Opinion ID: 2488316
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The family, like the state and the church, is a legitimate governing authority within its own sphere.

Text: The family is a separate and legitimate human government within its proper sphere. Like the state and the church, it possesses supreme authority within its own legitimate bounds, with the rights and duties of its members ordained by a higher authority. Ex parte Sullivan, 407 So.2d 559 (1981). As John Locke wrote: But these two powers, political and paternal, are so perfectly distinct and separate; are built upon so different foundations, and given to so different ends, that every subject that is a father, has as much a paternal power over his children, as the prince has over his: and every prince, that has parents, owes them as much filial duty and obedience, as the meanest of his subjects do to theirs; and can therefore contain not any part or degree of that kind of dominion, which a prince or magistrate has over his subject. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government § 71. Family and state are separate yet overlapping, and each must respect the authority of the other. Abraham Kuyper, a famous Dutch political leader, writer, and theologian, explained that the authority of the family was not dependent on the state, but independent of it, because it came directly from God. Behind these organic spheres, with intellectual, aesthetical and technical sovereignty, the sphere of the family opens itself, with its right of marriage, domestic peace, education and possession; and in this sphere also the natural head is conscious of exercising an inherent authority,not because the government allows it, but because God has imposed it. Paternal authority roots itself in the very life-blood and is proclaimed in the fifth Commandment. Abraham Kuyper, The L.P. Stone Lectures for 1898-1899: Calvinism (Six Lectures Delivered in the Theological Seminary at Princeton), 123 (1898). Kuyper went on to equate state interference with parental rights to rebellion against proper civil government: A people therefore which abandons to State Supremacy the right of the family ... is just as guilty before God, as a nation which lays its hands upon the rights of the magistrates. Kuyper, at 127.