Free Republic

“The Obama administration is basically saying there is no right to home school anywhere,” said Michael Farris, founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association. “It’s an utter repudiation of parental liberty and religious liberty.”

The Obama administration is arguing in federal court that a homeschooling family from Germany should be deported back to their homeland, despite what they say is religious persecution. The German government prevented Uwe and Hannelore Romeike from teaching their five children at home instead of sending them to government-run schools, fining them and threatening to prosecute them if they don't obey. When they took their three oldest children out of school in 2006, police showed up at their house within 24 hours, only leaving after a group of supporters showed up and organized a quick protest. But their legal troubles...

How do we view genocide in our public memory? Some answers lie in two news stories from this week. One concerns the death of Ieng Sary, an 87-year-old former Khmer Rouge official who helped kill 1.7 million Cambodians in the late 1970s. The other involves German asylum seekers in Tennessee. They seem unrelated, but a closer look reveals important unifying elements: both reflect how state-sponsored murder gets treated retrospectively. And both show how disparately each nation has recovered from its troubling and violent past.

Sobering Thoughts from the Romeike Case By Michael Farris, J.D., LL.M. HSLDA Founder and Chairman Having immersed myself for about eight days in writing a brief for the Romeike family (a German homeschooling family who fled to the United States for political asylum), I wanted to share some insights I gained into the view of our own government toward the rights of homeschooling parents in general. You will benefit from some context. The U.S. law of asylum allows a refugee to stay in the United States permanently if he can show that he is being persecuted for one of several...

The Romeikes are not your typical asylum seekers. They did not come to the U.S. to flee war or despotism in their native land. No, these music teachers left Germany because they didn't like what their children were learning in public school - and because homeschooling is illegal there. "It's our fundamental right to decide how we want to teach our children," says Uwe Romeike, an Evangelical Christian and a concert pianist who sold his treasured Steinway to help pay for the move.

MORRISTOWN, Tenn. — On a quiet street in this little town [...] lives a family of refugees who were granted asylum in the United States because they feared persecution in their home country. [...] The parents, Uwe and Hannelore Romeike, want to home-school their five children, ranging in age from 2 to 12, a practice illegal in their native land, Germany. Among European countries, Germany is nearly alone in requiring, and enforcing, attendance of children at an officially recognized school. The school can be private or religious, but it must be a school. Exceptions can be made [only] for health...

How German Homeschoolers Won Asylum in the U.S. But here's the problem: in Germany it's compulsory for children to attend school, and the Romeikes soon found themselves on the wrong side of the law. Local authorities slapped the couple with a $10,000 fine, and police even took their children to school when the Romeikes refused to send them. Fearing that they could lose custody of their kids or even be put in jail, the Romeikes fled to the U.S. in 2008, looking for a community where they could educate their kids as they saw fit.