Three years after the Texas Supreme Court cost a father his parental rights with his gender-confused son by wrongly assuming California courts would follow Texas court orders, the justices are seeking help on how to interpret Texas law on termination of parental rights regardless of whether the Golden State honors the Lone Star State.The high court asked parties in a different termination dispute to explain the “relationship” between the state’s new constitutional amendment on parental rights, approved by voters in November, and the “existing statutory framework for termination of parental rights” in the Texas family code, including the latter’s “clear-and-convincing standard.”
That evidence standard falls between the more-likely-than-not “preponderance,” which the Obama administration forced colleges to use in sexual misconduct cases, and “beyond a reasonable doubt,” which is used in criminal cases. The Supreme Court defines clear and convincing as “highly probable” that factual contentions are true.
Married couple Robby Lerille and Cama Niccum, who separately petitioned the Texas high court to review an appeals court ruling upholding a jury’s termination of each’s parental rights for various children in 2023 based on alleged physical abuse, and a handful of outside Texas interest groups filed briefs on the question last week.
Texas Scorecard told a version of the parents’ story several months before trial, alleging the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) exaggerated the couple’s practice of “physically correcting” such as spanking their oldest child, whom Niccum had with an “unknown” father before marrying Lerille.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief, said this is the Texas Supreme Court’s first chance to interpret the new constitutional amendment.
It reads: “To enshrine truths that are deeply rooted in this nation’s history and traditions, the people of Texas hereby affirm that a parent has the responsibility to nurture and protect the parent’s child and the corresponding fundamental right to exercise care, custody, and control of the parent’s child, including the right to make decisions concerning the child’s upbringing.”
Ballotpedia counted official support for the amendment from Christian, homeschooling, pro-life and “vaccine choice” groups.
When the Texas House approved the amendment last spring, the Texas Home School Coalition told Texas Scorecard that without it, parental rights would remain “found only in case law, which is controlled by judges.” The publication noted Colorado lawmakers had recently considered letting judges penalize a parent in custody disputes for misgendering a child.
The Diaz & Wright law firm, which says it “advocate[s] for children against neglectful parents” and often must fight Texas “to ensure it fulfills its legal obligations,” opposed the amendment as “largely redundant and performative” in light of the statutory Parents Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court’s Troxel parental rights precedent.
Texas brought the intersection of child custody and gender identity into the national spotlight in 2022 when its high court refused to return Jeff Younger’s gender-confused son from his ex-wife’s custody in California, the first sanctuary state for so-called gender-affirming care.
Two judges claimed the ex was still bound by a Texas court order banning her from unilaterally medically transitioning the boy to resemble a girl. But nearly two years later a Los Angeles judge allegedly authorized the ex to start the 12-year-old on potentially irreversible treatments and cut off Younger’s parental rights except with supervision, which he refused.
The Golden State subsequently made plain the consequences of parents refusing to medically transition children, with a recent lawsuit alleging it took a gender-confused girl from her immigrant parents and put them on a child abuse registry, according to Reduxx.
