Posted on 12/16/2009 8:30:24 AM PST by stainlessbanner
Could you imagine being jailed simply because you decided to opt your children out of sex education? Well, this is exactly what is happening to a number of fathers in Germany. And, if certain forces in the United States have their way, such a policy could one day find its way to our shores as well.
This story is unfolding in the German state of Salzkotten, where the government has decided that all children must be indoctrinated with a state-designed curriculum — including explicit sex education that most parents would agree is inappropriate for children. Bob Unruh reports on the story at WorldNetDaily.com, writing, “The students who are being held out of sex education classes also are not being allowed by their parents to participate in a play-acting program called ‘My Body Belongs to Me,’ which essentially teaches children how to engage in sex....”
Thus far, the fathers have been sentenced to only a week in jail; however, that is just part of their punishment. Writes Unruh:
The government [also] has imposed fines on the families, which continue to accrue.... The families are being targeted with a "Bussgeld," a fine described as "repentance money" designed to show contrition for wrong behavior.
The families so far have refused to pay because that would be admitting guilt.
Hearing such things is enough to make many want to homeschool, but, unfortunately, this renders parents “guilty” in Germany as well. Homeschooling has been illegal there since the days of Adolf Hitler, and today’s German government has been using increasingly heavy-handed methods to enforce compliance. As an example, Unruh published a government response to a complaint lodged after police officers came to a family’s home and forcibly brought a child to a government school. To wit:
The minister of education does not share your attitudes toward so-called homeschooling. You complain about the forced school escort of primary school children by the responsible local police officers. ... In order to avoid this in future, the education authority is in conversation with the affected family in order to look for possibilities to bring the religious convictions of the family into line with the unalterable school attendance requirement.
Note not only the words but the tone of the response. Is it not reminiscent of something from a very dark chapter in history?
While no one has as yet received such a letter in the United States, the mentality it reflects is not absent from our shores. For example, earlier this month a California judge refused to allow a couple to opt their children out of lessons involving pro-homosexual indoctrination and implied that they were bigots for wanting to do so.
Yet perhaps the most eerie part of this story is the Bussgeld, that repentance money. When the government forces people to issue tacit admissions of guilt and expressions of contrition, we may wonder what the point is. After all, we punish people in America and appreciate remorse, but we want it to come from the heart. What is the use of coercing a hollow apology? But while this is a natural line of reasoning for sincere people, there actually is method to the Germans’ madness. And for the purposes of understanding good governance and how to combat the bad variety better, it’s important we become acquainted with what it is.
Martyrdom is extremely powerful. When we see that people would rather endure punishment than renounce their beliefs, it lends those beliefs great credibility. And it also sets an example of fortitude, emboldening others to take the same stand. “Wow,” the thinking is, “these people must possess something very special — perhaps even the Truth — if they’re willing to suffer for it. Maybe it’s worth a second look.” This is why it’s said that the Church was built on the blood of martyrs.
This places the German government’s punishment regime in perspective.
It is trying to quash martyrdom.
If you simply punish people, you force them to suffer for their beliefs and martyr them to the degree to which you punish them. The only way you avoid this is by continuing and intensifying the punishment (the fines “continue to accrue”) until an admission of guilt is extracted. It is just as when medieval tyrants would torture people until they confessed — today only the methods are different. Instead of physical torture, it is fiscal torture.
In this way the state seeks to eliminate examples of courage that might inspire some of the sheep to become shepherds. It wants to deny dissenting beliefs the credibility that bold witness and blood would give them. If it appears that no one is willing to stand on principle when it counts, it sends the message that the principle doesn’t count for much.
This leaves the state as the only entity upholding its principles, as the state, for good or ill, does stand up for itself. Its dictates are enforced with police and handcuffs and guns and courts and prisons, and it is often so unyielding.
