NOW I GET IT
The Christian Science Monitor has the first MSM piece I’ve seen on the German homeschoolers. A couple of key quotes:
Why are American groups going to such lengths to shape the laws in other countries?
“We realized that if we didn’t try to mold precedents abroad, they could come back to hurt us, and that the American legal system as we know might change,” says Benjamin Bull, chief counsel for the ADF.
He notes that, for example, US judges have drawn on foreign precedents and international standards in several key cases, such as the Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, which legalized sodomy in the Lone Star State.
I should have picked up on this before. Farris routinely rails about “activist judges” using foreign courts’ reasoning for precedents. So the German homeschoolers are just pawns in the dominionists’ game.
Mr. Thornton, IHRG’s president, has been meeting regularly with Melissa’s parents and other German home-schooling families since the organization was founded in 2004. Often, he says, he encourages them to invite confrontation so that he can draw media attention to their cases.
“I try to teach them the American attitude and understanding that this is a fight you can fight – that standing up for their beliefs in the court system is a God-given right,” he explains.
And if they lose they can go to jail, face serious fines, and lose custody of their kids.
Perhaps all these dominionists need to re-read this bit of Ecclesiastes:
To everything there is a season,
a time for every purpose under the sun.
A time to be born and a time to die;
a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
a time to kill and a time to heal …
a time to weep and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn and a time to dance …
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to lose and a time to seek;
a time to rend and a time to sew;
a time to keep silent and a time to speak;
a time to love and a time to hate;
a time for war and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
I think it may be time for all the American groups to keep silent.
5 Responses to “NOW I GET IT”
 Comment by Valerie April 17th, 2007 at 9:49 am |
Uh, yeah.
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 Comment by Tim Haas April 17th, 2007 at 11:05 am |
Not agreeing with HSLDA tactics at all, of course, but one thing I will say: I believe we are moving (or are being forced) closer to a European understanding of the citizen’s relationship to the state than they are to us, and that concerns me. |
 Comment by Helen April 17th, 2007 at 2:25 pm |
Daryl, dear, it concerns me that you didn’t “get it” before now… |
 Comment by Daryl Cobranchi April 17th, 2007 at 2:33 pm |
It’s just such a two-cushion bank shot that it’s hard to believe that anyone would spend his precious time working this angle. |
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Comment by Valerie April 17th, 2007 at 3:07 pm |
RE: Tim’s concern, I can see some of that. To me, it isn’t so much that a pure Euro-think will take over in the U.S., but that a fundamentally Christian-hued application of Euro-think could develop. The idea of a fundamentalistic version of Christian socialism gives me the willies. Given the currents in both directions, could a Christian socialism be the ‘orange’ that develops overall from the ‘red/yellow’ flows across the Atlantic? And how much of the ‘blue’ from elsewhere am I not seeing — not to mention the blacks, whites and grays? As for the bank shot, Daryl, persistence is probably the name of that game. “Slow and steady wins the race” |