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Bad news for home schooling out of New Hampshire

This story just in: A New Hampshire judge has ordered a 10-year-old girl to be sent to public school because she seems too committed to her mother's religious views and hasn't learned to be critical enough of them. As she gets older, she needs to learn to explore new ideas, etc. This quotation from the court order is especially telling:

. . .[I]t would be remarkable if a ten year old child who spends her school time with her mother and the vast majority of all her other time with her mother would seriously consider adopting any other religious point of view. Amanda’s vigorous defense of her religious beliefs to the counselors suggests strongly that she has not had the opportunity to seriously consider any other points of view.

So is the court's expansive concept of education:

the Court is guided by the premise that education is by its nature an exploration and examination of new things,...

All of this sort of is straight out of the liberal playbook. See this important article from First Things, 2004, to which I have referred before. See also this little bit of pseudo-academic nonsense, which argues (like some of the "intellectuals" quoted in the FT article) that the state should control home schoolers to make sure that children are getting a sufficiently "pluralistic" education, learning to think sufficiently critically about their religious background, etc.

It is absolutely obvious to anyone who reads the ADF's motions that the court has ordered the child into public school so that she will be in an environment more hostile to her faith and hence more challenging to it. It's notable that the mother testified that she has taught her daughter information about many other religious traditions and their origins, but it isn't the information the court wants her exposed to--it's submersion in a different world-view. The ADF also shrewdly notes that, as public schools are to be non-religious, it is hard to see how public schooling will most effectively expose her to different religious views, so the court seems to want her to be exposed to secularism.

It's ironic, too, that the divorced father, who is hostile not only to home schooling but to Christianity, has used the word "socialization" as an umbrella term for the girl's being in a public school environment. Yet after the mother added many clubs and activities to the girl's schedule, it became evident that the father would not always take her to these activities when she spent weekends with him and that for a variety of reasons she was receiving far more socialization with her own age group when spending time with her mother than with her father. The anti-Christian agenda in all of this is obvious to anyone who has eyes to see.

Unfortunately, the HSLDA will not represent in divorce proceedings. I don't know if the mother is an HSLDA member, but even if she is, that policy would explain the fact that there is no mention of the HSLDA in the ADF news release. Still, I would like to see them submit an amicus brief, because this outrageous judicial decision runs contrary to everything HSLDA stands for. At a minimum, HSLDA should put up something about the case at their own web site, which I'm sorry to say they have not yet done.

God preserve us all from custody courts.

HT Jeff Culbreath

Comments (31)

This reminds me of the liberal political theorist Stephen Macedo, who in his contribution to a volume of essays on political theory, perhaps the Blackwell Companion to Political Philosophy, argued that the liberal theory of toleration was utterly ungrounded, rationally speaking, and that liberals has no principled basis for universalizing their doctrines, but in one of his books argued explicitly, and probably - if memory serves - with reference to education, that the liberal regime aims to inculcate in its citizens a liberal consciousness, and that this is a legitimate object of the liberal state. The disjunction of these positions may be explained as honesty in the latter, and in the former, a dissembling admission that there exists no rational reason to impose liberalism in this manner, but we will anyway, as an expression of liberal volition. Perhaps Rorty could then be invoked to justify not thinking any more of foundational questions. We do what we do under liberalism, and one of the things we will do is re-educate your children. The regime is always the mirror of the soul, and the soul the reflection of the regime.

I think the liberals were scared about the fact that little Amanda was able to give a defense of her beliefs and might actually be smarter than they are :) I don't know the details but perhaps she's been reading SOME REALLY DANGEROUS BOOKS I mean the really toxic stuff like "Handbook of Christian Apologetics","Reasonable Faith", or even the liberals worst nightmare "Summa Contra Gentiles".

The ideology of tolerance must ultimately issue in tyranny.

God help us.

There is nothing scarier to a liberal than a Christian with an IQ above the room temperature and a knowledge of their faith more profound than that of a small child, especially when the Christian is a child.

