Texas Voters Declare Parents, Not The Government, Make Big Decisions In Children’s Lives

All seventeen amendments passed, but #15 was a doozy

Wes Walker November 7, 2025
 146 2 minutes read

For all the talk we hear about Texas becoming a ‘purple’ state, their voting record on questions like these tells a very different story.

Seventeen different ballot initiatives were put to the public in Texas this week. And all seventeen of them passed.

They covered a wide range of issues, from crime initiatives giving automatic denial of bail for certain serious violent crimes, to funding of initiatives like technical schools, water infrastructure repairs, and alzheimers reserarch. They offered niche tax relief for animal feed, or small businesses. Tax exemption for the surviving spouses of veterans passed, and several other property-tax relief issues passed as well.

We saw changes to how a rogue judiciary could be held accountable, a pre-emptive ‘HELL NO’ on any new confiscatory taxes for securities, inheritance ‘death taxes’.

Most of those are fairly run-of-the mill changes, even if some of them (no death tax, or property tax relief for fire victims, for example) can be a really big deal to those affected.

But two of those Ballot Initiatives strike at the heart of what’s been dubbed the ‘woke agenda’.

First off, the glaringly obvious point that only citizens should have the right to vote in Texas is now enshrined in law. (Initiative #16)

As cited in Kera News:

This proposition clarifies that a voter must be a U.S. citizen and registered in Texas to cast a ballot. Proponents say that’s important because the state’s constitution doesn’t explicitly limit non-citizens from voting.

While current Texas law already limits voting to citizens, this measure codifies that restriction to prevent future legal or policy changes allowing non-citizen voting.

Which brings us, at last, to the one featured in the headline, proposition 15, with 2M+ voting for, and some 800k voting against (better than a 2:1 margin) in a vote that is the precise opposite of laws passed in, say, California.

Here is the actual text of the resolution giving parents the final say over big decisions impacting their children.

Senate Joint Resolution 34 proposes an amendment to the Texas Constitution stating that, in order to enshrine truths that are deeply rooted in the nation’s history and traditions, the people of Texas affirm by the proposed amendment that a parent has the responsibility to nurture and protect the parent’s child and the corresponding fundamental right to exercise care, custody, and control of the parent’s child, including the right to make decisions concerning the child’s upbringing.

It’s only a single paragraph long, but it carries an entire world of implications for the wellbeing of children.