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International Decisions to Influence US Constitutional Law – Homeschoolers Alarmed

Trend especially worries Homeschool Legal Defense Association

By Hilary White

PURCELLVILLE, VA, October 11, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) –  International law and court decisions will have increasing influence on US Supreme Court and Constitutional analysis, warns an American lawyer Michael Farris, head of the Virginia-based Homeschool Legal Defense Association.

The US Supreme Court will increasingly use international, not domestic, law sources to “help interpret American law, including the US Constitution,” Farris writes.

He quotes the late Justice Rhenquist, considered a conservative, who said, “It is time that the United States courts begin looking to the decisions of other constitutional courts to aid in their own deliberative process.”

Given the direction towards the extreme left and the revival of anti-Christian statism that is the fashion in legal decisions and legislation in Europe, however, Farris says that those who hold to more traditional concepts of rights, particularly parental and family rights, may have reason to worry.

As an advocate for homeschoolers, Farris particularly points to the recent jailing of a homeschooling mother in Germany and the government’s attempt to force children into state schools against their parents’ wishes.

In September, the online news magazine, Brussels Journal, reported that Katherina Plett, a German Baptist in Paderborn, was arrested in her home and charged under a Hitler-era law originally designed to ensure the indoctrination of children into Nazi ideology.

The law is still on the books and was largely ignored until recently when the German government began cracking down on Christian homeschooling families. Katherina Plett’s husband fled with the children to Austria while another family had their children removed by the court for the crime of homeschooling.

These and similar decisions in other countries could, says Farris, become the standard for interpretations of US law by courts. “No one should miss its bigger meaning. The state has the power to demand attendance at government schools so that children may receive indoctrination in today's theories of pluralism.”

In the case of the German homeschoolers, writes Farris, when parents argued for their rights of religious freedom, the European high court declared that “in view of the power of the modern State, it is above all through State teaching that this aim must be realized.”

Farris writes that a specific amendment to the US Constitution is needed to protect the rights of parents from state interference in education choices, “in order to stop the internationalists from using European law to erode our liberty to educate our children outside the orb of state efforts to indoctrinate them in pluralism.”

Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Germany Uses Nazi Era Law to Imprison Mom for Homeschooling; Family Flees to Austria
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/sep/06091407.html

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