Abstract
This Article explores parallels between integralists’ defense of the Mortara case (in which Pius IX removed a child from his parents’ care in order to provide him with a Catholic education) and contemporary progressive arguments for overriding the authority of parents who do not want their gender-dysphoric children to undergo social or medical gender transition. In Part I, I offer an overview of the natural law case for limited government, then in Part II I turn more specifically to a natural law defense of parental rights as an essential aspect of limited government. In the following Part, I return to the Mortara case, analyzing it in light of the principles presented in the previous sections to show why the Pope’s actions (however well-intentioned) were contrary to natural law. Finally, in Part IV I argue that the Mortara case has troubling parallels in the attempts of contemporary progressives (also presumably well-intentioned) to allow gender-dysphoric children to undergo social transition and begin hormone therapies without parental knowledge or consent, and to justify the removal of such children from the homes of loving parents who persist in opposing such interventions. I thus attempt to show, through these concrete examples related to parental rights, how natural law principles can save liberal political institutions not only from their integralist critics, but also from liberalism’s own contemporary progressive excesses.
Recommended Citation
Melissa Moschella,
Natural Law, Parental Rights, and the Defense of "Liberal" Limits on Government: An Analysis of the Mortara Case and its Contemporary Parallels,
98
Notre Dame L. Rev.
1559
(2023).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndlr/vol98/iss4/5