I don't believe that the Miami relatives' economic situation or eligibility as foster care parents has anything to do with it at all, but I think you were replying to other's posts, not mine, with all that stuff, so I won't belabor that part. To be fair, though, Newsmax had that ridiculous comment about the neighbor saying that "Juan drank like a fish" and smoked a lot - which was just as silly.
It had never reached a point in my mind that their qualifications for guardianship really needed approving. I think that when people began bringing out the hospitalizations and the unemployment and the criminal records, they were responding to exactly the type of emotional rhetoric you are attempting to use here--- the innocent, poor, abused completely guiltless relatives.
Although I don't believe as you do that it was a healthy situation for Elian in the relatives' home for other reasons, I agree that he wasn't in immediate physical danger. However, I DO believe that they had no right to keep him after they defied the order to turn him over to his father.
I think they DID become "criminals" of a sort after that point. I think Elian needed to be removed from this situation and the government had allowed itself, for whatever reasons, to be manipulated into a corner. THey had to act-- arguably in not the smartest way. I leave it to the courts to determine the legality of it. If we don't like the broad powers of the INS, then we need to go about changing them, but they had those powers at the time.
Also you are misstating priorities-- at least mine. This was not about an immediate father-son reunion for me; it was about a country forcing its own values of freedom on a man who didn't want to accept them. And the penalty some wanted to extract for this decision was to take his son from him for his terrible choice. We may not like it, but by our own value system, we can not terminate his parental rights for this. I believe we were restrained by our own beliefs in freedom from doing what you wanted to do. Castro may not allow him the freedom to choose, but we MUST. TO do otherwise is to only GUESS what Juan wanted and to override all that we stand for. At six Elian is far too young to understand what he would have been choosing when he signed that petition.
I fail to see what you are getting at with your "equal footing" proposal. C'mon, Michael. They had more legal representation than you or I could ever afford! They took this to the Supreme Court in our land. And they lost. |