Well put, Mike.

I have to admit, Maximos, to my sorrow that some of the greatest anti-Christian hysteria against parental rights is coming from people who would describe themselves as belonging to the analytic and non-Rortian wing of my discipline. (Disarm-and-cage Daniel Dennett being a good example.) I comfort myself with the thought that, by and large, these aren't people who are accomplishing anything very important right now in analytic philosophy itself. In fact, fighting the evil Christians and (especially) creationists has turned into something of a cottage industry for some of these guys, a substitute for real, original, apolitical work in philosophy.

What in the world is a "marital master"?

Ideas have consequences. I remember an airing of Firing Line where Alan Dershowitz remarked that he wanted to set things up to give every child an opportunity to break away from their religion (as if no teenager would ever rebel against their parents without help from the government). I was hoping someone would retort that they would set it up so that every child had an opportunity to break away from secular-progressive mushthink, but no such luck.

...these aren't people who are accomplishing anything very important right now in analytic philosophy itself.

And the political philosophers who have adopted this liberal maximalist approach seem not to be doing much of any importance in political philosophy, for that matter. As in so many other areas, the real action is on the traditionalist right, broadly construed, and the harder left.

There is nothing scarier to a liberal than a Christian with an IQ above the room temperature and a knowledge of their faith more profound than that of a small child, especially when the Christian is a child.

Couldn't agree more Mike

Perhaps the mother should consider relocating to a more homeschool-friendly state, if this is possible.

Bishop Fulton Seen wrote a blistering attack on tolerance years ago:

America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance—it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded. . . . Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience toward evil, a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. Tolerance applies only to persons, never to truth. Tolerance applies to the erring, intolerance to the error. . . . Architects are as intolerant about sand as foundations for skyscrapers as doctors are intolerant about germs in the laboratory. Tolerance does not apply to truth or principles. About these things we must be intolerant, and for this kind of intolerance, so much needed to rouse us from sentimental gush, I make a plea. Intolerance of this kind is the foundation of all stability. (Old Errors New Labels, 1931)

[From the article Lydia linked] in order to select, as a young adult, which of those systems will best suit her own needs.”

Her needs? This is right up there with, "Its my body..." I wonder if the judge has any children? It is the responsibility of the parent to see to the child's needs while they mature. The judge is silly to the point of being a caricature of wisdom: does he/she really think that 11 year old children have such a great handle on religious beliefs so as to accurately share them in an elementary school setting (except for those who have been homeschooled, of course)? This seems like a way to dilute the educational process instead of promote it, since it potentially will yield misinformation. As such, this decision is actually harming the child and goes against the expressed intent of what the judge thinks he/she are accomplishing.

This decision is based on questionable moral reasoning and as such is not binding on the parent, even though the state may take a different view.

The Chicken

I'm missing something. What does the girl's Christian home-schooling have to do with custody in a marital dispute? I'm trying to figure out from where the judge thinks he derives the authority even to consider such a thing.

Live free or die, New Hampshire!

Great analogy below, from an Austin Ruse article [Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute]

http://www.c-fam.org/publications/id.1379/pub_detail.asp

Fagan warned that while monogamous culture is fertile and expanding and polyamorous culture is in below replacement fertility, that polyamorous culture is still expanding through their control of three areas of public policy: “education of children, sex education, and adolescent health.” Fagan said that through such control polyamorous culture “snatches children away from their parents and away from monogamous culture in ways analogous to the Ottoman Turks of the 14th century who raided boys from Christian nations to train them aS their own elite warriors, the Janissaries.”
Fagan said “this snatching is almost complete when these three program areas result in adolescents accepting and engaging in sexual intercourse” and that “every time the polyamorous programs and media succeed in drawing teenagers into sexual activity they have captured another Janissary.”
In the end, Fagan called upon “monogamy men” to fight back.
Perhaps the mother should consider relocating to a more homeschool-friendly state, if this is possible.

