Parenting as A Sacred Right
Parenting as A Sacred Right
The right to parent as a matter of constitutional law is especially tenuous. The Supreme Court has on occasion echoed the popular assumption that the right of parents to make decisions concerning the care, custody, and nurture of their children is a fundamental one, deeply rooted in legal tradition and honored by the work of the Court. But no Supreme Court holding—including those of the seminal parenting cases Meyer and Pierce, and modern variants like Yoder and Troxel—supports this claim. If the rigor of the Court with regard to the regulation of parental authority has varied, its scrutiny has never been strict. In fact, more than once the Court has declined the opportunity to adopt this position. As Justice Antonin Scalia has observed, there is little decisional support for the notion that the right to parent is a “substantive constitutional right” at all, let alone a fundamental one.
Keywords: right to parent, constitutional law, strict scrutiny, Supreme Court parenting cases, regulation of parental authority
Yale Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.