Parental Rights, Constitutional Wrongs: Religious Right Pushes New Constitutional Amendment
The Parental Rights Amendment is still a bad idea.
Some ideas don’t improve well with age. Consider the Parental Rights Amendment (PRA).
Back in the mid-1990s, some Religious Right activists got the idea to add an amendment to the Constitution protecting “parental rights.” I’m sure they thought it would take off – after all, who could be against parental rights? But in fact the idea never really got much traction outside of Religious Right newsletters and soon faded away.
The reason for that was simple: Like a lot of Religious Right stunts, the PRA was a rapacious wolf strutting about in the garb of a mild-mannered sheep. It wasn’t difficult to snatch off the costume and see what lurked beneath.
Fifteen years have passed, but nothing has changed. The PRA is still a bad idea.
The amendment consists of just three sentences: “The liberty of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children is a fundamental right. Neither the United States nor any state shall infringe upon this right without demonstrating that its governmental interest as applied to the person is of the highest order and not otherwise served. No treaty nor any source of international law may be employed to supersede, modify, interpret, or apply to the rights guaranteed by this article.”
Back in the 1990s, right-wing strategists saw the PRA as a back-door voucher plan. Under their theory, states would be forced to give parents tuition vouchers for private and religious schooling since the right to direct a child’s education would be enshrined in the Constitution.
As I said, it never really took off, but I recall the concept being discussed with great hoopla at some of the Religious Right meetings I attended then.
The new PRA is being promoted by some familiar characters. Michael Farris, a longtime home schooling advocate, serves as president of parentalrights.org, a Web-based effort to promote the amendment.
Farris has a long and checkered career promoting Religious Right causes. In 1993, he attempted to launch a political career by running for lieutenant governor of Virginia. During the campaign, Farris’ opponent, Don Beyer, made hay of the fact that in 1986, Farris had represented parents in Tennessee who sought to remove several books from the public schools that they said promoted witchcraft. Among them was L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
I still recall the commercial Beyer ran showing a clip from “The Wizard of Oz” film. Watching Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion prancing arm in arm down the Yellow Brick Road in one of the best-loved movies of all time did cause one to ask: What was Farris thinking?
Farris’ list of “allied organizations” that are helping him push the PRA is a laundry list of the extreme right: Concerned Women for America, the Eagle Forum and Citizens for Excellence in Education (an anti-public schools right wing outfit that I’m surprised to learn is still around).
Also on the list is Christian Liberty Academy School System, a group that markets materials to fundamentalist home schoolers and proclaims that it believes in “combating socialism, godless Communism, and all forms of collectivistic tyranny alien to our way of life.”
The PRA Web site is also rife with paranoia about the United Nations. Farris is especially worked up over the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child – a document that has the temerity to assert that children have a right to be educated and to free from abuse and discrimination.
In fact, interpreted broadly, the PRA would open the door to all sorts of mischief. In the 1990s, some children’s welfare advocates opposed it, arguing the amendment would make it harder to prosecute child abuse. And it’s not hard to imagine parents citing the PRA when demanding that their child be excused from the entire Biology curriculum in a public school.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled back in 1925 that parents have the right to make decisions about their children’s education (Pierce v. Society of Sisters). That decision basically means that you have the right to send your children to private schools or home school them. But once you’ve made that decision, it’s up to you to pay for it.
In light of principle – and in light of the great amount of freedom afforded to private schools in this country – I have to conclude that the PRA isn’t about “parental rights” at all. It’s about you being forced to pay for someone else’s decision to patronize a private religious school or to engage in home-schooling. And it’s about giving fundamentalist Christians a powerful new weapon to use to harass public schools.
No thanks. Here’s hoping the Parental Rights Amendment 2.0 meets the same fate as its predecessor.