Almost certainly impossible. Most custody agreements in divorce cases make custody contingent on the child's continuing to live in the state. Sometimes it is even written into the custody agreement that the custodial parent must continue to live (with the child) within the same _school district_ they occupied at the time of the divorce. (I am not making this up.)

Custody arrangements are extremely micro-managed. Originally worked out as a kind of contract between the parents, often mediated by the court, at the time of the divorce, they can sometimes be changed later with the intervention of the court. Custody arrangements often get into all sorts of details of the child's life, and schooling often is considered as a relevant detail of a custody arrangement.

This gets to Bill's question. (By the way, my impression, though I'd have to check this, is that the "master"--a kind of assistant judge--who wrote the order is male in this case and that the actual judge who had to approve it is female. Rather confusing.) The judges (I'll just call them that) think they have the authority to do this because of the fact that a divorce custody case is at least potentially always under the management of the court. It's an on-going thing. In that sense, it's a little bit like a case of guardianship. However, Bill is onto something even in the legal sense, because the ADF attorney argues that the judges must use a "clear and convincing evidence" standard to interfere in this way, whereas the court order evidently says expressly that instead they used a "best interests" standard, which is much lower. The ADF attorney argues that where there is a custodial parent (the mother, in this case) who has not been declared unfit, the court cannot simply decide at whim what is in the best interests of the child but can make changes only if they show by clear and convincing evidence that the child is being harmed by the present situation and that the harm of a change is outweighed by the harm being caused by the present situation. Also, they must show that there is no less intrusive way of mitigating the "harm." The lawyer points out that they have done none of these things. I'm going to assume the lawyer knows his stuff on this one, in which case the judges do not, even in dry positive law, have the authority to do what they have done.

Gotta look at that Janissary analogy article. That's great! And it's a point I'm often making when people start talking demographics and Christians, saying triumphantly that the Christians will win over the secularists by demographics. Not if you keep giving your children to the secularists to raise!

Her needs? This is right up there with, "Its my body..." I wonder if the judge has any children? It is the responsibility of the parent to see to the child's needs while they mature.

No, the judge probably does not. One of my brothers rejects the notion of parents having the right and duty to decide for their kids. You know: Hey, kid, that rat poison probably won't taste all that good, and you might feel pretty ill if you eat it, but it's really up to you, you have to decide your own course in life. Fortunately the sake of both my brother and any such offspring, he doesn't have any. Except that having kids might have taught him otherwise.

I have a little hope that the above court case will be appealed higher up. A lot of the higher courts are moving in directions more favorable to recognizing the right to homeschool.

"There is nothing scarier to a liberal than a Christian with an IQ above the room temperature and a knowledge of their faith more profound than that of a small child, especially when the Christian is a child."

Sharks. I'm much more afraid of sharks. I couldn't care less about smart Christians, whether they be young or old. I work with one. We get along splendidly. As I imagine him at younger and younger ages, I'm just not scared in the least.

As for old, smart Christians, shouldn't most of you be smart of enough to see that there's a difference between doing something that only a liberal would do and doing something that all/most/many liberals would approve of? Maybe (but I have my doubts) the judge did something only a liberal would do, but I doubt that it is the sort of thing that all/most/many liberals would approve of. I'm liberal. From what I'm given from Lydia, I don't approve. Maybe Lydia knows the liberal playbook better than liberals do.

"It is absolutely obvious to anyone who reads the ADF's motions that the court has ordered the child into public school so that she will be in an environment more hostile to her faith and hence more challenging to it. It's notable that the mother testified that she has taught her daughter information about many other religious traditions and their origins, but it isn't the information the court wants her exposed to--it's submersion in a different world-view. The ADF also shrewdly notes that, as public schools are to be non-religious, it is hard to see how public schooling will most effectively expose her to different religious views, so the court seems to want her to be exposed to secularism."

