Bruce Lesley is president of First Focus on Children, and in this post he reminds us that both parent’s and children’s rights matter.
Three Houston mothers just handed us a model that those of us who believe in both parental and children’s rights should adopt.
Emily Roth, Audrey Rosa Nath, and Sanjam Kaur Sohal sued Texas over the Ten Commandments posters state law now requires in every public classroom, and they didn’t reach for a First Amendment claim that’s already lost twice in the Fifth Circuit. They sued under the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act and, more pointedly, under Proposition 15, the “Parental Rights Amendment” Texas voters approved last year, which guarantees parents “the fundamental right to exercise care, custody, and control” of their own children, including “the right to make decisions concerning the child’s upbringing.”
Although a judge declined to block the posters before school started, a hearing on a longer injunction is set for today, August 17. Win or lose, the lawsuit makes a point that should outlive the case: the same language conservative legislatures wrote to give parents veto power over vaccines, books, and health care also gives parents standing to say no to actions that states take, such as a state-mandated religious display that imposes one religious belief on all children.
In a matter of a few years, state laws are being proposed and cases are being taken to the Supreme Court built on the premise that “parental rights” are sacrosanct, non-negotiable, and immune from anything short of strict scrutiny.
As a child advocate, I don’t accept that premise. Children are rights-bearing people, not appendages of whatever their parents or the state decides for them, and their own interests shouldn’t disappear into an absolutist veto held by either one.