I support Parents for Choice in Education. I support their cause because I support the idea that parents, not elitist government bureaucrats, know best how to educate children. The “anointed elite” believe that because of their highly educated status, they are among the very wise and therefore must be obeyed when it comes to social policy.
One example I want to share. This comes from a newsletter recently sent to me by PCE. It includes a portion of a letter by Denise Griffiths. She writes,
My daughter’s stress and anxiety left her hating school and suffering a down turn in her delicate health situation. We believed a change in schools and peers would help. A transfer should have been easy since our our school was overcrowded and the other school had room for almost 200 students.
We applied to transfer her by the deadline but were rejected. Our written appeal, with letters from two doctors, was also rejected. When I complained to the district I was told ‘It’s not about capacity, it’s about things you don’t understand.’
In desperation to help my daughter, we were compelled to turn over custody to grandparents. Unbelievably, a school administrator attended the custody hearing to inform the judge that we were just trying to get around district policy. I wish the district understood that it’s about the children and things that parents do understand.
The only thing the newsletter leaves out is the identity of this busybody school administrator who believes he or she has the right, even the duty, to interfere in the lives of other people. In my opinion, this administrator should be fired, their name well-publicized, and they should be made the target of public scorn, derision, and ridicule.
Sadly, this is not an isolated incident. Remember the Jensen family that ran afoul of the State when their son, Parker, was diagnosed with cancer? Rather than subject their son to the torture of chemotherapy, which would leave their son sterilized in addition to offering little chance of saving his life, they opted to get a second opinion. That’s when their doctor reported them to the Utah Dept. of Child and Family Services. The DCFS took the case to a judge who ordered that Parker be taken into state custody and that his parents be arrested for kidnapping (they were on vacation in Idaho when the judge made his ruling).
Well, the family was recently spotlighted on a local news broadcast. The state has since dropped it’s case against the family, but only after two years of pursuing them. The father lost his job, they lost their home, and they are basically having to start over. But what they did was nothing short of heroic. Their actions are of the same character as those of our founding fathers, standing up against government overreaching its Constitutionally-limited authority. Instead, there are still many people here in Utah and elsewhere who see the Jensen’s as abusive parents who need to be jailed.
What these obtuse individuals have failed to grasp is that the government has never legitimately been given power over families like that. It has taken that power unto itself, which means that it does not really have the authority at all. It may have the power, but it lacks the authority.
Do these folks realize that the DCFS can sieze a child from its parents without due process? All they need is someone to say the child is in imminent danger. And the courts have historically sided with DCFS on the issue, Constitutional prohibitions notwithstanding. The DCFS and the courts thus routinely violate the Supreme Law of the Land.
Fortunately, there still seems to be a majority of people who oppose this usurpation. It’s one of the things I am asking Jason Chaffetz to address when he gets to Congress–to enshrine in our Constitution and laws the unalienable rights of parents to direct the upbringing of their children, including the recognition that government does not have first right of refusal in providing for childrens’ needs.
Vote for Jason Chaffetz on June 24.
