Tag Archives: Texas

Parental Rights– And Wrongs

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.

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Trashing The First Amendment

Ten months into the Trump administration, the outlines of America’s cold civil war have become too stark to miss. MAGA is determined to remake the United States into a nation where White Christian Nationalists are legally privileged and in control. And they’re making progress.

The evidence is overwhelming. Masked ICE agents focus on people of color. Trump reportedly wants to “revamp” immigration rules in order to make it easier for Whites and harder for others to enter the country. From day one, the administration has pursued an all-out war on “DEI”–insisting that any effort to level the playing field for previously marginalized folks is really anti-White discrimination. Aided and abetted by a thoroughly corrupted Supreme Court majority, the hits have kept coming: universities prevented from continuing programs even slightly resembling affirmative action, the continued gutting of the Voting Rights Act…

And as we’ve recently seen, the racism motivating MAGA isn’t diminishing; it infuses the GOP’s young activists.

I have previously written about the faux-Christianity that motivates much of this. I particularly recommend Tim Alberta’s book, “The Kingdom, The Power and the Glory.” Alberta is a genuine Christian Evangelical, and his critique is informed by his own deep religiosity. More recently, David French–another committed Evangelical– has described what is happening in thousands of churches as a religious “revolution”–not to be confused with a true revival. In his telling, America is close to a religious revolution, and the difference between that revolution and a true religious revival is immensely important for both church and state.

Decades of scholarship, very much including scholarship by religious organizations, have attributed America’s religiosity–far greater than in other Western Democratic countries–to the fact that the First Amendment requires the separation of church and state. That understanding fails to persuade the MAGA folks who’ve turned religion into a political identity.

The Christian Nationalists who dominate Red state governments reject the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. They intend to indoctrinate the nation’s schoolchildren, and they aren’t satisfied with mandates to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms. In Texas, they’ve introduced a “revised” and bible-infused English curriculum.

A new state-sponsored English curriculum infused with lessons about the Bible and Christianity could reach tens of thousands of Texas schoolchildren this year.

More than 300 of the state’s roughly 1,200 districts signed up to use the English language arts lessons, according to data obtained by The New York Times through a public records request. Many are rural, and relatively small.

The curriculum was created as several states, including Oklahoma and Louisiana, fought to bring prayer or religious texts like the Ten Commandments into public school classrooms, blurring the line between church and state.

According to the analysis done by the New York Times, the Texas curriculum features content on Christianity, the bible and the life of Jesus. Lessons include the Biblical story of his birth in a Bethlehem manger, New Testament accounts of the angel who described him as the Messiah, and even stories about the miracles he was purported to perform.

Fifth graders examine a psalm in a poetry unit. First-grade students discuss the parable of the prodigal son alongside stories like “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Kindergarten children learn in depth about the Book of Genesis in a lesson on art exploration that notes that “many artists have found inspiration for creating art from the words in creation stories in religious books.”

The Times analysis found that Christianity was heavily favored in the lessons. In the materials used in the second grade, for example, “Christianity, the Bible and Jesus are referenced about 110 times. By contrast, Islam, Muslims, the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad are mentioned roughly 31 times in lessons spanning from kindergarten to fifth grade.”

The Times article has much more detail, and it is worth clicking through and reading. The curricular changes were summed up in a quote by David R. Brockman, a Christian theologian and religious studies scholar at Rice University. After he reviewed all of the Texas materials, Brockman concluded that the lessons amounted to Bible study in a public school curriculum, and he worried that the state’s adaptation of its curriculum would send an implicit message to children “that Christianity is the only important religion.”

Well, duh! Of course that’s the message, and it’s intended. In MAGA’s America–a country distant from the one occupied by the rest of us–the only real Americans are lily-White and “Christian.” The rest of us–including genuine Christians–are intruders.

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Rigging The Vote, Thanks To A Rogue Court

A number of pundits have pointed out that Donald Trump is a prime example of projection; that when he accuses someone of bad behavior, it is almost always behavior in which he, himself, has engaged. His current effort to get Red states to redistrict mid-cycle is a perfect example. Ever since he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, Trump has insisted that he couldn’t possibly have lost “fair and square,” that the election had been rigged. So, in typical Trump fashion, he is engaging in an effort to rig the upcoming midterms.

As Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has recently written,

Texas Republicans are in the midst of making their state even more of a mockery of the concept of representative democracy than it already was. In an attempt to preserve the GOP’s narrow House majority in the 2026 midterms, lawmakers are tinkering with the boundaries of the state’s 38 congressional districts to create five more safe Republican seats, forcing several Democratic incumbents to seek re-election next year in districts that are suddenly, alarmingly red. Scrambling the map in this manner would ensure that in a state in which Trump earned 56 percent of the vote in 2024, Republicans would lock up 80 percent of the state’s representation in Congress for the rest of the decade.

