In November 2025, Texas voters approved a “Parental Rights Amendment” to the state Constitution. The proposition was proposed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in 2022, and claims to provide parents with the right “to exercise care, custody, and control” of their child, including the “right to make decisions concerning their child’s upbringing.”
Critics called the proposition unnecessary, vague, and dangerous, noting parents’ rights are already protected in Texas and warning it would open the door for another parent’s personal beliefs to strip rights from other people’s children and their families. Progress Texas warned it would be used to “weaponize the Constitution to propagate right-wing culture wars involving LGBTQ+ families, book bans, and what’s taught in public schools.” Parents of transgender children worried it would result in government overreach.
After nearly a year since its passage, political experts said those warnings have become a reality.
“‘Parental rights’ is a phrase we’re hearing a lot in politics, and people assume it’s the right of parents to be in charge of their families, of their children, what their kids are learning, what their kids are reading, what their kids are believing religiously,” Levi Fiedler, political coordinator at the Texas Freedom Network told Courier Texas. “It’s pitched as the opposite of government control, but that’s not the truth. That’s not what we’re seeing it used for.”
Fiedler said the proposition is giving small groups of parents power over everyone’s kids.
“It’s allowing them to control what books are available in your kid’s library,” he added. “It’s allowing parents to take control of all kids, rather than keeping parental control within the family where it should be.”
The amendment has been used by far-right conservatives to justify an increase in book bans in public schools across the state that parents deem too inappropriate.
It’s also been used to support the implementation of Senate Bill 10, which requires the Ten Commandments be displayed in public school classrooms, and a new state law that bans all diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives—including Gay-Straight Alliance clubs and how nurses are allowed to care for students—in K-12 public schools.
“Whenever we put this on a governmental level, when parents can take any book out of the library for everyone or decide what clubs they have a problem with in schools, it actually takes away those opportunities for kids to learn how to determine and discern these things for themselves, and learn how to apply their family’s beliefs and values,” Fiedler said.
But now, three Houston mothers against the Ten Commandments being displayed in classrooms are trying to use the proposition in their favor. They are suing to block SB 10, citing the parental rights proposition to claim the law is unconstitutional and infringes on their right to raise their children with or without religion.
“ I think an incredible example of how parents’ rights should be respected is a parent’s rights to say, ‘For my family, it’s not best that my kid sees the Ten Commandments on the wall of every classroom,’” Fiedler said.
The lawsuit, which is going after the state, Houston ISD, Cy-Fair ISD, and Spring Branch ISD, is taking a new approach by not only citing the parental rights amendment, but also arguing the law violates the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was signed into law in 1999 by then- Gov. George W. Bush—a Republican—and states “a government agency may not substantially burden a person’s free exercise of religion.”
The Ten Commandments in classrooms have already survived legal challenges in federal court. In July 2025, 16 families sued 11 school districts to block the new law, arguing it violates the separation of church and state and pressures students to embrace religious principles and values they may not align with. But the US Court of Appeals ruled in April 2026 that SB 10 doesn’t violate the US Constitution, letting the new law stand.
A Harris County district judge denied the mothers’ request for a temporary restraining order to block the posters from being displayed before the start of the school year, allowing the law to remain in effect while litigation continues.
