March 12, 2009 By Alan KeyesIn my last post, as I listed areas of life where the imposition of socialist tyranny will produce the enslavement of conscience, I referred to the fact that "Parents will be required, without exception to surrender their children for indoctrination by the state." I'm sure the usual purblind skeptics dismissed the thought as another example of rhetorical hyperbole. Providence came to its defense today in the form of a report out of North Carolina where "a judge has ordered three children to attend public schools this fall because the homeschooling their mother has provided over the last four years needs to be 'challenged.' The children, however, have tested above their grade levels - by as much as two years."
Judge Ned Mangum did not usurp Ms. Mills right to decide the best education for her children because the schooling she provided was academically deficient. He is reported to have "stated that his decision was not ideologically or religiously motivated but that ordering the children into public schools would 'challenge the ideas you've taught them.'" As reported, I'm not sure whether that statement is an example of self-evident dishonesty or shocking ignorance, but either way it makes hash out of the notion that Mangum is better qualified than their mother to decide the educational path of her children. The word "ideological" literally refers to that which gives an account of ideas, or is done on account of them. So if he sends the children to public schools in order to make sure the mother's ideas are challenged his decision is precisely ideological. If, when he made the statement, he knew the meaning of the word, then he spoke dishonestly. If he did not know it, then he revealed such deficiency in his own education as to raise serious doubts about his qualifications to make judgments about anyone else's. (In the U.S. lawyers get a doctorate when they graduate from law school, right?)
But the deeper issue goes beyond this or any other judge's capacity or qualifications. It has rather to do with the natural right of parents to fulfill their responsibility before God for their children's upbringing. A mother who seeks to assure that her children will receive an education that reflects her conscientious beliefs as to their moral welfare, does precisely what the laws of nature and of nature's God require of her. She does what is right. In light of her right, the state (including any judge acting on its behalf) is obliged to refrain from interference with her action unless, by dint of proven wrongdoing, it can assert the obligation to act on behalf of some superior right of the children (or their other parent) to prevent or correct the wrong. No such wrongdoing has been suggested in this case. In fact her husband, whose adultery his lawyer admits to be the cause of their ruined marriage, acknowledges that Ms. Mills "has done a good job with the homeschooling of the children."
Judge Mangum is reported to have said that "public school would 'prepare these kids for the real world and college' and allow them 'socialization'. But if his idea of socialization includes the need to challenge the Christian ideas their mother has taught them, then he not only interferes with her natural right to raise up her children, he tramples on one of the most important elements of the free exercise of religion. When one individual or group forcibly takes away the children of another in order to raise those children according to beliefs foreign to the beliefs and conscience of their parents, it is an unconscionable act of injustice and bigotry. What this judge does under specious color of law is no different than what their Spanish persecutors once did to Jewish People in Spain, or what American slaveholders in the nineteenth century did to the children torn away from their mothers to be sold into slavery in some distant state.
It may be to our credit that we speak of these things calmly, and seek to settle them by peaceful means in our courts of law. But this decent restraint should not lead us to forget the enormity of the issues involved; issues that have throughout human history roused deep indignation, humiliation and implacable anger, such as eventually ignite the heart's dry timber of grievance into the consuming flames of hateful war. As good people have lived and sacrificed to do right by their children, so also they have died, if need be.
Are we now so distracted by our little pleasures and playthings that we have no sense of the wounds we are inflicting upon the hearts and consciences of decent people? They know that the higher law of justice demands that they resist tyranny, even though black robed and velvet gloved. They must especially resist it when it reaches into their homes to deliver their children to what their consciences declare to be corruption. Our founding creed says that we should suffer while evils are sufferable. Children are done to death in the womb. Their parents' rights and duty towards them cast aside in the courts. All in the midst of times when the Constitution that may be the highest manifestation of our common sense of law and justice is treated with no more respect than an old TV guide.
When will it be enough to rouse us from complacency? When will we see enough to make out the pattern before our eyes? We see the disparate elements. We react to each with a little outburst, a little temper, perhaps a little prayer. But from a judge's usurpation of a mother's natural right to educate her children, to what may be the contemptuous usurpation of the highest office in the land, the elements come together to evince a design. Is it the design for despotism of which our Founders spoke? Despotism is such an odd and unfamiliar sounding word: so rarely used, so little understood. But this ignorance too has its place in the design. It's hard to rouse hearts to meet danger when the words to describe it have gone out of style. "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty…" to let arrogant judges, politicians and bureaucrats dispose of the souls of their children, and the charter of their liberty, and the future of their country. Is that how it goes? Is that how you remember it? For more current writing from Alan Keyes, please visit LoyaltoLiberty.com! Worth considering? Then don't forget to DIGG IT!!!! 
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From the mother’s website http://www.hsinjustice.com : What Can You Do? This case is still ongoing - we have a chance to make a real difference! Call, fax, or email those in authority to have Judge Mangum removed from this case - so that Venessa Mills can get a fair hearing and homeschoolers can get justice. 1. Forward this message to every person on your contact list, and all those interested in protecting basic American rights. After the right to educate is gone, property and other basic rights will follow. 2. Contact three officials to express your outrage at Venessa Mills’ right to homeschool being taken away and the prejudicial orders of this judge. Three or four short emails or phone calls could be the difference for these kids, and many more like them. You can reference the case number: #08CVD17753 Judge Mangum’s Supervisors Judicial Standards Commission
P.O. Box 1122
Raleigh, North Carolina 27602
919-831-3630 Don’t be discouraged or think that you can’t make a difference! This case has not been finalized - there’s still time to call for the removal of Judge Mangum - or, at the very least, make him review the facts and deliver a fair judgment. Every contact counts! Call the numbers on this list to demand justice! http://www.nccourts.org/County/Wake/Directory.asp State Legislators NC Senate-Neal Hunt (R)
919-733-5850
Neal.Hunt@ncleg.net NC House-Ty Harrell (D)
919-733-5602
Ty.Harrell@ncleg.net North Carolina Governor Governor Bev Perdue
Office of the Governor
20301 Mail Service Center
Raleigh, NC 27699-0301
Phone: (919)733-4240
Fax: (919)733-2120 |
"This is a gross example of government breaking the principle of subsidiarity." -Little Bit And saying nothing of the governments violation of the virtue of "Justice" [righteousness-justice]
The Principle of Subsidiarity
by David A. Bosnich One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State. This is why Pope John Paul II took the “social assistance state” to task in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus. The Pontiff wrote that the Welfare State was contradicting the principle of subsidiarity by intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility. This “leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending.” (Snipped) But there is another area of Alexis de Tocqueville’s thought which runs directly counter to Monsignor Higgins’s argument. Higgins is defending the Welfare State, the prospect of which Tocqueville dreaded. Tocqueville described the system which he foresaw in terms which are chillingly similar to modern society. He predicted that modern democratic government would degenerate into a huge, paternalistic state which would guide the individual in all of his affairs and insure that all of his needs were met. “For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?” Tocqueville strongly opposed this system because it kept the citizens in perpetual childhood. Read more…. http://www.acton.org/publications/randl/rl_article_200.php
“Have we all gone mad,.. when are we going to grow up?” - Alan Keyes “Obama -Radical Communist”
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