August 31- September 6, 2008 Issue |
Posted 8/26/08 at 1:42 PM
A Massachusetts federal appellate court has
refused to overturn a decision that is potentially disastrous to the ability of
parents to raise their children in accordance with their religious beliefs.
As previously reported in this
newspaper, last year Parker v. Hurley
dismissed a case brought by the parents of two children in Lexington, Mass.,
public schools. The families claimed that their children’s forced attendance at
classes that discussed alternative families violated their rights as parents
and also their religious liberty. The lower court found that the First
Amendment would not hinder a school system from teaching “anything reasonably
related to the goals of preparing students to becoming engaged and productive
citizens in our democracy,” even if the teaching at issue, to 5- and 6-year-old
children, violated the deeply held beliefs of the parents who entrusted their
children to the system.
The parents appealed. As has become
routine in these types of cases, the anti-religious arguments were presented by
the American Civil Liberties Union, and prominent law firms filed briefs as amici
curiae (friend of the court), while the parents were represented by
smaller firms. The appellate court affirmed the lower court, ruling that the
parents’ rights were not violated even though “we accept as true the
plaintiffs’ assertion that their sincerely held religious beliefs were deeply
offended.”
To reach that conclusion, the court
first found the plaintiffs’ free exercise of religion was not compromised by
the public schools system forcing their children into classes that offended
their beliefs. The court went on to examine numerous religious-liberty
precedents, and found that the parents’ claim could not be considered of
constitutional validity. In particular, the court found that unlike Amish
parents in a 1972 case called Yoder v. Wisconsin,
which relieved Amish families of sending their children to state schools after
eighth grade, here the parents were not enough of a “religious subgroup” to
qualify for constitutional protection.
Several aspects of the court’s
conclusions are worth further attention, as they illustrate the contemporary
hostile attitude toward religious beliefs in favor of all-encompassing state
power. First, the court opined that only if the parent could prove that the
objectionable material would “automatically and irreversibly” prevent them from
raising their children in accordance with their religious beliefs could they
prevail. This is obviously an insurmountable burden, and one that may be
evident only after years of indoctrination by public schools. Requiring
religious groups to be Amish in order to receive constitutional rights as
parents should be an unacceptable standard.
Second, while the court may be
correct that parents cannot have an unlimited constitutional right to interfere
with the school curriculum, that conclusion does not end the analysis.
Declaring such a right may make the school system unworkable, as every parent
becomes de facto school principal. However, the court displays a curious
blindness in the kinds of subjects being taught in the public schools. It notes
in its opinion that Massachusetts has a detailed curriculum, from grade school
through high schools, covering subjects such as family, diversity and
sexuality. Not only do such topics increase the possibility that some families
may find them objectionable, they also raise the possibility of people or
groups using the school for ideological purposes rather than instruction. Indeed, here the parents alleged (and the
court did not dispute) that the objectionable materials were inserted into the
curriculum at the behest of such groups. Even if not true in this instance,
that real possibility must be taken into account in the analysis of parental
rights.
Nor do parents have the level of
influence the court seems to believe on school governance. While public schools
are still largely local, enormous bureaucracies have sprung up to operate
public schools, and so compromises that parents might strike with local
community schools are increasingly unlikely, if not impossible. Yet, parents
are largely foreclosed from challenging that curriculum, even for their own
children. The parents here did not want to change the curriculum for other
parents, but only to protect their own from what they saw as harmful
influences.
The court also acknowledges but
glosses over the question of the children’s age. The Supreme Court has ruled
that public schools cannot be seen to have “endorsed” religion, for example by
offering prayers at a commencement ceremony, in part because of the fear that
such action may psychologically taint or influence children. Yet here, the
court notes that the “impressionability of young school children” is relevant
when analyzing constitutional claims, and even holds that with one of the
children, a book was read to the class for the express purpose
of influencing the children’s beliefs, contrary to those of the parent.
But the court does not draw the
obvious conclusion: that the curriculum offered here has the same potential for
damaging parents’ ability to control the upbringing of their children as those
religious activities prohibited by the Supreme Court.
As did the lower court, the opinion
implied that the best solution for the parents might be a legislative one, for
example, by expanding the grounds on which a parent can “opt out” of certain
curricular standards. However, this opinion, by disdaining the ability of
parents to raise their children, will provide no comfort to parents seeking
change through the political process.
Gerald J. Russello is a fellow
of the Chesterton Institute
at Seton Hall University.
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