Parents should be legally identified and held responsible [2]

I will try to keep my ethical objections short so as to provide a response to my opponent's rebuttal, and I will not be addressing the practical considerations to maintain focus on the normative nature of the debate. Doing so will allow my opponent to respond to both my rebuttal and my ethical argument, which I think he agrees will be favorable to the spirit of debate. The proposition on offer is such that any and all parents are legally required to provide identification as the parents, and are required to support the child. The ethical issues present in the proposition are not easily seen when viewed generally, but once specifics are lain out, it becomes evident that the umbrella nature of the resolution is unethical. In part b. of the proposition, the mother is legally required to provide the name of the father, and if she does not, she is subjected to imprisonment. This means that a mother, who is highly successful or at the very least financially and psychologically stable, is not allowed to determine whether or not the father is involved in the child's life. Clearly there is an ethical issue here, namely, the proposition supposes that Big Brother knows best, and it is always in the best interest of the child to have the father involved. Therefore, the person that is most involved and invested with the child is not able to weigh in on whether or not it is in the child's best interest to have the father in his/her life. Since the blanket nature of the resolution denies individuals the right to decide the fate of their child's life, it is unethical in it's current form and ought to be negated. Next, in part g., my opponent claims that the parents are responsible for any support the child receives from the government for the rest of their lives. If this is true, then all public schools should be paid for by parents of children only, all inoculations that are beneficial for society ought to be paid for only through taxes levied on persons with children, etc. The list is nearly endless, and it may be true that my opponent wishes for this end. However, it must be understood that it is in the best interest of all to help pay for some of the burdens of child rearing. For example, it is in the best interest of a country to maintain a highly educated populace to remain competitive with the rest of the world. Further, economic growth is often determined by ingenuity of a group of people, and education is vital to maintain economic health. The list is once again nearly endless. The point is that everyone shares responsibility for the children of a nation in order to benefit the whole. Clearly, if one thinks that one has a vested interest in the children of one's nation, then one ought to strike down the resolution. Now to move on to my opponents rebuttal: Pro: The resolution is posed with "should." If we agree it should be done, and if it were, for the sake of argument, found unconstitutional, then we should amend the Constitution to accomplish it. A Constitutional argument based on legal technicalities is irrelevant. That leaves the ethical issues to be discussed separately, but the argument of Constitutionality is nullified. The issue of Constitutionality is not nullified if the audience feels that the considerations of Constitutionality weigh in on a normative debate about public policy. In other words, if a person thinks that Constitutionality is a basis for the normative value of a proposition, then it is apt. Pro: Of course an outline is broad, that is the nature of an outline. I acknowledged in opening arguments that there would be need for more detail. My apologies to my opponent for not explaining that the term "broad" has a slightly different meaning in legal terms. A broad law is a law that, through it's language or general content, inadvertently violates a Constitutionally guaranteed right. By claiming that the proposition is broad, I am claiming that it inadvertently interferes with 4th Amendment rights through its content and intent, and cannot be refined in enough detail to dispel the broadness because Pro is adamant about maintaining robust police authority for searches. Pro: I do not understand Con's reference to sidestepping the chain of evidence. Huh? By sidestepping the evidence, I meant to point out that a police officer is able to obtain evidence legally through the application of the proposition, even though they could not legally obtain the evidence if they had to go through the normal chain of evidence that is required by law. Pro: Con claims there is a "Constitutional right to the presumption of innocence." I searched for this statement several times in my own argument several times and was unable to locate it. Please disregard any argumentation based on this point considering the fact that I never made the claim. ******************************* My opponent is correct to point out that certain considerations seem to trump constitutional concerns. However, it is only on their face that they trump the Constitution because no law is legal if it defies the intent of the Constitution under US law. In the case of the passengers on a flight being systematically checked, the courts have decided that it is not unreasonable to ask a person to subject himself/herself to search because, like driving, it is a privilege and not a right to fly. If a person does not wish to be searched, then they do not have to fly or they can fly in a private aircraft. However, the right to child and to the family has been seen to be non-derogable by both the European Convention on Human Rights and The Inter-American Convention on Human rights (Mcgraw, "International Law" 274). In other words, it is seen as a right to have a child and to raise it as one sees fit, and not as a privilege like flying in an airplane. Therefore, since having a child and raising it in the family setting that one sees fit is a non-derogable right, the 4th Amendment charge of probable cause for a search clearly comes into play. In other words, since child rearing is held sacrosanct, to intrude upon said right or the choices that right entails would require probable cause. Pro also asserts that probable cause does not apply because the father is not being charged with a crime. However, since the proposition on offer is that the parents will be responsible for all of the financing of their children, it can be argued that having a child is at the minimum a civil offense if one is poor and did not expect the child (i.e. failed contraception). Therefore, in order to justify a DNA swab of a person's mouth for a civil offense with as much economic severity as the one in question, the police officer must have probable cause. Much of the last part of my opponent's rebuttal focuses on my analysis of the various components of the proposition. However, it must be noted that all I was doing was pulling out the intent of Pro based on the severity of the punishments for non-compliance with the proposition. Since Pro has stood by his proposition in its entirety including part d., then my analysis is a moot point because the writer has explicitly stated his intent, which is to not force police officers to have probable cause to seize DNA evidence of a suspected father. Since the proposition is still unconstitutional, which does weigh in on a normative claim about public policy, and since the umbrella effect of the proposition leads to unacceptable ethical violations, the resolution should be negated.