Uncle Knows Best

In all the rhetoric swirling around the national healthcare debate, one story out of New England has gone virtually unnoticed. Time to shine a light on it.


State judge Lucinda Sadler has ruled that a ten-year old girl can no longer be home-schooled, but must attend public school because of what the judge calls the "rigidity" of her mother's religious views. The judge feels that the ten-year old should be exposed to other "worldviews."


Let's, for a moment, leave aside the supreme irony of a judge remanding a student to public school to learn about religious beliefs other than her own.


What Judge Sadler has done is substitute the state's guidance for the parents. The girls parents do not share the same religious views. That is an issue for family counseling or mediation. It is not an invitation for the state to cast aside the custodial parent's judgment in favor of its own. This is taking in loco parentis too far. As Phyllis Schlafly once said, liberals know that if they can win the battle over what's taught in school, they can win the political war at the ballot box.


Where do we go from here when judges set themselves up as religious arbiters? I cop to knowing nothing of the mother's "extreme" religious views. But what happens the next time a parent stands before Judge Sadler or any New Hampshire judge bound by the precedent the judge has just set? Suppose the offending parent is Roman Catholic and believes that she is drinking the blood of Jesus Christ during her main religious ceremony, the Eucharist? Does that make her an extremist in the eyes of the court? Should her parental rights be infringed in some way? How about if the offending parent is Muslim and observes the strict fasting period during Islam's holiest month, Ramadan? Would the judge order the family hooked up to IV bags for lack of nutrition? Jews near the end of September will observe Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when Jewish oral tradition has long proscribed such things as the wearing of leather shoes, annointing with perfumes or lotions and engaging in sexual relations. Sounds a little extreme to me.


Liberals like Lucinda Sadler shake their heads and tisk-tisk when they see things like raucous healthcare town hall meetings or tax-cutting "tea parties." They are oblivious to the anger welling up in American communities over government arrogance, as Cal Thomas puts it. This arrogance includes public healthcare policy rammed down the throats of Americans, taxes used as an weapon in class politics, and judges who abrogate parental rights.


The irony in all this: the state motto of New Hampsire: Live free or die.


Just thought you might like to know.