live like he owned a sugar plantation (if ownership were allowed in communist Cuba) or that he would become a media celebrity (if media were allowed). Elian, for anyone bothering to account for the child whose mother died coming to America, has disappeared, though he occasionally appears on state-run television in his communist uniform. The public won and moved on. Elian lost his freedom -- and America lost its way.
Each branch of government rejected Elian's right to live in liberty. The legislative branch refused to consider making Elian a citizen, though exceptions had been made for Vietnam's Boat People, for Cuba's Mariel boatlift, for Cuba's Operation Peter Pan and for generations of Mexicans, all of which included children. Congress granted no such exclusion to arbitrary immigration laws for the smallest minority: the individual.
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Elian's plea for asylum, made on his behalf by Elian's Uncle Lazaro, an auto mechanic who fed, clothed and housed the child at his two-bedroom home in Little Havana. Though Elian's defenders failed to make the case for his asylum on principle, his Miami family stood against a judicial system that had fundamentally betrayed its founding principle: individual rights.
The nation's most powerful official approved the initiation of force. On April 22, 2000, President Clinton, backed by the public and by each branch of government -- executive, judicial, legislative -- dispatched gun-toting agents to seize Elian, marking the first time America's government forced a child from a free society and returned him to a dictatorship. The conviction that it is better to live in the land of the free than to live under tyranny had been abandoned.
Educated by modern intellectuals, Americans had become ignorant of life under communism. Throughout Elian's saga, people expressed disbelief that life in Cuba includes no right to property, association, travel or speech. Elian, they insisted, belongs with his father. Whether father and son lived in freedom or slavery was judged irrelevant: What mattered to most Americans was that the two blood relatives were bound together -- even if it meant they would be gagged by a dictatorship -- and, anyway, they chortled, communism in Cuba couldn't be that bad.
Over three years later, not one reporter has been permitted to observe his condition unmolested by communist agents. Elian Gonzalez is fully enslaved and unseen, except when he is used by Cuba's dictatorship as a pawn for propaganda.
Yet it is America that has suffered for its philosophical inversion. As government agents were snatching Elian, Islamic terrorists, living illegally in Florida, were busy plotting the worst attack in U.S. history -- an attack that would probably have been stopped had the government enforced its laws. Forcing a child to return to slavery while our enemies were miles away planning the most diabolical act of war offers proof that America has lost any sense of what matters. A free republic that refuses to judge its enemies while spurning a child refugee from tyranny is doomed by its own contradictions.
As America approaches its third Christmas at war, we must restore the idea of inalienable individual rights to a sacred place in our hearts. There is no better time to do so than Christmas, which still represents benevolence, redemption and the notion that children should bask in the light of joy, not totalitarianism.
We can start by recognizing that a truly happy birthday -- a celebration of one's life and future -- is impossible for anyone living under communism and by acknowledging that nothing -- not family, not tradition, not religion -- is more important than an individual's freedom. It is why the enemy hates us -- and it is why Elian should be celebrating his birthday in America.
Scott Holleran (scottholleran@mac.com), a freelance writer in southern California, was the first reporter permitted into the Gonzalez family¹s Miami, Fla., home, where Holleran met Elian Gonzalez and wrote about the encounter for several American newspapers.
FWIW, seeing the raid that April morning completed my transformation from an apathetic dem to a staunch conservative
I'm sure he's not. But that's neither here nor there. It may be that Elian will one day lead the democratic revolution in cuba, who's to say?
He had both the second he set foot on US soil.
It may be that Elian will be so indoctrinated by Fidel that by adulthood he'll be ready to be the next undemocratic dictator in Cuba, who's to say?
Lest we forget, on Easter Sunday, Bill Clinton, the now disgraced, impeached ex-President, sent armed goons in the dead of night to remove the terrified child from his loving family and deliver him to the merciless tyrant Castro.
It's as if you don't understand the concept of freedom or familly. But hey we'll try again. In the case of the minor the parents have all the rights in the world. The moment he set foot on US soil he had the full force of the historical rights of parents the US has always granted. Those rights says the rights of the father are stronger than the rights of the grandparents or uncles and infinately stronger than the rights of "in-laws" and that again over the right of "bystanders" like you.
The law was never twisted save by those who wanted to disavow the rights and privilages the US has always granted to the parents of children.
As for the father, the moment he set foot on US soil he could have requested asylum for himself and his child. He didn't, and that was his decision. Maybe he was promised wealth and prestige when he returned (and Elian is treated as a national hero for propaganda reasons -- no illusions here), maybe he was told his relatives would be harmed, maybe he just liked his life in cuba. But for whatever reason he did not request the asylum which would have ended the problem once and for all.
The father's wants and desires played every single part in this "saga". The father showed up on US soil and asserted his parental rights once he did that the courts took at his word his wishes just as it would ANYONE ELSE. Had he not done that Elian would still be here.
Excuse me but are you prepared to argue that your brothers and sister's in-laws can come take your child because you're a republican and they're democrates?
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