Juneteenth Means Parental Rights
As the nation prepares to celebrate Juneteenth on Thursday, I’d like to remind you that true freedom involves parental rights—the liberty to raise your own family as you see fit.
Juneteenth is the commemoration of the day that Federal troops under Major General Gordon Granger brought the news to Texas, at the end of the Civil War, that the institution of slavery had been abolished.
Following that vast conflict, the States adopted three new amendments to the Constitution to ensure that slavery was ended and that the rights of all persons, regardless of race or color, were permanently secured.
These include the Fourteenth Amendment, whose Due Process Clause has been the source of “substantive” rights since the 1920s. Parental Rights, couched as part of the “liberty” of which a person cannot be deprived without due process under that amendment, have been recognized by the Supreme Court since 1923.
In its Meyer v. Nebraska decision, 262 U.S. 390 (1923) at 399, the Court held:
“While this Court has not attempted to define with exactness the liberty thus guaranteed, the term has received much consideration and some of the included things have been definitely stated. Without doubt, it denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint, but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileged long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”
Yet, even as we celebrate the end of slavery coming to Galveston 160 years ago, we still have work to do.
That’s because more than 50% of all African American children in America today will be part of a child welfare investigation before they reach the age of 18. The vast majority of those investigations will be for “neglect,” a poorly defined and even more poorly applied term that tends to mean almost anything the government wants it to. And roughly four of every five investigations will ultimately be closed as unsubstantiated or unfounded.
In short, Black families are still being intruded upon, and their right to family autonomy is still being threatened, by the very government the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to rein in.
Family separation was one of the worst atrocities of the slavery system. That a child could be ripped from his mother’s arms, taken from his father, and shipped to another plantation like so much chattle, was an inhumane horror.
Yet, today, families are ripped apart with a judge’s stamp of approval, simply because a child welfare investigator believes they know better than the child’s parent.
It is time for these violations to end.
That’s why the Parental Rights Foundation is working in states across the country to bring child welfare reform, from ending anonymous reporting to making sure “neglect” does not include choices to give a child reasonable autonomy and independence.
It’s also why we champion a Parental Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which will empower all parents, regardless of zip code or skin color.
While we celebrate the end of slavery as an institution on Thursday, we also commit ourselves to reining in a child welfare system that keeps vestiges of it alive to this day.
Thank you for standing with us as we champion the rights of all parents to protect their children!