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Two Cheers for Parental Rights

Scott Yenor

As a response to the ideological state capture of schools and hospitals, conservatives have responded with calls for parental rights. School districts peddle racialist, white-shaming theories in their curriculum. In response, parents want to know what is being taught, so they ask for transparency through what many states call a “parental bill of rights.” Schools encourage students to identify as other than their so-called “assigned gender” at birth and to do so against the parents’ wishes. In this case, conservatives view the state as usurping the role of a parent, and the sanctity of parental rights demands that the state back off...

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Power: Issue Two

Parents' Rights

The principle recognizing the prerogative of parents to educate their children is no longer just a haven from the tyranny of the State. The “right” itself has become an arbitrary claim, with “gender-affirming” parents appealing to it as proxies of their children’s “right to choose.” And the “parents” bearing the right are, increasingly, those who choose children—producing and buying them—not the ones who have them. Unless parents’ rights are grounded in the authority mothers and fathers possess as participants in a prevenient natural order, to which they themselves are beholden and for which they are responsible, it will become the arena of a lesser known, yet no less terrible, tyranny: the Huxleyan tyranny of our own desires.

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Humanum is about the human: what makes us human, what keeps us human, and what does not. We are driven by the central questions of human existence: nature, freedom, sexual difference and the fundamental figures to which it gives rise, man, woman, and child. We probe these in the context of marriage, family, education, work, medicine and bioethics, science and technology, political and ecclesial life. We sift through the many competing ideas of our age so that we might “hold fast to what is good” and let go of what is not. In addition to articles, witness pieces, and book reviews ArteFact: Film & Fiction searches out the human in the literary and cinematic arts.

Humanum is published as a free service by the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C.