Kids don’t belong to state
By John Long
A study from the Child Advocacy Center, a branch of the Law School at the University of Virginia, hit the papers this month. It questioned Virginia’s unique law that allows a religious exemption to the state’s compulsory school attendance requirements. Some 7,000 Virginia students are covered by the exemption, the study noted. It reached a seemingly frightening conclusion: At least some of these may be receiving no education at all! (Cue dramatic organ riff.)
Long is director of the Salem Museum and a Roanoke Times columnist.
September 27, 2012 - 12:11 AM
When we read about a child named Adolf Hitler, see two adorable looking girls singing white supremacy songs, happen upon a Phelps Klan protest, hear right wing dogma or ‘sex,drugs and rock-n-roll’ coming from a child’s lips or meet a teen who does not understand reproductive events, it is hard to buy that society and the great Satan “the state” have no stake in that child who will eventually grow up.
If you are ignorant or naive enough to not know that there are ignorant, bigoted, abusive and religious zealot parents that should not be the single “mold” for a young mind, or that society as a whole has no stake in being certain what these children are being “taught”, I cannot imagine what kind of world you think that would end up with.
Just like pedophiles find a way to work with children and isolate their victims, so do abusive parents and in case this too is a news flash, there are many, many abusive unfit parents. It may indeed seem more “fantastical than the boogieman“, but reality is like that sometimes.
We, “the state” have every right to be concerned about children deliberately pulled from the mainstream American experience that Thomas Jefferson held so dear. Whether the hate the government and those damnable liberals crowd like it or not.
#1 I’d say that just about says it all. Thanks.