Maybe you haven't spent much time in public schools, but I attended public schools so let me speak to this last point. In my public school, we took classes on world's religions. It was there that I first learned about Catholicism from someone who wasn't strongly anti-Catholic. It was there that I first seriously thought about becoming Catholic. Yes, I also learned about Islam and Judaism. We learned about their histories and core beliefs. The teacher came down hard on anyone who made snide remarks about those who belonged to these religious groups. The teacher had little patience for the atheists in the class who thought that any rational person would say 'none of the above'. The teacher did not, however, try to indoctrinate us into his particular religion. Talking to friends who also attended public school, my impression has been that my experience wasn't that extraordinary. Most kids in public schools are religious and the same goes for the teachers. There was very little there that was hostile to religion. We all lost religion when we shipped off to our private, religious colleges. Maybe we hadn't had enough time in the basement memorizing lines from Christian apologists, but that's a different matter.

Maybe you are working from a different playbook, Clayton, but certainly I am not attacking a straw man. There is, to begin with, the court order itself in this very case. I assume that if you are working with a different playbook, you would disagree with Justice Douglas, as characterized thus in the Hitchcock article I linked. (The Hitchcock article also cites a number of other liberals, some thus self-described, with similar views.)

In dissenting in the latter case, Justice William O. Douglas got to the heart of the matter in asking whether parents had the right to “impose” their beliefs on their children, or whether on the contrary the state might not have an obligation to expose children to the opportunities of “the new and amazing world of diversity which we have today.” (Douglas believed that 90 percent of people were not even fit to be parents.) Logically this left it at best an open question whether parents possess the right to raise their children in a particular religion.

If you are working from a different playbook, then presumably you also disagree with the (aptly named) Reich in the other article I cited. Here is a fairly long passage from Reich. Note especially the parts I have bolded and the fact that Reich considers it suspicious and problematic in and of itself that parents often home school because they want to "control the moral and spiritual upbringing of their children."

What is key to understand is that liberal democracies enshrine the individual, not groups or collectives. Each child is an individual, and while no liberal democrat wants children to have the same status as an adult, the fact remains that children have the same interest in freedom as adults do. That is, children are born to freedom, though are not born in the condition of being free.

The liberal democratic state therefore ought to protect the interest of children in being free, or as I have put it elsewhere, in becoming autonomous adults (Reich, 2002). The interests of children are separable from the interests of their parents, and the interests of children in becoming
free or autonomous—in becoming self-governing and self-determining persons—are as important as the interests of parents in being free or autonomous. Thus, the freedom argument is at bottom about ensuring that children acquire the capacity to lead the lives they wish, to believe what they want to, and to be free, when they become adults, from the domination of other people and institutions (from their own parents as
well as from the state). In other words, I seek to prevent both governmental and parental despotism over children, even a benevolent, loving despotism.

What does this have to do with home schooling? The answer is that one of the most effective and least intrusive ways the state has of discharging the obligation to protect and promote the prospective freedom of children— a freedom that they will exercise fully as adults—is to ensure that children receive an education that develops them into free or autonomous
individuals, that is to say, persons who can decide for themselves how they wish to lead their lives and what sort of values they wish to endorse. Such an education, I believe, requires exposure to and engagement with value pluralism, the very social diversity that is produced in a liberal democratic state which protects individual freedom. Unregulated home schooling opens up the possibility that children will never learn about or be exposed to competing or alternative ways of life….To put this in language commonly used by political theorists, the capacity of children to “exit” their parents’ way of life is undermined and they run the risk of becoming “ethically servile” (see Callan, 1997; Reich, 2002). In short, children become unfree, unable to imagine other ways of living. This is not to say, of course, that home-schooling parents are always motivated to create such total environments, though empirical evidence suggests that a large percentage of home-schooling parents are motivated by a desire to control the moral and spiritual upbringing of their children (National Center for Education Statistics, 2004, p. 3).

