Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Homeschooling Not a Fundamental Right Says Justice Department
Homeschooling Not a Fundamental Right Says Justice Department
Apr 3, 2025 3:20 PM

In 2010, Uwe and Hannelore Romeike, who lived with their five children in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, were faced with a choice: abandon their Evangelical Christian religious beliefs or lose custody of their children. The Romeikes had withdrawn their children from German public schools in 2006, after ing concerned that the educational material employed by the school was undermining the tenets of their Christian faith. After accruing the equivalent of $10,000 worth of fines and the forcible removal of their children from the home, they chose to flee their homeland and seek asylum in the United States. They believed our government was more respectful of religious liberties.

They soon discovered that was not the case.

On January 26, 2010, a federal immigration judge granted the Romeikes political asylum, ruling they had a reasonable fear of persecution for their beliefs if they returned to their homeland. The judge also denounced the German policy, saying it was, “utterly repellent to everything we believe as Americans.” However, President Obama’s Justice Department disagreed. They argued that the family should be denied asylum based on their contention that governments may legitimately use its authority to force parents to send their kids to government-sanctioned schools.

To better understand what Attorney-General Holder and his Justice Department are supporting, let’s look at the German policy. The parent-children relationship is defined in Art. 6 § 2 as follows:

The care and upbringing of children is the natural right of parents and a duty primarily incumbent upon them. The State shall watch over them in the performance of this duty.

And Art. 7 § 1 adds:

The entire school system shall be under the supervision of the state.

What this means for parents, as Franz Reimer explains, is pulsory schooling is seen as an important duty for parents and children which leaves practically no room for parental choice. The parents’ right to care, says Reimer, is sometimes termed a right pulsory schooling, not pulsory schooling.” The German government believes the law is necessary to “counteract the development of religious and philosophically motivated parallel societies.”

When the law was challenged by religious parents, the European Convention of Human Rights sided with the German government, saying “integration into and first experiences of society are important goals in primary-school education.” In other words, the State’s desire to socialize children to the society’s values trumps the parents rights to raise their children according to their own religious beliefs.

Even if the German state disagrees, being able to raise your children according to one’s religion should be considered a fundamental right in America. But as we have seen with the HHS mandate, the Obama administration believes that if a law can be applied to all people then it cannot possibly make exceptions for religious believers.

That is essentially what Justice Department lawyers are arguing in the legal brief for the case, Romeike v. Holder, which is currently in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. They argue that Germany did not violate the Romeike’s human rights because the ban on homeschooling is a ban for all, not any specific group. Since German law does not prevent, for instance, only evangelical Christians from homeschooling, the Romeike’s are not being persecuted for a religious reason.

Mike Farris, founder of the Home School Legal Defense Asssocaition (HSLDA), the group that is defending the Romeikes, says:

There are two major portions of constitutional rights of citizens—fundamental liberties and equal protection. The U.S. Attorney General has said this about homeschooling. There is no fundamental liberty to homeschool. So long as a government bans homeschooling broadly and equally, there is no violation of your rights. This is a view which gives some acknowledgement to the principle of equal protection but which entirely jettisons the concept of fundamental liberties.

A second argument is revealing. The U.S. government contended that the Romeikes’ case failed to show that there was any discrimination based on religion because, among other reasons, the Romeikes did not prove that all homeschoolers were religious, and that not all Christians believed they had to homeschool.

This argument demonstrates another form of dangerous “group think” by our own government. The central problem here is that the U.S. government does not understand that religious freedom is an individual right. One need not be a part of any church or other religious group to be able to make a religious freedom claim. Specifically, one doesn’t have to follow the dictates of a church to claim religious freedom—one should be able to follow the dictates of God Himself.

[product sku=”1416″]

The United States Supreme Court has made it very clear in the past that religious freedom is an individual right. Yet our current government does not seem to understand this. They only think of us as members of groups and factions. It is an extreme form of identity politics that directly threatens any understanding of individual liberty.

As Farris makes clear, this case is not just about a German family seeking asylum but about the parental rights of American families. The Obama administration believes that the rights of parents to educate our children is conditional on the government’s approval, a right that is not fundamental but exercised at the whim of our educational overlords.

“It is important that Americans stand up for the rights of German homeschooling families,” says Farris. “In so doing, we stand up for our own.”

