Ross Douthat, commenting on Damon Linker’s discussion of competing moral claims in l’affaire Caitlyn Jenner:

There too a rights-based moral worldview could explicitly privilege the rights of the child over the self-determination of her parents, treating to act of conceiving a child as a commitment that inherently limits one’s personal liberties thereafter. As, again, our society still does in many ways, especially where financial support and physical safety are concerned. (Which is part of why we remain so conflicted about the issue of abortion, where the physical harm is undeniable even if the victim’s full personhood is in dispute.)

But again, with the advance of social liberalism the balance between the rights of the child and the freedom of the parent has tipped in important ways toward adult autonomy, toward a view that children cannot reasonably make certain claims at the expense of their parents’ self-actualization and personal happiness. (With, of course, the self-justifying corollary that the kids will ultimately be better off if their parents have their own way.) Like the spouse who wants to stay the course in a struggling marriage, the child under our particular form of liberalism has no real claim, rights-based or harm-based or both, to any particular kind of familial situation, any particular form of association with his biological mother and father, any particular living arrangement during infancy or youth, or any particular relationship across the life cycle. (The adult children of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner, for instance, would be immediately cast as transphobic if they countered his/her right to transition by claiming an enduring right to his continuing fatherhood and paternity.) Consenting adults need not feel constrained by the possibility of conception when they decide to have sex; if they do conceive a child they need not feel obligated to marry for the child’s sake; if they are married they need not feel obligated to remain together; and so on. Indeed, consenting adults may now explicitly sell their own parental stake and obligation to their biological child (a step radically different in its implications from adoption), and the idea that the child in such cases might have been deprived of something, might have a right that’s been traduced or a claim of harm to make, is regarded as strange, irrelevant, offensive, antique.

When Ross tweeted that blog entry out, one of his young Twitter followers responded:

@DamonLinker @DouthatNYT The first retort is that what’s happened isn’t an elevation of parental rights-claims over children’s, but a

— Jeff Spross (@jeffspross) June 4, 2015

@DamonLinker @DouthatNYT rejiggering of those claims to a healthier balance. Take the Jenner example: if her children’s rights claims go so

— Jeff Spross (@jeffspross) June 4, 2015

@DamonLinker @DouthatNYT far as to even dictate Jenner’s sexual ID, what aspect of her existence do her children not have a claim on?

— Jeff Spross (@jeffspross) June 4, 2015

I get the question, given the premises that govern our demented culture, but honestly, in what kind of a society does that question even occur to one?

This will make no sense to a young progressive who believes the summum boner (heh) of human existence is “sexual ID,” but I would say that a good society is on that presumes that mommy and daddy’s responsibilities to the children they bring into this world entail abjuring the right to build their own lives around radical sexual autonomy. Troglodyte that I am. But I guess we are going to relive the Seventies.