Two options: compliance or punishment

Let’s back our way into this outrageous story:

Thornton states that unlike much of the American education system, German officials “view the children as belonging to the State, particularly during the time they are in school” and for that reason parents’ beliefs and authority over their children takes second place to the interests and mandates of the State.

Which pretty much explains the rest of what happened there when some families tried to opt out of certain mandatory sex-ed classes.

At least eight Russo-German families in Salzkotten, Germany, have suffered heavy fines and now their fathers have been sentenced to prison…

just because they exercised their parental discretion in choosing what their children should be exposed to in the delicate discussion of human sexuality.

The International Human Rights Group, a Christian legal defense organization that defends religious liberty and the right to homeschool in Europe, reports that in addition to refusing to allow their children to attend sex-ed classes, the families also resisted having their children enlisted in a theatre production of “Mein Körper gehört mir” or “My Body Belongs to Me,” which informs young children in how to engage in sexual intercourse.

Parents of young children should be allowed to exercise their authority and opt out of this age-inappropriate production. That should be a given.

What’s given is that penalties will be leveled for non-compliance with statism.

With fines having failed to force the families into compliance, government officials have now sentenced each of the families’ respective fathers to spend a brief time in prison. One father has already spent seven days in jail and was released Friday.
 
Instead of inflicting ordinary punitive fines on the families, the state has opted to impose a special fine called “Bussgeld,” which IHRG European Director Richard Guenther explains literally means “repentance money” and is “designed to show contrition for a wrong behavior on the part of the person being fined.”

Which is cruelly paradoxical.

The “Bussgeld” fines are significant, perhaps especially because they put the eight German families in an impossible situation: payment of the fines would imply an admission of guilt, but they believe that they have done nothing wrong.

Radical actions call for drastic reactions.

This involves lodging a civil suit on behalf of a number of persecuted home-school families in order to force Germany’s courts to recognize the rights of parents as the primary educators of their children.

(Which the Catholic Church teaches and strongly emphasizes again and again.)

Christians in Germany have faced enormous persecution from the German government for removing their children from the German public schools, either through homeschooling – an illegal act according to a law instituted during the Third Reich – or taking them out of select classes they deem harmful to their Christian values, which is also illegal.

The fact that these children often outperform their counterparts in state schools has little bearing on the matter for Germany; the government’s stated public policy is to suppress the existence of Parallelgesellschaften or “parallel societies” based on “separate philosophical convictions” through the education system.

The thought police are still (or again) in control.

Look folks, this is what state control has come to:

The Youth Welfare Office or Jugendamt – an institution similar to Child Protective Services – acts as the government’s chief intervening instrument, and when prison and fines do not bend Christian families into compliance, they recommend that these Christians lose parental custody of their children.

As we’ve heard from the United Nations, Barack Obama and Mother Teresa among others, injustice against any of us is injustice against all of us. When government can invade the sanctity of the family to this extent anywhere, the threat to families exists everywhere.

Contacts for German embassies are listed at bottom there. People should remind them how quickly they’ve forgotten the lessons of totalitarianism.