Thomas D. Kerr v. Heidi L. Kerr

It has long been well settled that parents enjoy a fundamental liberty of rights of childrearing, procreation, and education. See Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 45 S.Ct. 571, 69 L.Ed. 1070 (1925). Moreover, this Court has recently clarified the application of laws to favor one parent over the other on the basis of gender is unconstitutionally permissible. See Sessions v. Morales-Santana, 137 S. Ct. 1678, 1690 (2017).1 Thus, the simple question presented is: 1. Can the Montana Supreme Court ignore the unjustifiable and inexplicable decisions of the lower court discriminate against a father for no other discernable reason than his gender without running afoul of the clear protections of the United States Constitution’s guarantees to due process and equal protection or the decisions of the Court applying those protections to parenting? 1 Prescribing one rule for mothers, another for fathers, § 1409 is of the same genre as the classifications we declared unconstitutional in Reed, Frontiero, Wiesenfeld, Goldfarb, and Westcott. As in those cases, heightened scrutiny is in order. Sessions v. Morales-Santana, 137 S. Ct. 1678, 1690 (2017)