A law professor at the oldest law school in the nation believes that there is no inherent right to parent one’s own children.
In an interview for CRTV about homeschooling, Professor James G. Dwyer told syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin: The reason that parent-child relationship exists is because the state confers legal parenthood on people through its paternity and maternity laws.
An investigation into Dwyer’s writings and history reveals that his alarming statement was not an exaggerated or taken out of context by a conservative journalist. Instead, the statement appears to be a foundational core belief held by a man who formerly worked in New York state family courts as a Law Guardian.
Dwyer teaches college students at William and Mary College and his writings influence policy within the family court system
Dwyer has been a prolific writer on the subject of children’s rights. He told Malkin the state empowers parents to do anything with children, to take them home, to have custody, and to make any kind of decisions about that.
He goes so far as to claim that the state should choose parents for newborns –writing, courts should recognize that newborn babies, much more clearly than birth parents, have fundamental interests at stake in the state’s selection of legal parents and, therefore, a much stronger claim to constitutional protection.
And in a 1994 article, he said he resents any schooling taught from a religious perspective, whether it is from parents sending their children to a Christian school, homeschooling or rejecting the secularism taught in public schools.