SOMEONE needs to reacquaint Sen. John Kerry with the U.S. Constitution, specifically the 13th Amendment. In Manchester on Monday, Kerry unveiled his plan for the conscription of every American teenager into involuntary servitude. “We need to teach democratic values in our classrooms and educate students not only about how a bill becomes a law, but about how they can become a full citizen,” Kerry said. “And they should live as well as learn those lessons. So I propose that all high school students should also be required to do community service before they graduate.”
What, exactly, does “be required” mean? “High school service should be mandatory for students,” he said.
Yet this cannot happen. The 13th Amendment clearly states, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Kerry can call his program “High School Service” or “community service” or whatever he wants. It’s still involuntary servitude, and it’s still unconstitutional.
Even if forcing people to work X number of hours (Kerry suggested between 50 and 100) for a diploma were constitutional, it would remain morally wrong and strategically unsound.
Kerry argues that drafting teenagers into volunteer work in their communities will reinvigorate a charitable spirit in America. Of all candidates currently running for President, Vietnam veteran Kerry should know that drafting young people into service to their country fuels contempt for, not love of, one’s country and government.
In his speech, Kerry shamelessly invoked Sept. 11 and World War II to justify this extraordinary constitutional violation. He quoted a letter his mother wrote to his father during the war. “You have no idea of the ways in which one can be useful right now,” she wrote. “There’s something for everyone to do.” He said all should serve because there is “no room on the sidelines.”
Yet even during World War II there was “room on the sidelines.” Even while America drafted its young men into the greatest struggle against tyranny and oppression history has ever seen, the government did not force high school students into volunteering on the home front.
Neither Kerry nor John Edwards, who has a similar proposal, has sufficiently explained how voluntarism, by definition freely given, can be compelled, or why the federal government must institute this compulsion now.
This is not a right vs. left issue. Both sides should be just as outraged by Kerry’s and Edwards’ readiness to dispense with personal freedom. And both sides need to work together to squash this idea immediately.
Why just children? Why not force everyone to serve? And IT'S not SLAVERY! It is community service. See, there's a difference.< sarcasm/off >
An evil concept..........here's a good essay:
Compulsory Service for High School Students:
Whose Life Is It, Anyway?
Thomas A. Bowden, Esq.
More than two decades ago, President Nixon ended the military draft. Now a new and more insidious form of conscription is threatening Pennsylvania public school students: House Bill 1908. This bill would make "community service" a requirement for high school graduation.
Compulsory service programs, already operative in many communities, typically give students four years to complete, say, 60 hours of labor. The students must not receive any payment. They can choose whether to serve the elderly, or the poor, or the disabled, so long as they serve others rather than themselves.
The penalty for dodging the new draft is simple: no diploma.
In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, angry parents and students took the local school board to court, arguing that such a mandatory service program for high school students imposed the kind of "involuntary servitude" forbidden by the United States Constitution.
But a U.S. Court of Appeals approved the Bethlehem program, holding that so long as school boards stop short of putting students in chains for disobeying — so long as the students have some alternative, even an "exceedingly bad" one — there is no involuntary servitude.
Mandatory community service for high school students presents a clear moral issue: By what right do we treat our sons and daughters as beasts of burden?
Advocates of mandatory service like to claim sole possession of the moral high ground. To them, the moral duty of unpaid service to others is an unquestionable absolute. But not all citizens concede an unchosen obligation to serve. Holding their own lives as their highest value, many reject as evil the notion that being needy confers on some people a moral claim to free labor from others.
As far back as 1943, the Supreme Court made it clear that boards of education may not dictate such fundamental moral choices. In a decision that prohibited a school board from forcing young Jehovah's Witnesses to salute the flag, the Court said: "If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein."
School boards who hold diplomas for ransom, pending compliance with the prevailing orthodoxy of self-sacrifice, are engaging in nothing less than unconstitutional moral indoctrination.
Proponents of forced service insist that it is really for the students' own good. For example, the Bethlehem program claimed that compulsory service helps students "develop pride in assisting others."
But does anyone really believe that students will develop pride by succumbing to orders, abandoning their own personal projects, and serving the needs of strangers? The true source of pride is the achievement of one's own values. Pride in oneself cannot result from wiping one's own values out of existence.
On close scrutiny, the so-called "educational purposes" for community service are just so much window dressing. Any program, no matter how perverse, can be rationalized in that manner.
Suppose, for example, we want to justify a program that involves breaking students' legs. First, we motivate the students by withholding their diplomas unless they take part. Then we encourage the students to engage in meaningful participation by choosing which of their legs is to be crushed.
Finally, we list the "educational purposes." Not only will students' wheelchair experiences teach them to empathize with the permanently disabled, but students will also "develop pride in their ability to overcome adversity," through the valuable "coping skills" learned while enduring intense physical pain.
Why is it so easy to see the horror in a program that breaks students' bones, yet so hard to see the same horror in a program that breaks students' spirits?
Some say that students should no more be permitted to evade the community service obligation than any other part of the required curriculum, such as reading and writing.
But there is a crucial difference here. Our children must learn to read and write so they can pursue their own goals as adults, whatever those individual goals may be. Mandatory service, however, confers no such personal benefits; it only gets recalcitrant students accustomed to self-sacrifice.
Who does stand to gain from programming schoolchildren to believe that self-sacrifice equals self-interest? Who ultimately benefits when those children have become docile adults who, faced with a demand for sacrifice, no longer think to assert their individual rights?
Only those dangerous few who seek unchecked political power over others.
http://www.aynrand.org/medialink/compulsory.html
--excellent post. If this ever becomes law, I will assist my grandchildren in evading it in any way possible. Judging by the letter above, Canuck-land won't be the place to go.
Did you learn how to chant "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer?" What kind of uniforms did you wear? Did you talk about racial purity in your meetings?
If involuntary servitude is unconstitutional, one could argue that compulsory schooling laws are also unconstitutional. After all, they require the parents/student to report to a government school and perform, well, work.
The Founders never instituted compulsory schooling laws nor pictured any national role in education policy. They expected parents and communities to educate young people.
Of coarse this wont apply to illegal immigrants or the sons/daughters of Senators/Congressmen.
I can't get my five year old to do the things she doesn't want to do.
Beside the fact that this is America, this program would cost millions to manage these kids who don't want to be there and sabotage things so they can go home.
If you know someone will you get the plushier jobs? Someone will be cleaning highways while others will be visiting old people or organizing a baseball game for kids. Who chooses what one does??
Forced volunteerism takes the honor out of volunteering.
or maybe this is the "it takes a whore house" approach to turning the country into alternate parents to raise kids to vote democratic
