c. 2008 Religion News Service
Dobson, home schooling advocates decry Calif. court ruling
(RNS) Home schooling advocates, including Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, have decried a recent California court decision that declares most forms of home schooling illegal.
The Feb. 28 ruling by a California appeals court came in a juvenile court case involving a family that home schooled their children and had them tested occasionally at a Christian school.
“The fact remains that the children are taught at home by a non-credentialed person,” wrote Associate Justice H. Walter Croskey in an 18-page decision, in which two other justices concurred.
They ruled that public school enrollment is generally required unless a child is enrolled in a full-time private school or tutored by a credentialed person. A lower court did not order such schooling based on a belief that the parents had a constitutional right to home school, but Croskey wrote, “California courts have held that … parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children.”
Dobson, whose ministry is based in Colorado Springs, Colo., called the decision “an all-out assault on the family” and “an imperious assault on the rights of parents.”
“The ruling should have been confined to that one couple, not used to punish an entire class of people, the vast majority of them religious conservatives,” Dobson said Thursday (March 6).
The Home School Legal Defense Association has started a petition to “depublish” the appellate ruling, a move that would mean the case is not binding on any other family in the state.
“The ability to home-school freely in California should not depend upon one family in a closed-door proceeding,” the foundation said on its Web site. “All families should have the right to be heard since the rights of all are clearly at stake.”
The Pacific Justice Institute intends to appeal the case to the California Supreme Court on behalf of Sunland Christian School in Sylmar, Calif.
“If not reversed, the parents of more than 166,000 students currently receiving an education at home will be subject to criminal sanctions,” said Brad Dacus, president of the legal defense organization in Sacramento.
_ Adelle M. Banks
Critics of Oregon domestic partnership law appeal ruling
PORTLAND, Ore. (RNS) Opponents of domestic partnerships for gays and lesbians have appealed a February court ruling that allowed Oregon’s new law to go into effect.
The appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will not prevent same-sex couples from registering as domestic partners and obtaining some of the same rights as married couples.
Opponents of the Oregon law, which was passed by the 2007 Legislature, came up short of the signatures needed to put the issue before the voters. But in a lawsuit, several dozen people said elections officials violated their rights by failing to count their signatures.
A federal judge ruled that process for counting signatures was flawed, but adequate, and dismissed the suit.
Since then, opponents of domestic partnerships and a law banning discrimination against gays and lesbians have filed initiatives that would repeal them. Both are aimed for the November ballot.
_ Ashbel S. (Tony) Green
Sikh man loses case over motorcycle helmet
TORONTO (RNS) An Ontario judge has dismissed the case of a devout Sikh man who argued his religious rights were violated when he received a ticket for riding his motorcycle without a helmet.
In ordering Baljinder Badesha to pay a $110 fine, the court ruled that while the law does violate his constitutional right to religious freedoms, it is justifiable because helmets dramatically reduce public healthcare costs and save lives.
Badesha, a 39-year-old motorcycle enthusiast, had argued that Ontario’s mandatory helmet law violated his constitutional rights to practice his religion, which required him to wear a turban at all times while outside his home.
But the court ruled that safety trumps religious freedoms.
“Given the nature of Mr. Badesha’s beliefs, which foreclose him from wearing anything over his turban, and yet the unquestioned safety and related issues, this is one of those cases in which, unfortunately, no accommodation appears possible,” Judge James Blacklock wrote.
“There is a clear increase in the risk of devastating brain injury or death with the accompanying burdens on family members and the public in terms of medical needs.”
Badesha said the law was still “100 percent” discrimination. “We cannot put anything over the turban,” he said outside court. “It is against our religion.”
In his judgment, Blacklock said the fact that British Columbia and Manitoba have exemptions allowing devout Sikhs to ride without a helmet does not mean Ontario is compelled to follow suit.
He also cited several U.S. studies, including a Michigan study of hospitalized motorcyclists conducted over a four-year period, that showed that “helmet-less patients were found to cost an average of $6,000 per patient more than helmeted riders in hospital costs alone.”
_ Ron Csillag
Churches eager to build as New Orleans program stalls
NEW ORLEANS (RNS) Working between torrential rainstorms, more than a hundred volunteers _ from Massachusetts high school students to Amish and Mennonite couples from rural Indiana _ helped build seven new homes in Katrina-ravaged Central City, evidence that the city’s needs are still felt by workers from far away.
But there’s the prospect that willing hands might have to go idle.
The City Hall program that provided builders cheap vacant lots seized for back taxes has shut down, at least for a while, even as volunteers are plentiful, according to a major faith-based housing agency that uses the lots.
The shutdown is part of a larger plan to make an agency outside City Hall, the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, the single disburser of all land _ however acquired _ for redevelopment in post-Katrina New Orleans.
“We’re hungry for more property,” said Brad Powers of Jericho Road, a post-Katrina housing initiative launched by the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana. “But the whole process appears to have stalled out.”
After a long start-up process, Jericho Road and its partner, CrossRoads Missions, have built and sold seven new Central City houses for low-income families. They have four more headed to act of sale and 37 more buildable lots in their inventory, Powers said.
Powers said they expect soon to finish clearing the titles to another dozen or so lots, allowing them to build 50 new volunteer-built homes over the next year or so.
Most are on land that came virtually free from the city, which seized the lots for nonpayment of taxes.
Cheap land and volunteer labor means the new houses can be sold to low-income families for $115,000 to $124,000, far less than they would fetch otherwise, Powers said.
The partnership is simple: Jericho Road assembles the land; CrossRoads Missions, an evangelical building ministry in Kentucky, lines up the volunteer labor.
Two years ago City Hall announced it had awarded 22 developers like Jericho Road/CrossRoads about 2,000 so-called “adjudicated” properties seized for back taxes.
But hundreds of lots fell off the list when a surprising number of long-lost owners surfaced to reclaim them with payments of back taxes.
Because of the generally poor condition of City Hall records, many other lots turned out to be unsuitable for building.
Powers said the loss of cheap land from the tax delinquencies has left him dismayed. “I just wish progress didn’t have to stop,” he said. “I’m ready to continue building.”
_ Bruce Nolan
Quote of the Day: Joel Belz, founder of World magazine
(RNS) “What we evangelicals should have known before and have now demonstrated again in the current round … is that we aren’t quite as popular in the public square as we like to think. We may carry a pretty strong Word, but we also carry a fairly limp stick.”
_ World magazine founder Joel Belz, writing in a column in his magazine about the need to “end the illusion” about the political force of evangelicals.
KRE/CM END RNS
