Unlike assisted suicide and abortion, parental rights fit squarely within the “deeply rooted” standard.
The Supreme Court recognized that parents’ rights were constitutionally sacrosanct nearly a century ago, in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925). Both decisions were written by Justice James McReynolds, and both dealt with a vast intrusion of government power into traditionally private matters driven by the World War I-era push for a domestic monoculture to serve the nation’s wartime exigencies.