Stop Removing Parents from the Equation

Welcome to Family Policy Matters, an engaging and informative weekly radio show and podcast produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, this is John Rustin, president of NC Family, and we're grateful to have you with us for this week's program. It's our prayer that you will be informed, encouraged, and inspired by what you hear on Family Policy Matters, and that you will feel better equipped to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation.

And now here is our host of Family Policy Matters, Tracy Devitt-Griggs. Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. Most of us assume that the law defers to the decisions of parents when it comes to their children, especially in education and medical matters, but that is not always the case.

The organization Parental Rights Foundation recently filed a lawsuit challenging a new Washington, D.C. law that allows children as young as 11 to make binding medical decisions without parental consent or even notification. James Mason is with us today to discuss this disturbing trend. James Mason is president of the Parental Rights Foundation and vice president and director of litigation and development for the Home School Legal Defense Association. Jim Mason, welcome to Family Policy Matters.

Well, it's my pleasure to be with you today. So do you think most parents would be surprised at the current legal status of parental rights in the United States? And if so, why? The traditional view of parental rights is under pressure from a lot of different fronts. And I think parents would be surprised from some of those directions. Not so much, though, in others. I mean, some of these are pretty big items in the news today. We read a lot about, you know, school districts and school boards and critical race theory and the way education is being affected. There's another big issue that is something I didn't foresee coming years ago. But the transgender movement and the ideology behind it and how that's affecting children and how parents are being excluded from those big decisions is a pretty big item in the news. And it's kind of a frightening one. And just for people that may not be paying attention, the transgender movement involves what?

Give us a quick synopsis. The ideology is that people are born into the wrong bodies and that they are actually a sex other than what their biological sex is. And where children and parents become involved, it involves pre-puberty hormone treatments to block the natural development of a child's body, either male or female, and pretty drastic surgical interventions. Really frightening stuff that is happening to children all over the country. And it's increasing at an alarming pace over the last few years. And there are situations where the parents are being threatened with losing custody of their children, right, if they resist.

Yeah. And that ties into another big area of erosion of parental rights that most people are maybe vaguely aware of, but don't necessarily think about very often. And that is the whole child welfare system that most people don't think about it unless a CPS investigator comes to their house. Where these things intersect is that the rights of parents to decide medical issues for their children comes into conflict when the transgender ideology would say that the child has a right to have pre-pubescent hormone treatments or drastic surgical interventions. And the CPS system gets involved at cross-purposes with the parents.

That's an emerging trend that's starting to happen. That's disturbing. So somewhat related to that, you have filed recently a lawsuit or your organization has filed this lawsuit in federal court related to a Washington, D.C. law to vaccinate minors.

So tell us why this is so important. What the district did is it passed an ordinance that says children as young as 11 years old may consent to vaccinations. And it started out with the usual childhood vaccinations that you're required to have to go to school without their parents' knowledge or consent. And it's actually structured in a way that the school districts will keep two sets of books, one that the parents can see and one that they can't.

And then the ones that they can look at, it won't reflect that they had the vaccination. And it even instructs insurance companies to hide the fact in the explanation of benefits that's mailed to the parents. Now, that consent, it says that a child as young as 11 may consent if, in the opinion of the health care provider, the child has sufficient maturity to give that consent. Well, who is it for the 11-year-old child that has traditionally been the one to give consent for medical treatment?

That's always been parents. And the other layer on this is that in the District of Columbia, parents can file for exemption, which is kind of routine all around the country. You can have your children exempted from those vaccines for medical or religious reasons. So the plaintiffs that we represent for religious reasons have exempted their children from vaccinations for many years in the public schools, all in accordance with law, and now this new ordinance would say we're going to ignore the parents' religious exemption and ask the child themselves. And if the child says yes and the doctor thinks they're mature enough, we'll give them the shot and then we won't tell the parents about it. And then that all was started before COVID, and now the COVID vaccine has approved down to 12 years old, and the District of Columbia is, when school opens, they're going to set up clinics and ask kids apart from their parents whether they want to get the COVID vaccine.

Wow. So tell me about why parents, in case they're not seeing the importance of this, why do parents who even may fully support vaccinations and think, you know, getting everybody vaccinated is a great idea, why should they care about this? Why is this important? It's a very direct assault on the traditional role that parents have with their children to guide them through life's decisions until they're old enough or reach adulthood themselves to make those important decisions. And so our lawsuit is probably going to be looked at as a kind of an anti-COVID vaccine lawsuit, which it is not.

It is all about who decides. You know, the Supreme Court in 1923, in a very famous case, said that children are not mere creatures of the state, that their parents have the high duty and responsibility to make major life decisions for them. And so that's what's under assault. It's not about vaccines, it's about removing parents from that equation. And, you know, most parents want to have their kids vaccinated, but they want to be involved in the decision. If I had seven children, they're all adults now, none of them at the age of 11, in my humble opinion, would I have wanted to make those kinds of medical decisions without my wife or I being involved in them?

