The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals (or more appropriately the “Circus Court of Appeals”) has decided that parents do not have any rights over their children that are not superceded by the government’s authority over them. In other words, your children are not your own, they belong to the “village.”
Unfortunately, the whole Talking about Touching episode in the Archdiocese of Boston, as well as the Kettelkamp memo from the US bishops’ conference, have shown us that certain leaders in the Church have more in common with the 9th US Circuit Court than they do with Pope John Paul II and millennia-old Church teaching.
In this majority opinion of the court (PDF download), we are told:
��there is no fundamental right of parents to be the exclusive provider of information regarding sexual matters to their children, either independent of their right to direct the upbringing and education of their children or encompassed by it. We also hold that parents have no due process or privacy right to override the determinations of public schools as to the information to which their children will be exposed while enrolled as students. Finally, we hold that the defendants� actions were rationally related to a legitimate state purpose.
[�]In summary, we hold that there is no free-standing fundamental right of parents �to control the upbringing of their children by introducing them to matters of and relating to sex in accordance with their personal and religious values and beliefs� and that the asserted right is not encompassed by any other fundamental right. In doing so, we do not quarrel with the parents� right to inform and advise their children about the subject of sex as they see fit. We conclude only that the parents are possessed of no constitutional right to prevent the public schools from providing information on that subject to their students in any forum or manner they select.�
