Court Opinion

ID: 9594778
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 00:32:55.89279+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:00:46.395764
License: Public Domain

*195Sears, Justice,
concurring.
Both the majority and the dissent say much of Georgia’s “Grandparent Visitation Statute,” OCGA § 19-7-3, that today we declare unconstitutional. The statute makes the judicial process available for grandparents to use to require their children to provide them visitation rights with their grandchildren upon a showing of “special circumstances which make such visitation rights necessary to the best interest of the child.” OCGA § 19-7-3 (c).
In sum, the dissent says that grandparents can be another layer of special people for children. I fully agree. The family requires the most delicate mixture of nature and convention, of human and divine, to subsist and thrive. Its base may be mere bodily reproduction, but its purpose is the formation and maintenance of civilized human beings. Grandparents can be important to the family mixture because children must receive knowledge of the things of the past as well as prescriptions for what ought to be in order to resist the philistinism of the present. Having found wisdom, learned patience, and journeyed in faith, many grandparents have much to give their grandchildren in the way of a vision of the world, as models of action, and may, as well, provide children with a very profound sense of connection with others.
However, as important as grandparents can be in the lives of their grandchildren, the relationship between parent and child is paramount. For this reason I cannot believe in either the constitutionality or the political correctness of any law that allows a court, using its own notions of what “special circumstances” are, to pierce the delicate, complex and sacred unity of parent and child against the wishes of fit parents and without a showing of absolute necessity. While I have no quarrel with governmental interference where a parent’s conduct may injure a child emotionally or physically, interference on less than those grounds is contrary to our common law tradition of protecting the nuclear family as the foundation of society and leaving fit parents the exclusive right to determine what is in their children’s best interest. Far from being outmoded, that tradition is critical today. In this indifferent, lackluster and frightened time, we need to protect the sanctity and shore up the security provided by our families more than at any other time I can think of.
The American family as an institution is vulnerable for many reasons, not the least of which are the weaknesses of its members who are, after all, only mortals. Implicit in the Western family as we know it, which generally consists of parents and their young children, are deep distresses that often accompany living in intimate, revealing relationships with minimum regulation and oversight from government or other entities. Parents can perpetuate many subtle as well as overt outrages against their children, from neglect to mayhem. When pa*196rental conduct is so vile as to injure a child, and parents cannot or will not reach out to others for help, government not only is authorized but is compelled to invade the intimacy and privacy of the parent-child relationship in order to provide children with a healthy alternative.
Even in so-called “good families,” the engagement of child with mother and father, and husband with wife, can be intense, causing disappointment and pain. Mothers and fathers often feel their children’s misfortunes and failures keenly; their rejection by peers, their abuse at the hands of callous adults, their awkwardness and their miscalculations. There is often wounded pride and astonished unbelief when the bright promise of the baby fades into the ordinariness of the school child. In the family the young adult struggles to shake off the bonds of parental love that expresses itself in solicitude and supervision. And for the parent whose child has made the necessary leap to freedom, there is the pain of letting go, of turning back to the silent house, the empty bed, the abandoned books, dolls and baseball bats.7
Turn all of this over, however, and in the vast majority of homes you will also discover tender devotion, the deepest pride and the most exultant joy — all experienced in the relationship between parent and child. It does not matter whether our child is brilliant or deficient, beautiful or homely, perfect or deformed, good or bad — he or she is ours, and most parents are committed to their children lastingly. Whether we rear our children on the right side of the tracks or the wrong, whether we are dunderheaded in politics or forward-looking enough to please our adventurous offspring, whether we are able to provide them with the things they think they need or we are limited to providing them with the things we know they must have, they are ours and, absent abuse and neglect, parents and their children have the right to “remain together without the coercive interference of the awesome power of the state.” Duchesne v. Sugarman, 566 F2d 817, 825 (2nd Cir. 1977). Our law has always recognized that the relationship between parents and their children is the most mutually beneficial relationship possible, in an imperfect world, and in this country parents’ decisions concerning visitation with a grandparent or anyone else have always been dictated, if at all, by moral and religious forces rather than legal ones.
If the relationship of parent to child were a more superficial one — as well might be the case under any statute that would involuntarily relieve a couple of the care of their young in favor of others under *197a subjective showing of “special circumstances” — such profound feelings as I have described could be diluted to mere concern, and for some the concern could become indifference. Relieved of intensity and stripped of privacy, the relationship between parents and their children could be less binding, not more, creating another wedge between parent and child and another excuse for parents to shirk their responsibilities. Furthermore, when the parent-child relationship is curtailed, even to accomplish a goal as laudable and seemingly benevolent as ensuring a child’s connection with the parents of his mother or his father, over time some parents could come to feel less committed to their young in a time where more commitment is needed, and less inclined to ensure that their children got the essentials: authority, responsibility, attention and love.
Between parent and child, there is no monster like separateness. It can grow even faster than children, shutting first the heart, then the home, then history. The rights that some grandparents may seek under the liberal rules of the statute invalidated today could separate fit parents from responsibility for and authority over their children, thereby undermining the privacy and primacy of the American family. The statute cannot be allowed to stand.

 See generally Cox, “Marriage and the Family” Readings on the Psychology of Women (Harper & Row, 1972).