Here is Reich's solution:

The state insists upon a curriculum that meets minimal academic standards and that introduces students to value pluralism.

As for the nature of the exposure to different religious views, I take your point about your comparative religion class, though I would note that I have known of more than one person who lost his faith through a kind of relativism and implication that all religious are more or less equally socially constructed and irrational gained through high school and early college comparative religion classes. However, if all the court wanted was Amanda's exposure to _information_, of the kind you describe from your public school comparative religion class, then the mother's answers should have been satisfactory, as evidently they were not.

I don't think I accused you of attacking a strawman. I was saying that it's important not to try to tar liberals as a group with this. I know lots of liberals who think that parents should have the protected right to home-school. Maybe my sample is non-representative, but I don't see much evidence that suggests that all, most, or many liberals believe that parents shouldn't have the right to home-school. (It may be that many liberals who write on this issue have a beef with home-schooling, but _that's_ probably not a representative sample of liberals because it may well be that most liberals just don't care and think we ought to tolerate or encourage home-schooling.)

Do liberals as a rule think home-schooling is bad? I'm an atheist. I'm not convinced that kids should be raised religious, so I think religious home-schooling has its flaws. However, having known people who do home-school, I know that their kids have fantastic grammar, a grasp of logic, amazing knowledge of the Bible, and impeccable manners. They might not know much about biology or geology. They might be a tad too sheltered. No one's perfect.

I do appreciate your attitude on this, Clayton. Really, no sarcasm intended. I think what is happening is that as we move into what I think of as a new phase of the culture wars there is a real totalitarian impulse growing on the left. I think the views in Hitchcock's article, Reich's, etc. are becoming more openly expressed and more common on the left and are being represented more in actual legislative and other proposals. The aspect of this totalitarianism that most concerns home schooling takes the "mind is a terrible thing to waste" attitude and, to put it bluntly, gets hysterical about it. For example, you say that they "might not know much about biology or geology." Well, you and I both know what you're referring to, but Richard Dawkins is certainly not willing to say, "No one's perfect" about that. You've probably seen his most recent article, called something bizarre like, "The Creationists are Coming for Your Children." Turns out, in the article, it's really the creationists' own children he's most upset about, and he goes on at some length about the horrors of being a biology professor with students who have their arms folded and smirk during certain parts of the discussion. I mean, c'mon. I think professors are supposed to be able to handle, and even teach, students who have smirks and folded arms during parts of the class. Dawkins is just really starting to lose it, it seems to me. Daniel Dennett's infamous "disarm and cage" passage is another example. And this court order goes in something of the same direction, though with more general reference to religion and less specific reference to the evolution-creation debate.

Most kids in public schools are religious and the same goes for the teachers.

Not to sound too cynical, but have you been to a public school, recently?

The Chicken

Suppose it were discovered that the mother accepts traditional sexual views and is successfully passing them on to her daughter? Would the owner and most of the readers of the blog run by a certain philosopher whose initials are B.L. then be likely to support or oppose the court order in the case? If that were determined about the mother's views, she would be in their view a bigot and would be reproducing herself and her bigotry in her daughter. I tend to think that would be likely to affect their opinion on the urgency of getting the daughter into public school.

Lydia, you should have double-bolded this quote:

is to ensure that children receive an education that develops them into free or autonomous individuals, that is to say, persons who can decide for themselves how they wish to lead their lives and what sort of values they wish to endorse.

This is the crux of the matter. Liberals, at least liberals of this stripe (with apologies to Clayton, who I don't think is of this stripe), have a different definition of freedom. In their explicitly stated view, freedom = autonomy means being able to establish what is good for you and not good for you . At the extremes, it means the ability to decide that eating rat poison is what fulfills you, or spewing forth hatred, or jumping on one foot for the rest of your life. These liberals deny anything like a human contraint to freedom, they say instead that the free man will remake himself into whatever he chooses.

