One of the thorniest issues in American law involves “parental rights.” On the one hand, the law recognizes the primacy and importance of parenthood, acknowledging the right of parents to inculcate (or at least try to inculcate) their children with their own values and religious beliefs.
On the other hand, the law makes exceptions for behaviors that abuse or endanger children. Courts have long intervened when parents have tried to deny their children life-saving medical care in favor of “praying the illness away,” no matter how sincere such religious beliefs may be. Child welfare departments are supposed to intervene in cases where parents are physically or sexually abusing their children.
In other words, the law attempts to balance respect for the rights and prerogatives of parents with the safety and well-being of children.
Which brings us to a case in Texas. (Of course, it would be Texas…)
There’s a case pending before the Supreme Court of Texas that will test the reach of that state’s newly minted “parental rights amendment.” That state-level constitutional amendment, approved by Texas voters in 2025, declares that parents have the “inherent right to exercise care, custody, and control” over their children and to make decisions about their upbringing.” The measure provides that any governmental action found to “interfere” with those parental rights must be subjected to the highest level of judicial scrutiny.
Presumably, this stringent level of analysis is intended to protect parents whose conduct is ambiguous, or those who engage in parenting rooted in foreign cultural backgrounds. The record in this case is neither. As the linked article reports,
The conduct at issue includes food deprivation, beatings with a belt, forced wall sits that lasted hours, and prolonged kneeling on grains of rice—forms of punishment that most people would recognize as physical and emotional abuse. The question now being seriously entertained is whether the Texas Constitution requires courts to presume such treatment is protected parental decision-making unless the state can meet the nearly insurmountable burden of strict scrutiny.
That this argument is being advanced at all is chilling. That it is being supported by prominent right-wing advocacy organizations, including the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Family Freedom Project, should force a reckoning with what the contemporary “parental rights” movement actually is.
We are all familiar with the rhetoric. Public schools are “undermining” parents. (Usually, by acknowledging that LGBTQ+ people exist, or by teaching accurate history or science rather than creationism.) As the linked essay notes, the phrase “parental rights” has functioned as a euphemism—it isn’t aimed at parents’ right to raise their children in a manner consistent with their values, but intended to protect a parental right to control what “any child is allowed to know, see, or understand about the world.”
The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
Even as Texas voters were told the amendment would keep the government out of family life, the state was aggressively inserting itself into families whose children needed gender-affirming care, going so far as to label supportive parents as child abusers and to threaten investigations and removals. Parental autonomy, it turned out, was conditional. It applied only when parents’ decisions are aligned with conservative ideology.
Parental rights advocates insist that parents should have a veto over school library books or pronouns, but that same movement is quick to override parents who seek reproductive health care or gender-affirming treatment for their children. Now, the Texas Supreme Court is being asked to rule that extreme corporal punishment and deprivation are protected parental “rights.” As the essay says, such a finding would be tantamount to ruling “that a child’s right to bodily integrity is subordinate to a parent’s ideological claim of authority, even in the face of clear harm.”
That unthinkable result would confirm the actual intent of the modern parental rights movement. As the author asserts, the movement is not about freedom from government overreach in any principled sense. It is about allowing some parents to “enforce obedience, suppress identity, and inflict harm without meaningful oversight.”
A society that treats children as mere extensions of parental will, rather than as people with rights of their own, abandons one of the most basic functions of law: protecting those who cannot protect themselves. If “parental rights” can be stretched to cover child abuse, then the phrase no longer names a safeguard for families. It names a license—and a warning.
The lower courts had (properly) terminated parental rights in the case. Given those rulings and the copious record of abuse, the willingness to appeal–to argue that abuse is a “parental right”– is a chilling admission.
Goes without saying at this point, but the default assumption with these authoritarians needs to be bad faith – their argument that an unborn fetus holds the trump card in all cases leads to an exact inversion of the logic here
Oh boy. Where to begin. Before I began writing op-eds for two newspapers in Texas, I was a science educator there teaching grades 6 – 12 including AP Physics and Biology. Every year one or more of my students would address the religion aspect of science education. “Thanks for a great class, Mr. Turner. I learned a lot and had fun too. But my minister keeps telling us that all scientists and science teachers are the spawns of Satan.” I’m not making this up. It occurred all the time.
I never witnessed the corporal punishment outcomes in my kids, but I’m not surprised that the slime balls associated with the Texas Public Policy Commission are putting something like this before the courts. The radical right-wing religious nuts in that and other organizations there continue to advocate for the abuse children with mental and emotional abuse is something else indeed. I think denying children the right to learn about the world in total is as abusive as having them kneel on rice. It denies them the preparation for the rest of their lives.
The good news is that many of those kids, including the ones whose churches think science is satanic, think all that control, denial of facts and punishment is pure bullshit and resist. The internet gives them a window to the world that even the most backward-thinking people (Texas right-wing politicians lead the way back to the 7th century.)can’t keep ALL of the children under their thumbs. But professional educators will be hamstrung by the lunatics on the school boards and district offices who use religion as a cudgel to inculcate and brainwash their children.
Add to that, Texas has labor laws that are still quite Dickensian in that authorities can fire anyone without cause or reason, especially teachers who don’t comply to the “rules”. It breaks my heart to know that this crap is still going full-bore backward in the face of so much information that young people will need to function in life.
As you said, “Of course it’s Texas.” Vern has already acknowledged what I thought he would.
My inadvertent experience with the ‘Texas Education Agency’ (TEA) would confirm state interference in matters of “conservative” ideology. Like Indiana, their “Right to _____” is always a deception which Texas media supports. Propaganda never equals reality.
I am in a battle with the Texas Education Agency and Paxton in the statehouse. TEA wants to deny me access to TPUSA’s curriculum for the Club America program, which is being offered around the country, within months of the elimination of Charlie Kirk. The “leaders” in Texas have claimed it supports “conservative ideology.” One lesson is about teaching kids “how to argue with left-wing activists at school.” Governor Abbott wants this in every high school, as does Braun in Indiana. Last week, it was launched in many Red States.
TEA wants to deny my request, but they’ve written Paxton for advice on how to do so, and CC’d me. Have I mentioned that AI is wonderful? 😉
I’ve already sent out a red flag letter about a conflict of interest, since he’s publicly supported the program AND they’ve threatened any teacher who opposes the Club with disciplinary action managed by TEA.
And, as Sheila mentioned, if any parent or organization wants to sue to stop this authoritarianism, they have to deal with the “Texas Justice System.” There is a reason Koch and his other right-wing zealots sue in Texas first.
The idea that the unborn are human beings with rights but children once born are not is so far beyond cruel, but this is exactly what Indiana’s supermajority, governor, lieutenant governor and secretary of state want for Indiana.
I recall Trevor Noah doing a soliloquy on abortion and the Right To Life (RTL) movement. He said that RTL was like a classic comic book collector. The comic book has a great value, but it lost all of that value when you took it out of the wrapper. I’d say that is spot on!
Draw a vertical line down the center of a page. Label the left column Decency and the right column Cruelty.
Now consider all of the policies and actions of both the Democrats and the Republicans and place each in one column or the other.
Do you get a better understanding of the meme:
Vote (D)ecency
Not C(R)uelty