The Supreme Court has struck down a Washington state law that gave
grandparents broad powers to seek visitation of grandchildren, even if
parents of the children did not agree to the visitations.
On Monday, the high court ruled that state governments could not
intervene in such personal family decisions as who could and could not
legally receive visitation rights to children, an action applauded by
the
Home School Legal Defense Association.
“While the Court was split on the exact procedural steps that should be taken in a case involving grandparent visitation, there is a clear majority which endorses the view that parental rights are fundamental,” said Michael Farris, president of Patrick Henry College and founder of the association.
The case, Troxel vs. Granville, yielded six opinions from the court in a 6-3 ruling. Farris, an attorney, authored an amicus brief in the case.
At issue was a state law that allowed “any person,” relative or not, to seek and be granted a court-ordered right to visit a child when such visitations were deemed to be in the best interests of the child. State arbitrators and courts were placed in charge of making such decisions.
However, Farris, who has experience in parental rights cases and has litigated more than a dozen such cases to the Supreme Court, noted that in every case, “parents have the fundamental right to direct both the education and upbringing of their own children.”
“This means that parents have the highest level of constitutional protection when government agencies invade the lives of their children,” Farris said on Monday.
The Supreme Court agreed, calling the Washington law “broad” and ruling that it had “unlimited power” and “sweeping breadth.”
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, in her opinion, wrote that the Constitution’s due process clause does not primarily require “all non-parental visitation statutes to include a showing of harm or potential harm to a child as a condition precedent to granting visitation.”
“We do not, and need not, define today the precise scope of the parental due process right in the visitation context,” she said.
Joining O’Connor were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, along with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer. Justices David Souter and Clarence Thomas wrote concurring opinions, while Justices John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy wrote dissenting opinions.
Stevens wrote in dissent that the Washington law struck down by the ruling “merely gives an individual ‘with whom a child may have an established relationship’ the procedural right to ask the state to act as arbiter, through the entirely well-known best interests standard, between the parent’s protected interests and the child’s.”
The law had already been struck down by Washington’s Supreme Court.
Grandparents Gary and Jenifer Troxel had gone to court to seek more visitation with their two granddaughters, 10-year-old Natalie and 8-year-old Isabelle, after the girls’ father, Brad Troxel, committed suicide in 1993. Before his death, the girls regularly visited their father at the elder Troxel’s home. Brad Troxel was never married to the girls’ mother, Tommie Granville.
After Brad’s death, the two girls continued to see their grandparents until Ms. Granville began to limit the visits. The Troxels went to court to expand visitation rights in late 1993 and two years later were given visitation rights of one weekend a month, one week during the summer months and four hours on the girls’ birthdays.
During Granville’s appeal, she married Kelly Wynn, who then adopted both Natalie and Isabelle.
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