Many non-liberals, on the other hand, view freedom in perspective of a human nature that is a given: in that perspective, freedom is the ability to completely fulfill one's human nature and thus live human life to the fullest. They view the above liberal view as a form of insanity, since the reality of human nature is evident and cannot be denied without losing touch with reality.

With such widely differing views of the meaning of freedom, a passage like what I quoted above, while sounding somewhat innocuous to the uninitiated, is really a bold declaration rooted in an oblivious, unconsidered assumption, whose effect is that my notion of freedom must reign in civil society and your notion of freedom is so evil that not only shall the law not give it room to live, the law shall not tolerate it: we must take positive steps to eradicate even from your own children.

Let me play Devil's Advocate here and ask if people really believe in homeschooling or if they believe in CHRISTIAN homeschooling? What if the homeschooling mother had taught her child to be a staunch Jehovah's Witness, polygamous Mormon, Scientologist, etc.? I know someone whose "church" many (if not most) would consider to be a cult, and all the both members homeschool and have the kids working in family businesses. Would the mother still have the right to keep her child isolated from others and homeschool? Even if the father objected?

My kids no longer go to public school, in part because of the morals (or lack of such) taught there. They go to Catholic school, which is a whole other can of worms. But homeschooling isn't always great either, and though I know lots of great homeschoolers and great homeschooled kids, I am also troubled by the idea that some are NOT so great, and that the kids are never away from them.

Yes, even then, the court's decision on the basis the court gives would be a wrong decision. She is the custodial parent. No one even alleges that she is an unfit parent, abusive, or anything of the kind, and the child is receiving an excellent education, as the court admits. Insofar as this is relevant, the child most certainly is not "isolated from others." In fact, she has numerous activities outside the home, and her father, who purports to be worried about her so-called "socialization," won't even take her to the activities when she is staying with him. In any event, I think parents should have a lot of leeway as to how many activities their kids have, even in a divorce case, and the mother has gone above and beyond anything she should have had to do already in that regard. The court does not claim that she is "isolated" but that she defends her religious beliefs too "vigorously" because she hasn't had a chance to be exposed enough to other points of view.

Play devil's advocate all you like; this is a bad decision. It's bad law and bad policy, both.

The Jehovah's Witness child will grow up, as will the Scientologist and the Mormon. For that matter, so will the child raised an atheist by devout atheist home schooling parents and sent to atheist camp in the summer. They will all have chances to examine other views if they wish to do so. And if they don't through being killed in a car accident at the age of 10, I believe in a just God who will deal justly.

Polygamy, of course, is an entirely separate issue and has many non-religious ramifications. I do not believe it should be legal in the United States, as indeed it isn't.

"But homeschooling isn't always great either, and though I know lots of great homeschoolers and great homeschooled kids, I am also troubled by the idea that some are NOT so great, and that the kids are never away from them."

There is some risk here. However, I think the far greater risk is the anti-homeschooling rhetoric produced by the NEA and its allies.

They sometimes speak as if the mission of public schooling is to screen for physical and sexual abuse in children. The few examples of madrassah homeschools or fiendish abusive parents will be used to shut down legitimate freedom and competition.

As Clayton said before, I don't think it is fair to tar "liberals" with this brush. I consider myself middle of the road as I am liberal and conservative, depending on the issue.

This is bad policy and bad law, but I don't see how it is liberal. I think it is a mistake to wrap our Christian beliefs in the current political view. The end result is bound to be a perversion of the faith.

Elsewhere on this blog I see someone defending torture. To me, that is inhumane and insane. (Torture is not only wrong, it is also illegal.) Since the torture was instigated by a Republican administration, should I say that defense of torture is Conservative? No. Torture is not part of the Conservative ideal. And practically speaking, it is currently being defended by the "liberal" administration.

This simple minded division into Red/Blue, Republican/Democrat is a false dichotomy that only serves to confuse. If we move beyond the noise we can see things as they truly are.