The effort to give Republican candidates unearned advantages isn’t limited to Texas–Trump is currently leaning on other Red states, notably Florida and Indiana–to engage in the same gerrymandering, which he clearly believes will forestall a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives. (He really shouldn’t be so confident; in a special election just last Tuesday, a Democrat won a seat in the Iowa legislature with 55% of the vote–in a district that Trump had carried by 11 points. But recognition of nuance and complexity aren’t among Trump’s very limited intellectual skills.)

As Marshall quite correctly notes, “you can draw a straight line between this frantic gerrymandering arms race and a mind-bendingly stupid decision from the U.S. Supreme Court.” That “mind-bendingly stupid decision” was a 5-4 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause, a 2019 case in which the five Republican justices held that partisan gerrymanders are a “political question”—that is, an issue that must be left to the democratic process. “Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts explained that the Constitution yields no workable standard for determining when a given gerrymander goes too far to be legal.”

In what is, in my view, still one of the most embarrassing paragraphs to appear in the pages of the United States Reporter, Roberts wraps in Rucho by noting that the holding constrains only federal courts; Congress, he says, would remain free to enact anti-gerrymandering legislation, as would lawmakers at the state level. The argument here is that voters who are dissatisfied with corruption in the political process don’t actually need John Roberts’s help, because they can always seek redress of their grievances via the aforementioned corrupt political process. This is roughly analogous to the fire department pulling up to a burning house, attaching the hoses to fire hydrants, and then politely informing the owner that it could rain any minute.

As Marshall points out, and as I have previously written, there definitely are standards the Court might have applied. The decision was clearly partisan. Republicans control 59 of the 99 state-level legislative chambers, and both the legislature and the governorship in 24 of those states. That compares with just 15 for Democrats. Despite the fact that most Blue states have significantly larger populations than the more numerous Red states, Republicans have power over the line-drawing process in more places than the Democrats–a power that allows the GOP to win elections despite garnering fewer votes overall.

It’s hard to argue with Marshall’s conclusion that what is happening in Texas and California and elsewhere right now “demonstrates just how vapid and hollow the reasoning in Rucho always was. You do not have to have a law degree to understand that a Texas map that transforms a 56-42 advantage into a 79-21 blowout is not, in any meaningful sense, fair.”

But it isn’t just Rucho. The Roberts Court will go down in history (assuming we have a history) as a disgraceful, rogue Court in which a blatantly partisan majority enabled an autocrat and undermined the democratic process in multiple decisions contrary to years of judicial precedents.

If and when the Democrats control Congress, they need to impose term limits on the justices, and expand the Court.

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The Ten Commandments

 A  Judge recently struck down a Texas law, modeled after one in Oklahoma that was also ruled unconstitutional, requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.

This effort surfaces every few years, as Christian Nationalists try to use government buildings to send a message that only certain people are “real Americans.” Given the periodic eruption of this effort, I thought I’d just share what I’ve previously posted about these efforts–and why they are blatantly inconsistent with the Bill of Rights.

Way back in 1997, I wrote:

If I believed passionately that everyone would be better off for reading the Ten Commandments, what would I do? 

I would probably start by distributing leaflets containing the Ten Commandments everywhere I could–on street corners, at the grocery store, at sports and entertainment events. I might ask local churches and individuals to erect replicas of the Ten Commandments on their lawns or porches.

I would ask local newspapers to reproduce them; if the papers would not do so as a contribution, I would try to raise the money to buy a paid advertisement, which would stress the importance of the Commandments to the development of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

I would use the Internet to find others who agreed with me on the importance of widespread distribution, and would engage them in my project. Or I might sell tee shirts printed with the Commandments if I could afford that or could raise the money. 

I would find a group of young people to form a Ten Commandments Club, to spread the word. Or I might hold a rally, and bring in people to speak about the importance of the Ten Commandments in their lives.

And of course, I would do my very best to live up to the principles of the Commandments and other great religious precepts.  (“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” comes to mind; there are many others.)

Every single one of these methods for promoting the Ten Commandments and righteous behavior is protected by the Free Exercise Clause.

If, however, all I really want is for my government to send a message that my particular beliefs are the proper ones, I won’t bother with any of these time-consuming activities. I will petition my local county officials to post the Commandments so that everyone visiting a public building will know who really belongs in this country and who doesn’t. It will be important that my document appear on government-owned buildings, so it will be very clear what my government approves–and by implication, what (and who) it doesn’t.

Unfortunately for those who wish to be more equal than others, the First Amendment forbids government from issuing such endorsements, just as it would forbid the passage of laws requiring the posting of the Bill of Rights in all churches. The First Amendment protects our right to advocate in the public square, but it forbids us to enlist the help of the 800 pound gorilla– the public sector.

And about that “sacred” text? In 2024, I wrote,

Most of us have seen the news that Louisiana now requires posting the Ten Commandments in that state’s schoolrooms. What I hadn’t seen reported–until I read a fascinating article from Salon–is that the version to be posted comes not from the Bible, but from Hollywood. Rather than go to any of the biblical texts, Louisiana opted for Cecil B. DeMille’s, taking the version to be posted from “The Ten Commandments.”

