Right to homeschool jeopardized by activist court
Dear Friend,
Once again, our personal freedoms are under assault. And this time, those doing the assaulting are the very people who are supposed to be protecting our rights. The issue boils down to a very simple question: who has the right to raise the children of this country? Parents or the State?
In the eyes of the 2nd Appellate Court of Los Angeles, parental rights are ceded to the State right after one's offspring leaves the womb. This California appeals court recently ruled that the parents of a staggering 166,000 students in the state could face criminal sanctions for – are you ready for this – homeschooling their children.
As unbelievable as it sounds, this ruling reversed an earlier decision by a California Superior Court judge stating that "parents have a constitutional right to school children in their own home."
The homeschooling issue has, unfortunately, become something of a political football as the movement has gathered momentum over the past decade or so. A small but growing band of parents has opted out of the public school education system, often for a variety of reasons from the religious to the moral to the purely educational. Regardless of the reasons for the shift, one look at the news stories about the sex and violence in our schools (let alone the severe dip nationwide in the public schools' basic skills test scores), and it's a wonder that there aren't more families that are homeschooling.
But now, thanks to an amazingly wrong-headed decision by irresponsible (and, I suspect, activist) judges, homeschooling could be removed from the equation for parents, forcing them to send their children to public school – or face criminal charges.
This whole mess started – as most messes in today's society do – with lawyers. Lawyers were appointed by the state of California to represent the two youngest children of parents Philip and Mary Long after so-called "child advocates" called attention to the fact that the Longs were homeschooling their children.
"Child advocates?" More like nosey, agenda-driven busy bodies who objected to the fact that the Longs had their children enrolled in a private Sunland Christian School's homeschooling program. (I wonder if this case would've even come to court if the Longs had their children enrolled in homeschooling program run by an Islamic madrassa? I think you know the answer…)
In any case, the lawyers appointed by the state were "unhappy" with the previous (and sane) ruling by the court that declared homeschooling to be a Constitutional right. So they appealed. And, without even hearing arguments from the Sunland Christian School, Justice H. Walk Croskey (or should we call him "injustice" Croskey?) ruled that the Long's homeschooling was a "ruse of enrolling [children] in a private school and then letting them stay home and be taught by a non-credentialed parent.
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Who do you attack first? The alleged "child advocates" or this idiot Croskey? Either way, it's apparent that what's primarily on their mind is the reinforcement of their agenda – NOT the interest of the Long children.
How can ANYONE with the gall to call themselves a "child advocate" possibly endorse taking children out of a homeschooling program and tossing them back into the cesspool of the Los Angeles public school system? What "child advocate" would prefer to put children in an environment of schools that need armed security and metal detectors, and that have low test scores, and even lower graduation rates?
And as for "Justice" Croskey, you won't believe the unmitigated gall of the ruling! The ruling affirmed that the original trial court had found evidence that "keeping children at home deprived them of situations where (1) they could interact with people outside the family, (2) there are people who could provide help if something is amiss in the chidrens' lives, and (3) they could develop emotionally in a broader world than the parents' "cloistered" setting.
Read that again and see if you don't want to drive out to L.A. and give this Croskey character a piece of your mind. Since when has it EVER been the business of the state to be sure that MY children interact with people outside of MY family!? Since when has it EVER been the business of the state to determine what is or is not a "cloistered" environment? And when has the emotional development of MY children EVER been the business of some government bureaucrat?
It's truly a mind-boggling ruling. It's one of the biggest assaults on our personal rights and freedoms that I've come across in years. And it could only come from the mind of a liberal activist judge – because only a liberal could possibly believe that it's better to take a child out of a loving home with involved parents (and you won't find any parent more involved in their child's life than a homeschooling parent), and put them into the nation's questionable public schools.
Of course, liberals want kids in the public schools, because it's the liberals that set the agenda of those schools – and they don't want to miss out on the ability to brainwash our kids with their left-wing, politically correct nonsense.
The only good thing about this ruling is that it is so wildly unconstitutional that it's almost guaranteed to be kicked up to the next highest court. And even if it has to go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, I'd be stunned if this ruling wasn't eventually overturned at some level. But in the meantime, please help spread the rage.
Schooling you on outrageous court decisions,
William Campbell Douglass II, M.D.
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