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
How taxing work affects employment
Note: This is post #104 in a weekly video series on basic economics. An important factor influencing an individual’s decision whether to keep working as they get older is their government’s tax and retirement policies. Taxes on earnings plus penalties, like losing retirement benefits, gives us an implicit tax rate, explains economist Alex Tabarrok. Countries with higher implicit tax rates for older workers see a much lower labor force participation rate for people considered retirement age. (If you find the...
Samuel Gregg: Paris is burning
“Since 1789, we’ve all had good reason to worry whenever riots break out in Paris,” says Acton research director Samuel Gregg. “Whether it’s 1848 or 1968, social upheaval in France rarely ends well.” The sheer fury vented throughout France by thegilets jaunesmovement over the past three weeks has highlighted specific grievances animating many French citizens. The truth, however, is that the burning cars, blocked highways, vandalism, lawlessness, and running battles between rioters and police in the streets are symptomatic of...
FAQ: What happens in a confidence vote?
Prime Minister Theresa May will face a confidence vote today between 6 and 8 p.m. local time (1 to 3 p.m. Eastern time). The result is expected no later than 9 p.m. London time. What is a confidence vote, how does it work, and what happens afterwards? What is a confidence vote? Under the UK’s parliamentary system, the ruling party’s leader es prime minister. If the leader loses his or her support, Conservative members of Parliament vote to express their...
From inmates to entrepreneurs: How work transforms the soul and spirit
James, Gene and Dexter at Refoundry With the promising (but now passing) prospect of a new wave of criminal justice reform circulating around Capitol Hill, discussions have reemerged as to how we might improve the justice system to better help and support our prison population (current and former) in rehabilitating their lives and avoiding the status quo of systematic detours. Meanwhile, at a cultural and institutional level, we continue to new ways of helping individuals better recognize their gifts and...
FAQ: Who is Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Angela Merkel’s successor in Germany?
On Friday, December 7, Angela Merkel’s ruling Christian Democrats elected Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer as party leader. “AKK,” as she is known, is liberal on economic issues, conservative on social issues, and once called for the Roman Catholic Church to ordain a “quota” of female clerics. Here are the facts you need to know. What happened at Friday’s CDU party leadership vote? Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer narrowly won the delegates’ vote to e party leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in a narrow,...
An Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn centenary
On this day in 1918, Russian writer and historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born inKislovodsk, Russia, to Taisia and Isaaki Solzhenitsyn, parents of peasant stock who had received a university education. When he died in 2008 near Moscow, Solzhenitsyn had published his monumental Gulag Archipelago and other literary and historical works — which continue to appear in English for the first time. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be posting Acton archival material and new writings and media on the blog...
5 Facts about international human rights
Today is the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a milestone document in the history of human rights. In honor of the observance, here are five facts you should know about international human rights: 1. Prior to the 1940s there were a number of documents, such as the the British Magna Carta and the U.S. Bill of Rights, that advanced the recognition of human rights. But few documents were recognized internationally as applying to all people at...
5 Facts about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Yesterday marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The celebrated novelist and dissident is considered by many to be a key figure in the demise munism and the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Daniel J. Mahoney says, “Solzhenitsyn embodied, in thought as well as deed, the two great moral wellsprings of European civilization: humility and magnanimity, humble deference to an ‘order of things’ and the spirited defense of human liberty and dignity.” In honor of his...
A Hanukkah meditation on Maimonides … and venture capitalism
If the average person had to describe a capitalist, he might name “Dickens’ unredeemed Scrooge, or Gordon (‘Greed is good!’) Gecko from the movieWallStreet.” However, the real patron saint of venture capitalism may well be the great Jewish theologian and philosopher Moses Maimonides,writes Laurie Morrow, Ph.D., in a Hanukkah meditationfor Acton’sReligion & Liberty Transatlanticwebsite. “Rambam” believed that the highest form of charity is enabling someone to start a business or take other means so that he will no longer have...
‘The Great Awokening’: The threat of America’s new political religions
The decline of religion in America is real—that is, depending on how you define “religion.” Weekly church attendance is in decline, as is self-identification with a formal religion, denomination, or belief system. Meanwhile, the rise of the “nones” seems increasingly steady in speed, replacing religious-cultural standards and norms of old with a modern menu of “personal spiritualties” based on any number of humanistic priorities—from humanitarianism to political activism to self-helpism to the garden-variety exultations of hedonism, materialism, fortability. But not...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved