9th Circuit Declares Parenting Unconstitutional

For those who don't want to read the whole thing, just cut to the chase by scrolling down to the last page of the "decision." It says it all. Yikes!

I think the last paragraph deserves to be posted:

In summary, we hold that there is no free-standing fundamental right of parents “to control the upbringing of their children by introducing them to matters of and relating to sex in accordance with their personal and religious values and beliefs” and that the asserted right is not encompassed by any other fundamental right. In doing so, we do not quarrel with the parents’ right to inform and advise their children about the subject of sex as they see fit. We conclude only that the parents are possessed of no constitutional right to prevent the public schools from providing information on that subject to their students in any forum or manner they select. We further hold that a psychological survey is a reasonable state action pursuant to legitimate educational as well as health and welfare interests of the state. Accordingly, the parent-appellants have failed to state a federal claim upon which relief may be granted. The decision of the district court is affirmed.

Not being trained in the legal profession, and not having read the decision in its entirety, I'm sure I must be ignoring a great deal of ~~tightly-reasoned, carefully argued, objective~~ legal ~~deliberation~~ gobbledegook, when I simply state: "Yikes, indeed."

In summary, we hold that there is no free-standing fundamental right of parents “to control the upbringing of their children by introducing them to matters of and relating to sex in accordance with their personal and religious values and beliefs” and that the asserted right is not encompassed by any other fundamental right.

This sentence will be used in later cases to force homeschoolers back into the public brainwashing system once the exodus begins.

This sentence will be used in later cases to force homeschoolers back into the public brainwashing system

They used to use the truancy laws to force Catholic children back into the Protestant-dominated public school system before we established our own parochial schools. So it's nothing new, really. Sadly.

once the exodus begins

I'm sorry, but I don't think there will be one. (There should be one, of course.) Many parents, especially the irreligious, are apathetic about their responsibility to educate their children - most importantly in areas of morality - when the state will do it for them. Others simply have very busy lives and use the system as a "free" nanny. Still others find it hard to justify the expenditure of time (or tuition for a private school) when they are forced to fund the public system through their taxes, especially as no tax-relief is forth-coming for people who opt out of state-controlled indoctrination.

We cannot let them get away with it. Granted, I'm a bit of a pessimist when I look around at all the inertia out there. But, when will the tipping point be reached, and people finally say "Enough!!" and act as if they MEAN it? This is a *vital* issue. If this goes unchecked, ALL of our rights (such as still exist) are in jeopardy. Including our rights to rear our children in the Faith and maintain our own unhindered by atheist fifth-columnists in the judiciary and legislature, both state and federal.

I hope everyone on FR forwards this to everyone they know, on their own e-mail distribution lists. If we e-mail tree and phone tree this information to people we know, it won't be long before this mess is dragged into the light, like a Dracula, and run-through with a stake to the heart.

I looked for Scrappleface in the source... but it was not there. Wacky people.

it won't be long before this mess is dragged into the light, like a Dracula, and run-through with a stake to the heart

I truly hate to be a pessimist, because hope is a theological virtue and despair is a sin, but I think you're assuming that people are not already compromised in the area of sexual morality, and I'm sorry to say that that assumption is unwarranted. There's a reason why something like 30% of Internet traffic is devoted to the delivery of pornography. And I've just recently read an article that the new video Ipod is being targeted as a delivery vehicle for porn as well. This is happening because there's a market for it.

I've been around FR since the days of the Clinton impeachment, and we commonly asked ourselves during that time, "Where's the outrage?" It never really materialized, except among a few of us who saw the implications of what he and Hitlery were practicing. It certainly comes as no surprise that kids took up his example, and there has been an explosion in their practicing oral sex.

The attitudes of the sexual revolution have won the day, and I don't think the toothpaste can be coaxed back into the tube. But, interestingly enough, this whole idea was tried in the early days of the Russian revolution, advocated by people like Alexandra Kollontai. Even the Commies had to eventually encourage people to practice more sexual continence because of the social chaos which resulted. So we already know this won't work, and of course the Catholic Church has predicted that it wouldn't, because sexual "liberation" denies the ontology of the act itself. To deny a thing's ontology is to live in a delusional state, and that can only be maintained until the consequences become undeniable.

That, by the way, is why the Catholic Church is "the enemy" in the eyes of the cultural elites, and the whole propaganda apparatus is being brought to bear to discredit her, and to demoralize her adherents.

Paul Weyrich used to post on FR in the old days, and when he counselled withdrawing from the fray and "tending one's own garden", I told him to stop whining and get back on the horse. (I didn't know it was him at the time, or I would have been more respectful.) These days, I'm thinking he was right. By all means, let's do what we can to bring the message to the public square, to warn people of the consequences of what they've chosen to embrace, but let's not be discouraged when that message falls on deaf ears. People don't tend to learn from reasoning, from history, or even from their own personal past experiences. They don't seem to learn much at all, in my experience. So I think the most important thing we can do is keep the candle burning next to the tabernacle (yes, I'm invoking Brideshead Revisited here) until the storm passes and they begin to come to their senses.