And that's what's under assault. And this is just one example of laws like this around the country, whether it's medical records or consent to abortions. There's a trend of taking parents out of the medical decision making to achieve social goals that are kind of contrary to the traditional role of parents in the lives of their children. Is there a grand scheme here? Are these people all getting together and deciding, oh, let's start with something that seems reasonable, like a vaccine, and then we can go after, you know, more and more parental rights? Or do you think this is just kind of that zeitgeist, that kind of cultural movement?

It may be both. The ideology that is behind this, there's a pretty prominent law professor named James Dwyer, who has written books, and one of his books is about homeschooling, but he doesn't confine his writings to homeschooling. And he has expressed the notion, which is widespread amongst elite academic institutions and law professors and the like, that the only reason parents have rights to do anything with their children is because the state grants them those rights.

There's a very long essay about this, and he is actually at the forefront of changing the way we view the parent-child relationship and removing the traditional view, the legal view, what is still the law in America is that fit parents, that is parents who have not been adjudicated as abusive, fit parents have the right to decide major life decisions for their children, education, medical, and so forth, unless there's a really compelling interest that is very narrowly tailored to overcome that right. They would like to switch that to the state gets to decide pretty much everything and parents are just kind of the caregivers that the state delegates its role to. So there is that in academia, and these kind of laws are reflective of that mindset.

And this despite the fact, as you just said, that the Supreme Court has ruled pretty much the exact opposite of that. Yes, so that's kind of the problem of my organization was actually founded about 15 years ago with the idea of getting a parental rights amendment added to the United States Constitution to prevent the erosion of parental rights through the courts, because parental rights are not in the Constitution, they are the traditional rights that parents have long understood they had and the country is long understood that parents have, but we had set out to put it in black and white in the Constitution to prevent any kind of erosion. And so we do see erosion in courts, and I have been involved in a couple of cases over the last few years where the courts have upheld and return to those traditional rights and use that kind of language so it's a ongoing struggle, where people who hold to the traditional view, law firms, lawyers like me, need to be involved in cases to keep advancing that so that the courts will continue to uphold it, but not every court has.

So it's an ongoing issue that we need to really pay attention to. So the outcome of this lawsuit that you have filed in Washington, DC, will that have implications for some of these other issues that you're discussing? You know, depending on how it turns out, if the traditional role of parents is the primary holding and it comes out favorably, this lawsuit would be, you know, used as a good example of the reasoning behind it, and we raised a couple of other arguments in it. Religious freedom, for example, should parents who have a legal right to religious exemption have those rights just ignored? I mean, how does that make sense? You give them the right to claim exemption for religious reasons, and then you ignore them and hide hide the fact from them. That doesn't make any sense.

That'll also be helpful. So we take these cases on because we think they have the potential to highlight the issues and get us a good precedent that can be relied on in other cases around the country. So you mentioned your efforts to try to get parental rights written into the US Constitution.

How is that effort going? Well, as you may have read, Congress is kind of polarized right now. So the first step, getting a parental rights amendment or any kind of amendment to the United States Constitution requires that a bill be introduced and passed in the same two year Congress. So this is a marathon divided up into two year sprints, we get the amendment introduced in Congress pretty much every every Congress, we have pretty high hurdle two thirds of each house before it gets sent to the states.

And we're just continuing to highlight it, it's not likely to happen soon. But because of our efforts, and because we formed the organization, we've also been working diligently around the country getting parental rights statutes. We've had several of those passed around the country. And another big thing we're working on is the CPS investigation system is very erosive of parental rights and it largely occurs in secret, and nobody knows what's really going on and so we have been proposing model legislation through an organization called the American Legislative Exchange Council, which then state legislators attend these sessions and they can take those bills out into their states and pass state specific bills to protect parental rights. I know that there will be people who are listening to us who will be very interested in following this issue, but also your organization is involved in a couple of other very interesting cases.

Could you tell us how people can follow your work and where they would go to learn more about these other cases as well? Our website is parentalrightsfoundation.org and you can sign up for our emails there. As you noted in my introduction, I'm also at work with the Home School Legal Defense Association, and the relationship there is The right to home school depends in large part on the right of parents to direct the education of their children. And you can find out more about us at hslda.org and we have a weekly newsletter you can sign up for there as well. Well, James Mason, President of the Parental Rights Foundation, thank you so much for being with us today on Family Policy Matters.

You've been listening to Family Policy Matters. We hope you enjoyed the program and plan to tune in again next week. To listen to the show online and to learn more about NC Families work to inform, encourage and inspire families across North Carolina, go to our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org. Thanks again for listening and may God bless you and your family. Thank you.