February 28, 2007
Will the UN Supervise America's Public School Monopolyby Jonathan R. at 10:10 AM
One of the most pernicious and underreported trends today is the creeping influence of international law and the commensurate erosion of national sovereignty. The nightmare scenario of remote, unaccountable bureaucrats, with no moral authority, much less democratic legitmacy, is steadily becoming more visible. Europe is far ahead of America in this slide away from government by consent of the governed, but there are elements in America who would like nothing more than to subject us all to the whims and wishes of foreign busybodies.
Consider what is happening in Germany to home-schoolers:
Earlier this month, a German teen-ager was forcibly taken from her parents and imprisoned in a psychiatric ward. Her crime? She is being home-schooled.No doubt those lawyers and liberal politicians would love to decide who sits on Americas courts. What distinguishes America from most of the rest of the world, including our "allies" in Europe, is that we still value fundamental individual rights while they place a higher value on the state's authority. This basic philosophy, enshrined in our Declaration of Independence, that our rights are endowed by our Creator and not granted by government is something that we often lose sight of.On Feb. 1, 15 German police officers forced their way into the home of the Busekros family in the Bavarian town of Erlangen. They hauled off 16-year-old Melissa, the eldest of the six Busekros children, to a psychiatric ward in nearby Nuremberg. Last week, a court affirmed that Melissa has to remain in the Child Psychiatry Unit because she is suffering from "school phobia."
Home-schooling has been illegal in Germany since Adolf Hitler outlawed it in 1938 and ordered all children to be sent to state schools...
Six decades after Hitler, German politicians and church leaders still do not understand true freedom: that raising children is a prerogative of their fathers and mothers and not of the state, which is never a benevolent parent and often an enemy.
Hermann Stucher, a pedagogue who called upon Christians to withdraw their children from the state schools which, he says, have fallen into the hands of "neo-Marxist activists," has been threatened with prosecution for "Hochverrat und Volksverhetzung" (high treason and incitement of the people against the authorities). The fierceness of the authorities' reaction is telling. The dispute is about the hearts and minds of the children...
While it is disquieting that Europeans have not learned the lessons from their dictatorial past — upholding Nazi laws and sending dissidents, including children, to psychiatric wards, as the Soviets used to do — there is reason for Americans to worry, too. The United Nations is also restricting the rights of parents. Article 29 of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child stipulates that it is the goal of the state to direct the education of children. In Belgium, the U.N. Convention is currently being used to limit the constitutional right to home-school. In 1995 Britain was told that it violated the U.N. Convention by allowing parents to remove their children from public school sex-education classes.
Last year, the American Home School Legal Defense Association warned that the U.N. Convention could make home-schooling illegal in America, even though the Senate has never ratified it. Some lawyers and liberal politicians in the states claim that U.N. conventions are "customary international law" and should be considered part of American jurisprudence.
The Republican Party should elevate this theme in its rhetoric and policymaking and should emphasize the significant difference between it and the Democrats on this issue. We need the GOP to stand for the prerogatives of the individual because there is a plethora of groups advocating a greater role for government in all aspects of our lives. If one of the GOP candidates for President would talk about this grand theme (and relate it to judicial nominations), it would separate him from the pack and attract tremendous admiration. The alternative is to have buffoons like Prince Charles dictating our lives to us.
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