I'd also recommend reading E. Michael Jones' Libido Dominandi, subtitled "Sexual Liberation and Political Control", for a discussion of how we came to this pass and the forces at work to advance this destructive agenda.

The solution is to dump public schools and their "tenured" teachers. Sell the old schools to private businessmen. Let them hire who they want and allow them to be competitive. Then issue vouchers to parents to choose which schools they want.

Bump to a great post

I think I made it clear in the body of my post that I share your pessimism. But, if even the remnant of morally responsible adults "read and heed" the implications of this decision, there are enough people still out there to wither this court's decision in the public eye. Millions of people fall into this category.

I agree that, failing something virtually miraculous, the long-term outlook for things in this country is pretty dismal. But perhaps this decision is being held out in front of us as something of a "last chance" to at least *try* to reverse the juggernaut of societal sin brought on by our own inaction. It seems to me that we have to at least *try* to do something. Defeatism is a self-fulfilling outlook on life.

Defeatism is a self-fulfilling outlook on life.

Yes, but we each have only a limited amount of energy, resources, time, and "political capital" (whatever that is), so we need a realistic assessment of how best to expend them.

I do appreciate that this decision essentially says, "Your children are wards of the state - deal with it," and how outrageous that is. But I also have to wonder how many parents, in moment of anger, have said to their children, "You're only here because the condom broke," or "I could have had you aborted, you know." It's difficult to imagine, given the state of our culture, that the thought hasn't occurred to most parents at least once. Parents have quite willingly abdicated their responsibilities for raising their children to the government schools, and I'm sure that many are quite happy to be relieved of the burden. Children are consistenly depicted as a financial (and otherwise) burden in the popular culture, and families on TV and in the movies are almost always dysfunctional. A "lesson" is being taught by the media, and social statistics show that it has been taken up in large part by the populace.

Can the state-run school system be reformed? The conservative response has been to apply the principles of Federalism: abolish the federal Department of Education, and return control of the schools to more local government entities, to ensure more accountability. That would certainly be a step in the right direction. But Mr. Bush has done just the opposite with the "No Child Left Behind" initiative, increasing the federal DoE budget and centralizing control. And he's supposed to be one of the good guys. But the fact is that if the DoE were abolished, there would be a great howl among the constituents; there's just no discernable political will for this. I'm sorry, but we're not going to get anywhere trying to reform the current system, especially since we have no advocate in a position of political influence.

As Catholics, we can try to re-establish the system of parochial schools, but there we are facing several serious problems. All we can do is provide an alternative for those who are willing to take advantage of it; we can't know in advance how many will. Tuition costs have risen beyond many people's means, because we now must employ lay teachers, who require a decent wage, as opposed to religious who worked nearly for free. This is due to the decline in vocations in the teaching orders. And we must also ensure that the Catholic schools are providing an orthodox Catholic education, perhaps by extending the mandatum to elementary and secondary schools. We must continue to push for some method of tax-relief for families who opt-out of the government schools, but we've consistently met with resistance to this idea, back to the days of Paul Blanshard and his "Protestants and Others for Separation of Church and State".

And, of course, a similar analysis applies to other forms of private schooling, whether they be networks of home schoolers, Protestant private schools, or secular private schools. Still, the great majority of parents will continue to avail themselves of the government schools, which means we can expect a generational propagation of cultural degeneracy. That's the future voting public, consciences formed in the Culture of Death, if not obliterated entirely. None of this really new, either; its seeds can be found in the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf of the late 1800's in Germany, the ideas of which entered our public school system in particularly virulent form by means of Dewey et al.

We have to be realistic about this. We're dealing with the culmination of a trend which is faily long established, and with cultural premises which, though demonstrably destructive, have become ingrained. That's why the culture war was the only one ever worth fighting in the political domain, but the retreat was mostly sounded before the initial shots were fired.

I think a year or so ago James Dobson said that he would recommend that parents in california seriously consider withdrawing their kids out of govt schools. I think this court ruling is one more reason to support that point of view.

At the risk of flogging a dead horse, I'd like to call attention to this article: Dad, I Got a 'C' in Sex, which discusses this ruling in terms of Natural Law.

I think it important because it's part of a larger trend to divorce law from its grounding in morality, even though the law itself speaks of certain acts being malum in se. When the law is stripped of its moral backing, it becomes whatever you can get a legislature to pass (or, these days a judicial activist to rule). And that is precisely how the Nazi regime began the persecution of Jews: all nice and legal by means of the Nuremberg Laws, but utterly immoral.