Moreover, there is something implicit in this. Like it or not, laws send the message that what they enforce is a good, whether this is actually the case or not. After all, any other assumption renders lawmaking incomprehensible, for why prohibit something if it isn’t wrong? Why mandate something if it isn’t a moral imperative? It is as when you tell a child that something is a no-no; he assumes it is a “bad’ thing to do, otherwise you wouldn’t have made the rule. Unfortunately, this childlike assumption isn’t always correct, as the messenger that is the law is sometimes lawless (as in contrary to the highest law).
The only way to compete with the message of law is with the message of martyrdom. Kill martyrdom, and you kill opposition. But you cannot do this by simply killing opponents, as that is how martyrs are made. Whether you ultimately kill them or just their spirit, you must first make them renounce their beliefs. Then you deny them martyr status — and their beliefs meaningful status.
Yet the state’s strategy isn’t foolproof. To intensify punishment is to raise the stakes, and then, when people do resist, their martyrdom is intensified. It is much as when St. Lawrence was put to death by Roman emperor Valerian in 258 A.D. When he was being cooked in an iron cage over an intense fire, he said to his executioners, “Here now, you burn only but one side of my body; turn over the other and do my whole body.”
To this day, people remember the essence of what he said, “Turn me over, I’m done on this side!”
No one remembers the man who lit the fire.
mark and bump
ping
At the risk of “breaking Godwin’s Law” I would point out that these laws that Germany uses to harass homeschoolers and people who don’t want their kids learning about how to be homosexuals were put into place by the Nazis for the specific purpose of destroying individuality in education.
Sounds like Adolf is back in charge.
Sounds like Adolf is back in charge.
Tomorrow belongs to me. Something about Germans and socialist comprehensive indoctrination never seem to change. Work Shall Set You Free!!!!
So glad that my German ancestors were of a completely different strain. My German grandfather fought in WWll and hated the nazis. He believed in no govt intervention in the market at all. A little extreme in that regard (didn’t even believe in welfare of any sort). But a lot of his DNA prevailed in me (thank God) because some other grandparents I had (while great people) did have a socialist mentality. I never understood it either because they were hard workers. They lived through the depression and loved FDR, so maybe that affected them.
This ping list is for articles of interest to homeschoolers. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping List. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added or removed from either list, or both.
The keyword for the FREE REPUBLIC HOMESCHOOLERS’ FORUM is frhf.
This article doesn't really fit either list, but I know a lot of people have been watching the school situation in Germany in regards to homeschooling and public schools. So, ping it is.
I would like to comment as someone who has lived most of the year every year in Germany for about 20 years. I regard myself to be a liberal in the classic sense of the word, that is, a Burkian, a descendent of the Enlightenment, a Lockean and not last, a Christian and an evangelical Christian at that. I am one who holds the Bill of Rights as be writ nearly as sacred as the King James version.
Coming to Germany with this mindset, I was shocked as the authorities here increasingly tightened the screws on homeschoolers and that came at a time when they were also oppressing Scientologists. I first heard about the homeschooling situation when my neighbors spontaneously brought up the subject to question me about why it was that we permitted home Schooling in America and did that not permit crazed evangelicals (they would probably translate this to be crazed "fundamentalists") to distort the minds of their children for life? This was, incidentally, the context in which I first began to understand the hold the media has on the European mind particularly with respect to their understanding of America and especially conservative America. Conservative America is described by the media here exactly as Keith Olbermann portrays it nightly on MSNBC.
Homeschooling here was justified on the need to "socialize" the children. We might say that it is not so much socialization as indoctrination and propaganda designed to effect a Stepford kind of conformity. The idea of socialization has appealed to the Germans because, despite their history they unaccountably fear their neighbor more than their government. That, for example, explains antipathy toward the ownership of guns and their support for everything that regulates interpersonal social behavior. That is why you had better not as a tourist in Germany flip another driver the bird unless you have about €3000 unneeded in your travel budget. But the idea of socialization to them is to be distinguished from anti-religion, and this might be so.
I have actually lost a friend here in Germany in a political argument over homeschooling. About five years ago I was maintaining the absolute right of parents to homeschool and I compared the authorities here to the authorities the third Reich.
