No Home Rule
The War Against Parents by Schools & States
States and school districts throughout the United States are implementing laws and guidelines that undermine parents’ right to information about their children. Parents have a constitutional right to make judgments about the upbringing of their children, including in the sphere of education. But can they make those judgments if states and schools prohibit parents from learning information vital to their children’s wellbeing? In particular, many states are allowing schools to keep parents from learning about their children’s gender-identity problems and the counseling they are receiving in that regard.
A century ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that parents have a constitutional right to choose how to bring up their children and that this right is protected by the Fourteenth Amendment (Meyer v. Nebraska, 1923). The Fourteenth Amendment states, “No State shall . . . deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of the law.” The Court in Meyer established that “without a doubt, [liberty] denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint but also the right of the individual to . . . marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience.”
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Nicole Marques holds a Juris Doctor degree from Northeastern University School of Law and focuses on legal writing and research. She lives in Florida.
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