Story here from the UK Telegraph. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The case of the homeschooling couple from Germany who were granted political asylum in the United States, about which Ed West blogged recently, becomes even more interesting if one reads the remarks of the man who granted the Romeikes asylum, Immigration Judge Lawrence O. Burman, of Memphis, Tennessee.

[…]Judge Burman added that the scariest thing about this case was the motivation of the German government. He said that, rather than being concerned with the welfare of the children, it was trying to stamp out parallel societies. Making his court order, the judge voiced concern that, although Germany was a democratic country and an ally, the policy of persecuting homeschoolers was “repellent to everything we believe as Americans”.

[…]The mentality is that the state – not parents – is the natural controller and shaper of children’s lives and beliefs. When a schoolgirl can be given an abortion without her parents’ knowledge, we know that, while public utilities may have been privatised, children have been nationalised. The Romeikes who fled from Germany objected to their children being forced to follow a curriculum that they believed was anti-Christian. The same would apply in British state schools, where pornographic sex education is increasingly being made compulsory.

Next to unilateral “no-fault” divorce, this opposition to parental rights is what prevents me from considering marriage and parenting, no matter how good of a match I find. And make no mistake, the idea that children are the property of the state is totally at home among today’s Democrat party. The system of ineffective government-run public schools, which are partially funded by homeschooling and private-schooling families who don’t even use them, is anti-family and anti-liberty.

Consider this radical feminist Democrat:

“We really don’t know how to raise children. If we want to talk about equality of opportunity for children, then the fact that children are raised in families means there’s no equality. […]In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them.”
(Mary Jo Bane:  Former Assistant Secretary of Administration for Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services of the Clinton administration)

I wrote about the problem of state intrusion into the family here: Are marriage and family compatible with single-payer health care?

But sometimes Christians cause their own problems by being ignorant about economics. I have talked to fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers who actually favored single-payer health care, yet simultaneously opposed things like taxpayer-funded abortions. The problem is that many Christians are not informed about economics. They think that they can empower a secular-leftist state to achieve “social justice” through wealth redistribution, without having their own religious liberty impacted.

But the same government that can confiscate wealth from “the rich” to nationalize health care can also force pro-life nurses at government-run hospitals to perform abortions. The best defense of religious liberty is a free market. If a government-run school discriminates against you in the free market, you can always homeschool or use private schools. That is, if you can afford to homeschool or pay for private schools after the government is done using your taxes to indoctrinate the other children.