Judicial Supremacists Lash Out at Parents
By Phyllis Schlafly

When Hillary Clinton proclaimed that it takes a village to raise a child, many people didn’t realize that she was enunciating liberal dogma that the government should raise and control children. This concept has now been embraced by activist judges eager to be anointed as elders of the child-raising village.

A federal court of appeals in California has ruled that parents’ fundamental right to control the upbringing of their children “does not extend beyond the threshold of the school door,” and that a public school has the right to provide its students with “whatever information it wishes to provide, sexual or otherwise.” The decision stated that “there is no fundamental right of parents to be the exclusive provider of information regarding sexual matters to their children.”

This 2005 case, called Fields v. Palmdale School District, was brought by parents who discovered that their seven to ten-year-old children had been required to fill out a nosy questionnaire about such matters as “thinking about having sex,” “thinking about touching other people’s private parts,” and “wanting to kill myself.” The parents were shocked and looked to the court for a remedy.
No such luck. Three judges unanimously ruled against the parents. One judge was appointed by Jimmy Carter, one by Bill Clinton, and one by Lyndon B. Johnson. After heavy criticism in Congress, the court tried to soften the “threshold” sentence but reaffirmed its decision.

How did these judges get around “the fundamental right of parents to make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children,” which has been settled law in the United States for decades? The judges said that once children are put in a public school, the parents’ “fundamental right to control the education of their children is, at the least, substantially diminished.”

It’s time for Americans to wake up to how they lose control over their children by putting them in public schools. What the judges ruled in this case is exactly what the National Education Association has been demanding for years: total control over what is taught to schoolchildren, overriding the wishes of the parents.

The decision in Fields v. Palmdale School District is much broader than just the matter of a nosy questionnaire interrogating elementary schoolchildren about their assumed sexual activities. This decision included the statement that the school’s power extends to “protecting the mental health of children.” The judges apparently anticipated the new national plan to subject all schoolchildren to mental health screening, and they invented a judicial argument to protect—not children, but—the right of the schools to engage in mental screening of all schoolchildren.

The school in this case had sent a letter to parents stating that if a child felt uncomfortable about answering nosy questions, the school would assist in “locating a therapist for further psychological help.” That should have been a warning, but many parents don’t realize that the schools have an agenda unrelated to reading, writing and ‘rithmetic.

How did the court feel empowered to put new limits on the settled law of parents’ rights and give public schools the power to override parents on teaching about sex? Simple! The three liberal judges based their decision on what they called “our evolving understanding of the nature of our Constitution.” Liberal judges have no shame in proclaiming their belief that our written Constitution is “evolving.” In this case, the judges bragged that the Constitution has evolved to create the right to abortion, and then they ruled that the evolving Constitution takes sex education away from parents and puts it “within the state’s authority.”

Parents should realize the broad meaning of the Palmdale decision that a public school is authorized to teach your child “whatever information it wishes to provide, sexual or otherwise.”  The meaning of “whatever” was spelled out in anti-parent, pro-public-school decisions handed down in five circuits within the last two years. Federal courts upheld the right of public schools to indoctrinate students in the Muslim religion and practices (Eklund v. Byron Union School District, 2005), to force students to watch a one-hour pro-homosexual video (Boyd Gay-Straight v. Boyd Board of Education, 2006), to force students to attend a program advocating homosexual conduct that used minors in sexually suggestive skits (Brown v. Hot, Sexy and Safer Productions, 1995), to censor any mention of Intelligent Design (Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 2005), to use classroom materials that parents consider pornography (Evans-Marshall v. Board of Education, 2005), to force students to answer nosy questionnaires with suggestive questions about sex, drugs and suicide (C.N. v. Ridgewood Board of Education, 2005), and to deny a divorced father’s right to get his son’s school records (Crowley v. McKinney, 2005).

The courts have upheld the constitutional right of any schoolchild to refuse to recite the Pledge of Allegiance (West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 1943), but neither school nor court offered any child or parent the right to opt out of any of the offensive programs listed above.

This is not only a culture issue; it is a free speech issue. Public schools are censoring views that do not conform to the diversity/multiculturalism culture. The courts upheld the public schools in prohibiting an anti-gay T-shirt, (Harper v. Poway Unified School District, 2006), but ordered a school to permit a very offensive anti-Bush T-shirt (Guiles v Marineau, 2006).

Government schools are every day defining the culture of the nation our children will live in by inculcating the values of diversity, multiculturalism, American guilt, situation ethics, and easy acceptance of sex outside of marriage. There is no proof that the American people have democratically chosen this definition of our culture. It is being done with the power of government employees spending the people’s money. Since there is no prospect that either the public schools or taxes will be abolished any time soon, our task is to stop government institutions, especially the public schools, from directing our culture in ways the American people do not want to go.

Phyllis Schlafly is the founder and president of Eagle Form. To learn more about Eagle Forum please visit their web site at: www.eagleforum.org. You may also write to them at their Alton, IL office: Eagle Forum, PO Box 618, Alton, IL 62002 or call (618) 462-8909 or to their Clayton, MO office which is located at 7800 Bonhomme Ave., Clayton, MO 63105 or call (314) 721-1213.