iberals on the send-Elian-home bandwagon have been saying that conservatives on the other side are hypocrites, having in the past championed parental rights and criticized Hillary Clinton for denying same. The charge of hypocrisy can be sustained only if Mrs. Clinton's early-seventies critique of pervasive American oppression — children's powerlessness, she wrote, is both unjustified and "part of the organization and ideology of the political system itself" — is on a par with conservatives' claims about Cuba. Wrote Mrs. Clinton: "The pretense that children's issues are somehow above or beyond politics endures and is reinforced by the belief that families are private, nonpolitical units whose interests subsume those of children."

A lot of people said and did stupid things in the seventies, and Clinton subsequently backed off those views. But the notion that she was talking only about abusive or dysfunctional families is pure revisionism. Her view then was that the family should be treated as a political institution. Castro, in his infinitely more terrible way, believes the same thing; and conservatives aren't hypocrites for opposing both views.

Speaking Of Hypocrisy, Though...
Doesn't Ken Starr deserve an apology? He was a brute and a thug, recall, because his subordinates interrogated Monica Lewinsky in between her shopping excursions in the Pentagon City mall. (Our friend Jonathan Schell, writing in the Nation, waxed particularly eloquent about the horror Americans should feel at the image of this interrogation.) Starr was damned as well because Lewinsky's mother was brought to tears during grand-jury questioning.

But in the Gonzalez case, now liberals are all tough guys. What's the big deal about the raid, they ask? The gun wasn't pointed right at Elian, and the safety was on. And it's not like anybody died. (Much of the commentary seems to imply that the Gonzalez family should be grateful about Janet Reno's forbearance on this point — as, given her record when it comes to children, perhaps they should be.) The guys with guns were just professionals upholding the rule of law. Liberals buy that line, at least when the professionals threaten some Cuban-Americans and not the president.

Kissling's Sea Change
A group called Catholics for a Free Choice — and no, they're not talking about school vouchers to help parochial schools — is running a campaign, dubbed "See Change," to eliminate the Vatican's permanent observer status. The argument is that the Vatican represents a religion, not a state. Which makes the following quote from Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice, rather embarrassing: "I spent twenty years looking for a government that I could overthrow without being thrown in jail. I finally found one in the Catholic Church" (Mother Jones, May/June 1991).