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Scalia, J., dissenting
democracy set forth in the founding documents to argue, in legislative chambers or in electoral campaigns, that the State has no power to interfere with parents' authority over the rearing of their children, I do not believe that the power which the Constitution confers upon me as a judge entitles me to deny legal effect to laws that (in my view) infringe upon what is (in my view) that unenumerated right.
Only three holdings of this Court rest in whole or in part upon a substantive constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children 1—two of them from an era rich in substantive due process holdings that have since been repudiated. See Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U. S. 390, 399, 401 (1923); Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U. S. 510, 534-535 (1925); Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U. S. 205, 232-233 (1972). Cf. West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U. S. 379 (1937) (overruling Adkins v. Children's Hospital of D. C., 261 U. S. 525 (1923)). The sheer diversity of today's opinions persuades me that the theory of unenumerated parental rights underlying these three cases has small claim to stare decisis protection. A legal principle that can be thought to produce such diverse outcomes in the relatively simple case before us here is not a legal principle that has induced substantial reliance. While I would not now overrule those earlier cases (that has not been urged), neither would I extend the theory upon which they rested to this new context.
Judicial vindication of "parental rights" under a Constitution that does not even mention them requires (as Justice Kennedy's opinion rightly points out) not only a judicially crafted definition of parents, but also—unless, as no one be-1 Whether parental rights constitute a "liberty" interest for purposes of procedural due process is a somewhat different question not implicated here. Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U. S. 645 (1972), purports to rest in part upon that proposition, see id., at 651-652; but see Michael H. v. Gerald D., 491 U. S. 110, 120-121 (1989) (plurality opinion), though the holding is independently supported on equal protection grounds, see Stanley, supra, at 658.
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