This editorial begins with a star-spangled Independence Day hat tip to the United States of America.

Why is this July 4 tip of Uncle Sam’s hat so appropriate today? 

It’s because of the profound wisdom and common sense the U.S. Supreme Court displayed courtesy of its landmark June 27 Mahmoud v. Taylor decision.

Via its findings, the court’s 6-3 majority of justices reined in a rogue pro-LGBTQ-rights school board in Maryland and upheld parental rights and religion across our entire nation.

The case centered on the school board’s covert and dishonest efforts to embed pro-LGBTQ curriculum materials throughout the literature curriculum for all children in pre-K through grade 6. The school board also rejected the rights of religiously inclined parents to opt out of exposing their kids to such materials.

Even some Montgomery County school administrators pushed back against their school board’s dishonest and manipulative campaign. But to no avail. Just as with the objections from a broad spectrum of parents — including Catholic, Orthodox and other Christian parents, as well as concerned Jewish and Muslim parents — the school board told everyone who disagreed to collectively pound sand.

In upholding parental rights and religious liberty against the rogue Montgomery County School Board, the Supreme Court was implicitly  affirming a fundamental and crucial Catholic moral teaching: Parents, and not the state, are always the primary educators of their own children. 

Relying on the constitutional foundation of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, the Supreme Court’s majority oriented themselves in that same direction. The Montgomery County curriculum goes far beyond “mere exposure,” the justices declared, and therefore “burdens the parents’ right to the free exercise of religion.”

“Woke” school boards in other parts of the nation are now on notice: Apply this Supreme Court ruling in the context of all their pro-LGBTQ policies. And going forward, respect the inalienable rights of loving and religiously minded parents to guard their kids from any curricula or other classroom propaganda that contradicts their most fundamental moral beliefs. 

But while the Supreme Court provided this resounding and uplifting win for parental rights and religious freedom here in America, a very different scenario is unfolding in Germany.

It’s taking place in the Archdiocese of Hamburg. But there, it’s the local Church, and not the German state, that has taken the lead in initiating a new sex-education policy that tramples parental rights and core Catholic teachings, courtesy of the forced implementation of the LGBTQ agenda in archdiocesan school classrooms.

In a June 5 statement introducing its new schools policy, the archdiocese announced “the recognition of different identities and sexual orientations is actively promoted” and declared that “discrimination and taboos” are to be “consciously dismantled.” 

Sadly, the outlook that underlies the Catholic shift in Hamburg is not an outlier. It’s widely expected that most of Germany’s other dioceses will soon move to emulate the Archdiocese of Hamburg’s new policy. 

It’s tragic that in the area of sex education, Germany’s Church leaders are abandoning their duty to shepherd their own flocks of parents and children. In doing so, they are aligning themselves with the secularist diktats of contemporary Germany’s irreligious federal and state governments, in direct contradiction of what their own Church proclaims about the truth and meaning of human sexuality.

At first glance, when the Archdiocese of Hamburg’s policy shift is viewed through the eyes of faithful Catholics on this side of the Atlantic, it seems incredible that German Church leaders could ever allow this to happen.  

But it’s understandable — though no less tragic — when faithful Americans, of every religious stripe, become acquainted with the contemporary context of church-state relations in Germany. 

Here in America, our Founding Fathers wisely chose, courtesy of the First Amendment’s Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses, to permanently disentangle church and state. Germany’s constitution mandates precisely the opposite: It permanently entangles — and effectively subordinates — all of Germany’s major Christian denominations to the authority of the state. 

The entanglement is a consequence of the European nation’s constitutional provision that all tax-paying citizens who are registered as members of religious communities must pay a church tax, at a rate of 9% in most German states. 

The tax revenue is then turned over to the registered religious communities, the largest of which is the Catholic Church. And it continues to be paid out, whether or not a registered religious taxpayer attends church anymore. In secularized Germany, only a very small percentage of Catholics continue to do so.

For the German Catholic bishops, one consequence of this constitutional entanglement is that they remain very rich in terms of financial wealth, even though their churches have become disastrously poor in terms of the sacramental worship of faithful believers.

Another consequence is that most of the massive revenue it receives from the state is spent on social services. And, since the state is the paymaster, the government effectively controls the overall direction of how the German bishops spend their church-tax moneys.

As the Supreme Court’s recent Montgomery County ruling demonstrates, the contrasting outcomes between this pair of U.S. and German constitutional arrangements couldn’t be any more glaring. 

Here, religious liberty and parental rights are guaranteed. There, these rights are stripped away from churches and parents whenever a foundational Christian belief conflicts with contemporary Germany’s secularist zeitgeist.

That’s why this Independence Day hat tip to the profound wisdom that the Founding Fathers embedded in our own Constitution is so richly deserved. 

God bless all our readers, and God bless America!