Parental Rights Targeted?

Image source: Boris Roessler/picture alliance/Getty Images via The Daily Signal Parental rights are targeted for eradication in Germany’s ban on homeschooling.  The Wunderlichs, a homeschooling family in Germany whose children were temporarily removed from their home for the German crime of homeschooling, have lost the right to educate their children as they deem fit.  Despite the fact that international law upholds the right of the family to make educational choices, the European Court of Human Rights recently upheld Germany’s homeschooling ban.  Read on this more at The Daily Signal.  Last week the Austin Institute in Austin, Texas sponsored a symposium on The Family & the Law in Politics Today, at the Southern Political Science Association annual conference, where parental rights were part of the discussion.  This excerpt below explains how parental rights law in the United States differs from that of European regulations, but also sounds a warning for American parents: The United States Constitution does not explicitly extended special constitutional protection to family relations.  In the early 1920s, however, the Supreme Court of the United States used the doctrine of substantive due process to declare that certain family relations were entitled to special constitutional deference - those were parental rights.  In 1923 the Court in Meyer v. Nebraska,  ruled that parents direct the upbringing of their children when it comes to their education, and affirmed that in 1925 in Pierce v. Society of Sisters. As if to add emphasis to this notion, indeed, in 2000 the Supreme Court of the United States in Troxel v. Granville, characterized a parent's right to raise his or her child as “perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by this Court.” If the United States Supreme Court has then traditionally protected parental rights, what is happening now between the law and parents?  Today we consider this question.  Section I details how parents are fighting for the lives of their children, and losing.  Section II discusses state efforts to protect parental rights in statutory code and legislative measures.  Section III then examines the difference between children’s rights derived from the state, and inalienable parental rights which work to protect the best interests of the child. By examining the constitutionalization of the family, we consider some of the most important policy debates on parental rights, children’s rights, and families today, revealing how the Supreme Court of the United States’ rulings on marriage and children have altered how we think about rights and duties between family members, and arguing that "the relationship between a parent and child is a constitutionally protected liberty interest under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment” which deserves renewed protection.

Look for this piece soon on SSRN.