Have you ever heard the phrase 'parental rights' and thought, "But what about the children? Don't they have rights, too?" Tune in to Homeschool Heartbeat, as guest host Joel Grewe and HSLDA chairman Mike Farris discuss five things about parental rights that you won't want to miss.
Mike: Sure, Joel. In international law, there's the idea of positive rights and negative rights. America doesn't recognize that. Positive rights are what the government has to do for you; negative rights are what the government can't do to you.
Mike, when we talk about parental rights, some of our listeners think, "Well, what about the children? Don't they have rights too?" So tell us about the relationship between parental rights and children's rights. Are they antithetical to each other?
The problem that we see is that the children's rights movement isn't interested in protecting children from the overreach of government—that's where rights would come in. Instead, the children's rights movement wants to move into the zone, and invade the legitimate sphere, of the family. So it's the rights of the parents and the children together to stand free from the government until such time as there's a breach of those duties. And then the parents can be held responsible for failing to live up to what God and the law expect them to do.
Mike, some of our listeners might be surprised to learn that the phrase "parental rights" never appears in the Constitution or in the Bill of Rights. If the concept of parental rights is so important, why didn't our Founders mention it?
But the Ninth Amendment implicitly mentions the issue that we're talking about. They wrote down, "Just because we wrote down other rights, doesn't mean we're not preserving our other recognized rights in the law." And if you will go to the common law rights that were recognized in 1791, when the Bill of Rights was adopted, there is utterly no doubt that the rights of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children was overwhelmingly recognized as a basic right of life, a right of parents to do. And the government could not legitimately interfere with that.