“The law is a ass—a idiot,” declared Mr. Bumble in Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist. Just how much of an ass is becoming daily apparent in this twisted society of the 21st century.

Recently, two contrasting judgments of the courts—one from the far left, the other from the far right—show just how much of an ass the judicial system has become within Western society. These dubious judgments also demonstrate just how much our children’s education is increasingly at the whim of the state rather than under the control of responsible parents, where it has traditionally belonged in a free and open society.

In an open attack on the basic constitutional rights of parents in the matter of the education of their children, a district judge dismissed a lawsuit from two Massachusetts couples who objected to classes where children are taught to accept traditionally anti-social, perverse relationships as normal. “The couples filed their suit in 2006 after Jacob Parker, then in kindergarten, brought home a book depicting different families, including a same-sex couple. Joey Wirthlin, then in first grade, was read a book featuring a prince who married another prince” (Boston Globe, February 23).

The increasingly asinine tendency of law practitioners was further underscored when a female “staff attorney for the aclu of Massachusetts, which filed a friend of the court briefing siding with the school district, praised Wolf’s ruling. ‘I think it’s a terrific opinion,’ she said. ‘A parent can’t control what’s taught in the public schools based on their own personal religious views. So it keeps public education alive, really’” (ibid.).

How times change. My children were educated in a state system. When I objected to my son being required to study and analyze a novel that contained instances of perverse practices, I was gladly given the opportunity for him to study an alternative novel offering a much more enriching experience. That was 25 years ago. Now, I’d be fighting in court for the same right, with the outcome heavily weighted against me, the child’s own parent!

The second case is perhaps the more worrying, certainly in its method of enforcement, even more so for the system that originally legislated the particular law at issue.

The Washington Times reports on a case in Bavaria, Germany, again involving the state contesting the parents’ rights to have a say in the education of the children to which they, not the state, gave birth. “Earlier this month, a German teenager was forcibly taken from her parents and imprisoned in a psychiatric ward. Her crime? She is being home-schooled” (February 28).

The Times further reported that a year ago “a judge in Hamburg sentenced a home-schooling father of six to a week in prison and a fine of $2,000. Last September, a Paderborn mother of 12 was locked up in jail for two weeks. The family belongs to a group of seven ethnic German families who immigrated to Paderborn from the former Soviet Union” (ibid.).

Out of a population of 80 million, barely 500 children are presently being home-schooled in Germany. The reason?

A law enacted by Hitler himself, in 1938, by which he mandated that all German children be educated by the state. In today’s “free and democratic” Germany, not only does that Hitlerian law still lie on the statute books in Germany, it is being rigidly enforced! One can only hope that the same perverse practices of Hitler’s social scientists aren’t being practiced today on that poor lass in Bavaria in an effort to brainwash her into toeing the party line!

What is of even greater concern is that this great Germanic idea of the European Union is now manifesting its true self through draconian laws that mitigate against the basic freedoms of its peoples. Last year, in a ruling that backed Hitler’s 1938 education bill, the Strasburg-based European Court of Human Rights ruled that a child’s right to education “by its very nature calls for regulation by the state.” Endorsing the ruling of the German courts, the European Court declared, “Schools represent society, and it is in the children’s interest to become part of that society. The parents’ right to educate does not go so far as to deprive their children of that experience.”

This current instance of, as the Times states, “upholding Nazi laws and sending dissidents, including children, to psychiatric wards,” is a pervasive sign that, though their continent has a long and tortuous history, Europeans themselves seem to have very short memories. It’s little more than 60 years ago that such tyranny was practiced within Nazidom in Western Europe—and far less since it was extant in the East under the Soviet Union.

One could be forgiven for considering that these latest court rulings give a hint that we already run the risk of those sad and bitter days returning.

And not just in Germany.

In America, certain liberal politicians and lawyers are claiming that United Nations conventions are “‘customary international law’ and should be considered part of American jurisprudence” (ibid.; emphasis mine). Article 29 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child declares that the state has an inherent right to direct the education of children.

The Times posed a question that should have every responsible parent deeply concerned, “[Y]oung Melissa Busekros’ ordeal is a German horror story. Could it soon be an American one?”