The Iowa House passed on a 58-37 vote an amendment (H-8489) to the SF 2336 the Health and Human Services appropriations bill. The amendment provided clear and strong language which defunds abortion of state and federal family planning funds with the only exception being to save the life of the mother. It removes exceptions for rape and incest, as well as, fetal abnormalities. It also largely defunds abortion providers in the state of Iowa. The amendment reads:
A department shall not distribute state or federal family planning funds under this section to any entity that performs abortions or that maintains or operates a facility where abortions are performed.
In addition all state departments that distribute state and federal family planning money are required to report to the Governor and the General Assembly who received state or federal family planning funds. If they do distribute state or federal family planning funds to an entity that doesn’t provide primary health services they have to explain why it was necessary to prevent severe limitation or elimination to family planning services to that region of the state. This amendment had the full support of the Republican caucus.
Shane also quotes Thomas Jefferson in his post as follows “to compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical”. I think that de-funding abortion is a great first step to reducing the number of abortions, and particularly sensible in a time of fiscal crisis. This is common sense.
After seizing a child from his parents and holding him in custody with virtually no visitation for 1 1/2 years because he was home-schooled, the Swedish government has now jailed the boy’s father for taking his son home from a supervised visitation when he wasn’t supposed to last week. Social services officials also told the 9-year-old boy’s mother that if she doesn’t stop crying at the limited visitations, which last for one hour every five to six weeks, they will further reduce the frequency of visits with her son.
After Swedish courts upheld the government’s right to seize Domenic Johansson, son of Christer and Annie Johansson, attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund and the Home School Legal Defense Association filed an application with the European Court of Human Rights asking it to hear the case, Johansson v. Sweden. Swedish authorities will not permit the family to be represented within the country by an ADF-allied attorney and have instead required them to accept a government-appointed public defender.
“The government shouldn’t abduct and imprison children simply because it doesn’t like homeschooling. That’s exactly what happened here,” said ADF Legal Counsel Roger Kiska, who is based in Europe. “Despite the ill-advised decision on the part of Mr. Johansson, the only menace here is a government drunk with its own power. This sad circumstance is what happens when an over-powerful government pushes a parent to the point of desperation, so social services should not pretend to be surprised.”
“The parents complied with everything expected of them, and yet the government has continued to keep their son under lock and key,” Kiska added. “Americans beware: This is coming to your doorstep if you are not vigilant about your government.”
Swedish authorities forcibly removed Domenic from his parents in June 2009 from a plane they had boarded to move to Annie’s home country of India. The officials did not have a warrant nor did they charge the Johanssons with any crime. The officials seized the child because they believe home schooling is an inappropriate way to raise a child and insist the government should raise Domenic instead, even though home-schooling was legal in Sweden at the time he was taken into custody.
The Democrat party, and all secular leftist parties, are opposed to the idea of parents raising their own children because it offends their sense of “equality”. The left desires equality of outcomes for all citizens regardless of how they act. And that means that all children should receive state care and instruction during daylight hourse, virtually from the time they are born until the time when they become employed (hopefully by the government). The left is especially terrified of homeschooling, because in that arrangement, the parents, (and especially the father), are able to teach the child to have the beliefs that the parents prefer. The left is allied with teacher unions who have educated themselves to the point where they believe that parents are not their partners in educating children, but instead are enemies.
Homeschooling versus fascism
A common thread in fascist regimes is the effort to separate children from parents at a young age, so that adult teachers can impose the state’s values on the children when they are least able to resist them. That is why, accoring to the Guardian, the National Socialist party abolished homeschooling in fascist Germany in 1938. (A review of Goldberg’s book by Canadian author Denyse O’Leary is here). My favorite quote from Goldberg’s book is about the role of government-run schools in a fascist state:
Hence a phalanx of progressive reformers saw the home as the front line in the war to transform men into compliant social organs. Often the answer was to get the children out of the home as soon as possible. An archipelago of agencies, commissions, and bureaus sprang up overnight to take the place of the anti-organic, contra-evolutionary influences of the family. The home could no longer be seen as an island, separate and sovereign from the rest of society. John Dewey helped create kindergartens in American for precisely this purpose — to help shape the apples before they fell from the tree — while at the other end of the educational process stood reformers like Wilson, who summarized the progressive attitude perfectly when, as president of Princeton, he told an audience, “Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life … [but] to make them as unlike their fathers as possible.”
The United States is also heading in this direction. In Democrat-run California, Human Events reported that homeschooling was effectively banned by an activist court. Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza recently explained why the left is so intent on keeping control of the schools here. He notes that secular people do not form families and do not have children, because it is too much of a constraint on their autonomy. Instead, D’Souza writes, secularists simply seize control of the children of religious parents, and pass their values on to the children in the mandatory government-run schools.
Christians and the secular left
Some people, even some Christians, vote for Democrats because they don’t want to have to pay for the things they want by working themselves, but would prefer to pay for the the things they want by having their harder-working neighbors pay for the things they want. Parents who vote for leftists are really just delivering their children into the hands of an ever growing secular humanist educational bureaucracy that will have no respect – no respect – for the traditional family. And this is even worse for Christians, because the traditional family is the nursery for Christian beliefs. When a child has to please his peers and his public school indoctrinators more than his parents, Christianity is finished.
This is something that the church is largely ignorant of, and indifferent to, because they are more focused on providing feelings of happiness to their customers. The church does this by neglecting the truthfulness of Christianity as a knowledge tradition and emphasizing Christianity as an amusing musical show. Apologetics is replaced by entertainment.
The parliament passed what the HSLDA called a “sweeping” reform of the nation’s education system on June 22 in the form of a 1500 page bill, 2 pages of which addressed the topic of home education.
[…]Previous regulations specified that home instruction must be a “fully satisfactory alternative” to state-run education, and officials may inspect homeschooling families to make sure they are keeping up to speed. The new law, however, keeps those previous regulations and adds a third, highly restrictive clause: parents may only homeschool after they have demonstrated “exceptional circumstances.” Despite the fact that the council of the Swedish supreme court charged with reviewing laws recommended a clarification on the meaning of the ambiguous term “exceptional circumstances,” the government moved ahead without having done so.
While homeschooling families in the country have already faced persecution and punitive fines from school officials for homeschooling, the new law essentially gives carte blanche authority for school officials to deny homeschooling applications in any and all circumstances.
Parents who have religious, moral, or philosophic reasons for will not get a break. In fact the law explicitly states, “It is the opinion of the government that there is no need of a law to make space for homeschooling based on the religious or philosophical views of the family.”
[…]Because Sweden has no supreme court with the authority of judicial review, the key to overturning the law will be to effect a change in parliament – and elections are in September.
The secular left wants “equality”. In order for everyone to be “equal”, all the children have to be taught by the state. And that means no more homeschooling. Naive Christians who are liberal on fiscal issues or liberal on war/terrorism sometimes vote against the conservatives. We need to be more careful about educating Christians to be conservative across the board. I am sick and tired of talking to people who are active in fringe Christian political parties who do not understand why they need to favor free market capitalism and peace through strength.
Be careful who you vote for – when you vote secular left, you’re making it harder on your Christian brothers and sisters to do the things they need to do.
WINTERY KNIGHT 