My children here attend German schools which in Bavaria are openly Catholic with crucifixes still on the wall despite the objections of the European Court. My 13 year old just returned from a three-day retreat in the Bavarian Alps conducted by the school called "Besinnungstag " in which the children are supposed to examine their life philosophy. Apparently, what used to be a religious retreat has become, perhaps through political correctness, a secular philosophical experience.
Privately, some teachers will say that the reason the retreat has been "corrected" into a philosophical rather than a religious experience is because of the swelling number of Muslims in Germany. And this brings me to my dilemma.
If homeschooling were to be accepted wholesale here in Germany, if "socialization" of every generation of schoolchildren were abandoned as a societal goal, one does not have to be Pat Buchanan to understand that with Germany scheduled to be 50% Muslim by 2050, the nation is likely to be riven in twain if a militant Muslim culture grows up unchecked in every generation.
I'm not bashful about bashing "diversity" but I am reluctant to say that the society that perseveres in religious liberty in the face of a militant medieval minority is committing suicide. Put another way, I reluctant to say that the Bill of Rights should give way to demographics. But I'm afraid that is the stark choice. Unless one is willing to back up one step and look hard at all immigration and declare that a society cannot massively absorb alien cultures, religions, races and languages and maintain a civil and decent society.
The choice for America will become the choice being made here in Germany, regulate immigration or strip away basic human rights. If one does not regulate immigration, waves of aliens will strip away the human rights anyway. A Muslim land is incompatible with my Lockean vision of a decent constitutional society and I think that rational people will put aside political correctness in recognition of that truth. Our very survival depends on it.
Can yellow stars be far behind?
This ping list is for articles of interest to homeschoolers. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping List. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added or removed from either list, or both.
The keyword for the FREE REPUBLIC HOMESCHOOLERS’ FORUM is frhf.
This article doesn't really fit either list, but I know a lot of people have been watching the school situation in Germany in regards to homeschooling and public schools. So, ping it is.
Well done article.
Sorry about the double ping. I got an error message the first time so I repinged it and later found out it had gone through after all.
An interesting sidebar concerning Germany’s education system post Hitler. The requirement of all German students to study religion for the first 7 years of school was implemented after the war to de-NAZI-fy the population and return it to its Christian past. A German friend explained that religion was mandatory until high school, but the headmaster made it amply clear that he would elect to take religion or not graduate from high school. While I can understand the German’s desire to distance themselves from NAZISM, making religion a requirement does nothing more than turn it into a museum philosophy or worse a new accepted “ism”. Religion, in my opinion, should be a personal rather than public decision if it is to have any weight and merit. In German schools there are two religious studies to choose from: Catholic and Protestant (Lutheran).
You sir, are an astute individual. This scenario will follow the same course here. Thanks for the excellent post.
I think most of your readers will understand that you didn't mean to say "homeschooling" here.
If homeschooling were to be accepted wholesale here in Germany, if "socialization" of every generation of schoolchildren were abandoned as a societal goal, one does not have to be Pat Buchanan to understand that with Germany scheduled to be 50% Muslim by 2050, the nation is likely to be riven in twain if a militant Muslim culture grows up unchecked in every generation.
Quite a conundrum. The issue, it seems to me, is that Mohamed was a military conquerer who promoted a unified "church" and state. Ann Coulter had a point when she wrote in the aftermath 9/11,We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now.She had a point, but of course that spirit is precisely the spirit of Mohamed, and not the spirit of Christ. The New Testament is written not by warrior priests heading armies but by apostles of the Suffering Servant, Jesus. And they were writing when Christianity was a tiny, persecuted minority, not the Establishment.We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.
The limitations on government posited by the framers of the Constitution are Christian in spirit. Even more so, IMHO, than the framers themselves understood. Or than the present-day government of Germany seems to accept.
The parents need to flee with their kids and seek political asylum in the U.S., citing this as political and/or religious persecution. That would embarass the heck out of the German government. Maybe that could force a change in this ridiculous policy.
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