Will the Texas Supreme Court Legalize Child Abuse?

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.