90
Stevens, J., dissenting
in the best interest of her child, it would be necessary, were the state appellate courts actually to confront a challenge to the statute as applied, to consider whether the trial court's assessment of the "best interest of the child" incorporated that presumption. Neither would I decide whether the trial court applied Washington's statute in a constitutional way in this case, although, as I have explained, n. 3, supra, I think the outcome of this determination is far from clear. For the purpose of a facial challenge like this, I think it safe to assume that trial judges usually give great deference to parents' wishes, and I am not persuaded otherwise here.
But presumptions notwithstanding, we should recognize that there may be circumstances in which a child has a stronger interest at stake than mere protection from serious harm caused by the termination of visitation by a "person" other than a parent. The almost infinite variety of family relationships that pervade our ever-changing society strongly counsel against the creation by this Court of a constitutional rule that treats a biological parent's liberty interest in the care and supervision of her child as an isolated right that may be exercised arbitrarily. It is indisputably the business of the States, rather than a federal court employing a national standard, to assess in the first instance the relative importance of the conflicting interests that give rise to disputes such as this.10 Far from guaranteeing that
10 See Palmore v. Sidoti, 466 U. S. 429, 431 (1984) ("The judgment of a state court determining or reviewing a child custody decision is not ordinarily a likely candidate for review by this Court"); cf. Collins v. Harker Heights, 503 U. S. 115, 128 (1992) (matters involving competing and multi-faceted social and policy decisions best left to local decisionmaking); Regents of Univ. of Mich. v. Ewing, 474 U. S. 214, 226 (1985) (emphasizing our "reluctance to trench on the prerogatives of state and local educational institutions" as federal courts are ill-suited to "evaluate the substance of the multitude of academic decisions that are made daily by" experts in the field evaluating cumulative information). That caution is never more essential than in the realm of family and intimate relations. In part, this principle is based on long-established, if somewhat arbitrary, tradition in
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