A case now before the Supreme Court of Texas may become the first real test of the state’s newly minted “parental rights amendment,” and the stakes could not be higher. The state constitutional amendment, approved by Texas voters in November 2025, declares that parents have the “inherent right to exercise care, custody, and control” over their children and to make decisions about their upbringing. Any state action that “interferes” with those rights is subject to the equivalent of strict scrutiny—the highest level of constitutional protection.
On its face, the language sounds familiar and even benign. Few Americans object to the idea that parents, not the government, should ordinarily make decisions about their children. But constitutional language does not exist in a vacuum, and this case forces a confrontation with what the “parental rights” movement is actually seeking to protect and whom it leaves exposed.
The dispute before the court arises from allegations that are not remotely ambiguous or cultural in nature. According to the record, the conduct at issue includes food deprivation, beatings with a belt, forced wall sits that lasted hours, and prolonged kneeling on grains of rice—forms of punishment that most people would recognize as physical and emotional abuse. The question now being seriously entertained is whether the Texas Constitution requires courts to presume such treatment is protected parental decision-making unless the state can meet the nearly insurmountable burden of strict scrutiny.
That this argument is being advanced at all is chilling. That it is being supported by prominent right-wing advocacy organizations, including the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Family Freedom Project, should force a reckoning with what the contemporary “parental rights” movement actually is.
The amendment itself did not emerge from concerns about extreme discipline or state overreach in abuse cases. Its public justification was far more ideological. Supporters framed it as a response to schools “undermining” parents, particularly by acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ+ people or by offering inclusive curricula. In that context, “parental rights” functioned as a euphemism—not merely the right to raise one’s child but the right to control what any child is allowed to know, see, or understand about the world.
It’s a framing that comes riddled with contradictions. Even as Texas voters were told the amendment would keep the government out of family life, the state was aggressively inserting itself into families whose children needed gender-affirming care, going so far as to label supportive parents as child abusers and to threaten investigations and removals. Parental autonomy, it turned out, was conditional. It applied only when parents’ decisions are aligned with conservative ideology.
The case now before the Supreme Court of Texas exposes that conditionality in even starker terms. Here, “parental rights” are not being invoked to resist bureaucratic micromanagement or defend reasonable differences in child-rearing. They are being invoked to shield conduct that would trigger intervention if committed by a teacher, foster parent, or childcare worker. The theory is not that abuse did not occur, but that the Constitution requires the state to tolerate it.
The rhetoric of parental rights collapses into a claim of unilateral power rather than responsibility. Traditionally, both law and social norms have treated parental authority as bounded by a child’s basic rights to safety and dignity. Parents are entrusted with enormous discretion precisely because they are presumed to act in their children’s best interests. When that presumption breaks down and harm becomes clear, the state intervenes—not to punish ideology but to protect a vulnerable child.
The “parental rights” framework advanced in this case seeks to invert that logic. It asks courts to treat children not as rights-bearing individuals but as constitutional property interests over which parents exercise near-total control. Under this view, the barrier the state must overcome to stop it is incredibly high: Even actions that most would consider abuse are protected as expressions of parents’ authority and ideological preferences.
This is not a neutral application of constitutional principles. It is a selective expansion of rights that entrenches hierarchy while disclaiming accountability. The same movement that insists parents must have an absolute veto over school library books or pronouns has shown no hesitation in overriding parental judgment when families seek reproductive health care or gender-affirming treatment for their children. “Parental rights” disappear and reappear depending on whose autonomy is at stake.
What makes this case particularly alarming is its potential to constitutionalize that asymmetry. If the Supreme Court of Texas embraces the argument that extreme corporal punishment and deprivation fall within the protected core of parental decision-making, it will not merely be deciding one family’s fate. It will be signaling that a child’s right to bodily integrity is subordinate to a parent’s ideological claim of authority, even in the face of clear harm.
Supporters of the amendment may insist this is a slippery-slope concern, that courts will still be able to intervene in the worst cases. But strict scrutiny is not a minor procedural hurdle. It requires the state to prove not only that it has a compelling interest—protecting children from abuse—but that its intervention is narrowly tailored and the least restrictive means available. Applied rigidly, that standard risks turning child protection into a constitutional afterthought.
More fundamentally, the case reveals the true endgame of the modern parental rights movement. It is not about freedom from government overreach in any consistent or principled sense. It is about securing a constitutional trump card—one that allows certain parents to enforce obedience, suppress identity, and inflict harm without meaningful oversight, while the state is compelled to look away.
A society that treats children as mere extensions of parental will, rather than as people with rights of their own, abandons one of the most basic functions of law: protecting those who cannot protect themselves. If “parental rights” can be stretched to cover child abuse, then the phrase no longer names a safeguard for families. It names a license—and a warning.
