A German couple is seeking political asylum in the U.S., alleging they are being persecuted for their evangelical Christian beliefs which lead them to homeschool their children. According to this article, German state constitutions require children to attend schools. Parents who try to homeschool their children can be fined or imprisoned, and even have their children taken away by social services officials.
I find the rationale for this requirement quite puzzling. At least as explained by the German consul general for the Southeast U.S., as quoted in this article:
For reasons deeply rooted in history and our belief that only schools properly can ensure the desired level of excellent education, we . . . go a little bit beyond that path which other countries have chosen.
Another person interviewed in the article is Bernadette Meyler, Cornell Law School, who suggests
The idea is homeschooling might lead to the emergence of separate societies that would not share the same vision of the (German) state.
I would think that Germany's history would suggest that protection of individual conscience claims would be of utmost importance, even at the possible expense of some "excellence" in education, or a united vision of the State.
Can anyone shed some light on Germany's homeschooling policies, or the likelihood of success of this couple's U.S. asylum claim?
Tom Huddle wonders whether it's possible to base conscience laws on the centrality of a particular belief to the person invoking conscience:
Per your blog posts in the past few days, you suggest “centrality of the particular belief to the believer” as a possible criterion for deciding which claims of conscience might deserve more deference than others. Surely this is unacceptably subjective and unworkable. In medicine it might lead to, say, the Jehovah’s Witness physician or blood bank worker who might decide not to offer transfusions being treated with the same deference as the physician unwilling to perform an abortion.
Is it not the case that we must pay some attention to a) the space of a practice which is actually contested in a given societal context (so that in medicine, the 5 widely contested practices enumerated in the HHS conscience rule would be on a different footing than generally accepted medical practices such as blood transfusion) and b) the relationship of a contested practice to the broader practice of which it is a part—so that abortion, explicitly forbidden by codes of conduct in Western medicine for the past 2000 years and arguably contrary to central goals of medicine on anyone’s reading, deserves different treatment than practices that have no such overall problematic character in the practice’s larger context.
I think a privileging of intermediate institutions such as you suggest holds a lot of promise for defusing the all-or-none character of the current debate. But to the extent that institutions are to be asked to defer to individuals, criteria other than individual attachment to a conscience objection are surely necessary.
I think I agree with Tom, for the most part. I tend to be similarly skeptical of the practicality of line-drawing in the area of conscience protection that focuses on the centrality of the belief to the individual. What I am trying to get at is whether the law is able to distinguish between forcing a doctor to perform an abortion from forcing her to work on Sundays based, at least in part, at the level of dis-integration that the requirements would impose on the doctor. Also, my fear if we focus solely on the degree to which a practice is contested in society is that it leaves very little space for unpopular conscience claims.
Oklahoma City Archbishop Beltran and Tulsa Bishop Slattery have voiced their dissapointment at Notre Dame's decision to honor President Obama at graduation.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
They are connected, says Bishop Murphy. (Full interview here.)
". . . is to abolish the death penalty altogether." So says that right-wing, partisan, shallow, one-dimensional, in-the-pocket-of-the-GOP Archbishop Charles Chaput:
Capital punishment, euthanasia, abortion and war: All these issues raise profound questions for Catholics as we reflect on the sanctity of human life. But while they all touch on human dignity, they don’t all have the same moral content.
Euthanasia and abortion are always, intrinsically wrong because they always involve an intentional killing of innocent human life. War and capital punishment, in contrast, can sometimes be morally acceptable as an expression of society’s right to self-defense.
Both Scripture and a long tradition of Catholic thought support the legitimacy of the death penalty under certain limited circumstances. But as Pope John Paul II argued so eloquently, the conditions that require the death penalty for society’s self-defense and the discharge of justice in modern, developed nations almost never exist. As a result, the right road for a civilized society is to abolish the death penalty altogether.
Courtesy of the smart people at Sidley & Austin, here is a helpful update on a recent religious-institutions decision that might be of interest.
