Right to Privacy

Without comment, we provide the following excerpt from today's decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Fields v. Palmdale School District, No. 03-56499, available as a .pdf file HERE:

When parents of schoolchildren in Palmdale, California learned from their sons and daughters that they had been questioned in their public elementary school about sexual topics such as the frequency of “thinking about having sex” and “thinking about touching other peoples’ private parts,” some of them exercised their constitutional right to take their grievance to the courts.

[SNIP]

We . . . hold that 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.

Remarkable. Keep in mind that the surveys were administered to children in the first, third and fifth grades, that is, to children ages 6, 8, and 10.

So: Because of her "right to privacy" it is quite, quite wrong, and probably unconstitutional, to require that my 16-year-old daughter tell me (let alone get my permission) before she has an abortion, but her "right to privacy" does not protect my 8-year-old daughter from whatever sort of sex "education" or "survey" material The State declares is appropriate for her.

[That was not a comment, but a scream of pain.]