Well, Christian Nationalists aren’t known for consulting original texts. Or for honesty.

The cited article quoted a scholar who pointed out that The Ten Commandments recounted in Exodus 34 are nothing like the list with which most people are familiar. It starts off: “Be careful not to make a treaty with those who live in the land where you are going, or they will be a snare among you.”

As he noted, the version passed by the State Senate doesn’t appear in any Bible. It is a “highly Christianized version” with “Judaic elements removed.”

As I concluded in that post, Christian Nationalism has two goals: to signal to the MAGA base that they are culture warriors fighting “leftism, Marxism, woke-ism, state-sponsored atheism or whatever else scares conservative white Americans;” and as a distraction from Republican policy failures. It’s notable that US News recently ranked Louisiana dead last among all 50 states, and 47th in education.

The Christian Nationalist’s Ten Commandments agenda stands for the proposition that America is a Christian nation, and Christians (of the right variety) should control every facet of it.

It’s hard to get more unAmerican than that.

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Texas Again

Texas really should serve as the primo example of a thoroughly UnAmerican state, a first-place spot that has been occupied until now by Florida. Granted, Florida won’t give up its win without a fight, and DeSantis’ success in turning Florida into a quasi-fascist state is impressive in a horrifying sort of way. But Texas is a worthy competitor.

We’ve all seen the death and destruction that accompanied the recent floods, and while Trump’s inept administration contributed significantly to the tragedy, the refusal to provide adequate warning mechanisms was a state and local decision. That bit of bad governance shouldn’t have come as a surprise; the administration of Governor Abbott–an administration that includes the state’s slimy Attorney General Ken Paxton and a GOP-dominated legislature–has diligently followed the MAGA (and Florida) playbook.

A few examples:

As enthusiastic participants in MAGA’s war on education, Texas has passed laws restricting expressive conduct on public campuses—banning protests and reassigning governance authority from faculty to politically appointed boards.

In its zealous war on immigration, Operation Lone Star has used razor wire and troop deployments, and engaged in mass busing of migrants to so-called “sanctuary cities.” The state also created state-level crimes for illegal entry and empower state judges to deport migrants–measures even the very conservative Fifth Circuit ruled unconstitutional.

Texas has enthusiastically fought the culture war: banning abortion, banning gender-affirming treatment for minors, and threatening medical professionals with license revocation.

Texas Republicans have eliminated Diversity, Equity & Inclusion efforts wherever possible, and removed such offices from public universities.

The state passed a law restricting content moderation on social media (an effort that has been temporarily blocked).

Because cities have a tendency to vote Blue, Texas passed what has been dubbed a “Death Star” law, restricting the powers of municipal governments to pass progressive policies. (A Travis County judge struck it down as unconstitutional interference in local self-governance.)

The Texas GOP’s Christian Nationalists won passage of a senate bill 10 requiring display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms.

Given the fact that many of these efforts have been stymied by courts noting their inconsistency with that pesky constitution, Abbott is emulating Trump; The Houston Chronicle recently accused Abbott of judicial appointments intended to reshape the Texas Supreme Court in his image.

It isn’t just the Texas Supreme Court. The Lever recently published an expose of a new kind of “court packing” in the great state of Texas.

On Sept. 1, Texas is slated to open its new business courts, a brand-new legal system backed by Big Oil — and several of the court’s main judges have in the past represented fossil fuel companies as lawyers, The Lever has found.

The judges were hand-picked over the last two months by Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, a major recipient of oil industry cash — and many can be quickly replaced if they hand down decisions he opposes, a judicial design that he championed.

The courts consist of 11 regional business courts and a new statewide court of appeals to hear appellate litigation, which are expected to have immediate impacts on environmental cases in the state. As Public Health Watch, an independent investigative news organization, reported last month, a suite of cases involving state environmental authorities will now be transferred from a generally liberal appeals court to the state’s new Fifteenth Court of Appeals, created to oversee the business courts.

There, these cases will be decided by a panel of conservative judges historically friendly to industry — particularly oil and gas interests, a powerful force in Texas.

As a leader of the state’s Public Citizen organization put it, Abbot has created a “boutique court for corporations where he, not the voters, gets to pick the judges.” The article goes into some detail about the judges who have been appointed–details unlikely to comfort litigants who might be hoping for dispassionate judicial conduct.

For the past several years, pundits have predicted a revolt by Texas voters sufficient to turn the state purple, if not Blue. Extreme gerrymandering has forestalled that revolt, if indeed it was imminent, and as I posted a few days ago, Abbott has now called for a mid-cycle redistricting–a move urged by Trump as a means to maintain GOP control of the House of Representatives.

Political experts are dubious about the tactic. As Politico has explained,

The thoroughness of Texas’ gerrymander during the last round of redistricting in 2021 leaves no room for Republicans to grow their 25-member majority among the state’s 38 seats in the House of Representatives. Any alteration of the map will only hurt the GOP’s sitting incumbents and comes with a risk of backfiring.

We can only hope.

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