The State is seizing control. DHS, the phony war on terror, the false-flag 9/11, internal spying, etc... are all means of consolidating control of our lives. Wake up to the truth. Work for peace. Turn off your television.

The government of the United States pretends to be Christian, but committed war crimes against Serbia because of a fake genocide. In this country the abortion industry makes BILLIONS of Dollars every year. As does the porno industry. And our biggest export? Weapons of Mass Destruction. Wake up. The United States is not what it pretends to be.

It is this simple-minded attitude of following POLITICAL stripes that allows the Christians of the country to support Anti-Christ principles.

Mr. "Marlowe," please. I've known Clayton in the blogosphere for quite a number of years, and he and I have almost nothing in common politically, but at least he had the sophistication to make a distinction between something only a liberal would do and something all liberals would do. I encourage you to read some of the sources I provided above. _Of course_ this judge is making a "liberal" decision, in the sense that his hostility to religion has a particular type of leftist intellectual flavor of which there are quite a number of explicit, self-conscious examples *in written political pundit and legal literature* to which I have referred readers. It all has to do with this particular idea of what it means for America to be a secular democracy and of how that needs to be enforced upon families.

As for the rest of your red herrings--do keep them off my threads. I never said anything about how wonderful the Republican party is, etc., I've come out strongly against torture in many threads on this blog, and I dislike thread-jacking intensely--at least as much, if not more, from Christian "centrists" as from secular liberals.

Let me play Devil's Advocate here and ask if people really believe in homeschooling or if they believe in CHRISTIAN homeschooling? What if the homeschooling mother had taught her child to be a staunch Jehovah's Witness, polygamous Mormon, Scientologist, etc.?

That is the business of the parents, not the state.

To Clayton and Gail, this is very simple: it's none of your business!

As we say in the school choice debate, it's MY MONEY and MY CHILDREN. What is it about that do you not understand?

As a Catholic Christian, it's my God-given right and obligation to educate my children (and grandchildren if need be)in the true Faith. It is also my duty to protect them from the Godless, corrosive, hyper-sexualized, nihilism that passes for "education" in government schools. If you wish to sacrifice children, either out of ignorance of the threat or out of some misguided and futile reformist zeal, then sacrifice your own.

As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

To Mr. Marlowe:

That kind of America-hating false rhetoric is so disgusting. You sound like Obama's preacher Wright cursing America. Here is some facts for you. Yes, our government is infringing upon our rights, but that is largely OUR fault for allowing it. It's all up to us to protect our rights. Second, there are many, many people who do not buy pornography; there are many younger people at my church who do not own computers or televisions and have prayer nights with thier kids. My dad never had a naked book before in our house and never offered me one. Third, our biggest export is commercial/civil aircraft from Boeing and Cessna and Gulfstream, not defense equipment. Fourth, disarming America is not wise and this "peace" fanatacism among "Christians" is hardly a correct interpretation of scripture. Fighting in this world is many times necessary. And last, there was no "torture" involved so far. What they did at Abu Ghraib was not torture. No one was drowned, no one was drilled with drills, and no one was shot or thier families killed. Scaring terrorists who cut people's heads off is not losing me any sleep. It's not Christian to allow these people to walk freely knowing what they would do if given a chance. You "Christians" who care more about terrorists rights than the innocent should reread the Scriptures. We have a Biblical duty to uphold the rights of Man. Sometimes that requires using force to stop a worse evil. All evils are NOT equal in the Bible. Please take your liberal Christianity to another land, it's destructive to ours.

im 27 and I don't remember any religion class in high school.....but who knows maybe the heavy drug use and constant distraction of trying to get laid blinded me to the spectaculare job those flaked out left wing wackjobs were doing at helping me develop my critical thinking skills so I could one day be a brain dead government employee, just like them. I home school my kids now and you commies should realy learn to mind your own buiseness, because im an athiest, and don't have that pesky moral delema the christains do when it comes to the need for your eratication. live free or die is right.....best of luck to you home schoolers....

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