Ethnic Cleansing in California: Homeschooler Edition

This case became public late last week; I only heard about it this morning. The upshot is that a California Appeals Court has ruled that homeschooling is illegal in California unless the parents have degrees in education.

How do we drive the hated Christian conservatives -- with their tiresome resistance to the totalist state and their aggravating habit of voting Republican -- from our jurisdiction? Easy: by identifying that which is unique to their way of life and using the law to attack it. They will then flee or perish. Gun control was Stage 1. Now for Stage 2.

As I read the press coverage (helpfully compiled by the HSLDA), I rested easy at first. Looking at the narrow family-law circumstances of the case, I thought, surely a decision as incandescently awful as this one would be quickly overturned, probably by the courts and certainly by the legislature. But then, in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Two members of the state Senate Education Committee, Sen. Jack Scott, D-Altadena (Los Angeles County), the panel's chairman, and Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, declined to comment Friday on the issue or the court ruling.

So . . . the two (Democrat) politicians with the most legislative power over education can't summon a single word in the defense of parents seeking to educate their children at home? Perhaps they were too busy pouring the cool-aid.

From the Time article I read perhaps the most novel understanding of privacy in existance:

The [Department of Children and Family Services] then turned to the courts to mandate that the children attend public school so that teachers might spot evidence of abuse (a charge the parents deny).

Chew that over for just a second. According to the Fourth Amendment, if the police wish to violate your privacy in order to gather evidence against you, they are required to appear before a judge and show probable cause to believe that you are, in fact, guilty of a crime. But in California, if the state fails to show probable cause, they can require you to bring your private affairs to them to look over . . . for seven hours per day, five days per week.

For those of you to whom this sounds reasonable, imagine for a moment that abortion was illegal (as I believe it should be). Now imagine a Department of Children and Family Services requirement that all women submit to a government supervised pregnancy test every day so that it can keep track of pregnancies, the better able to root out illegal abortions. That is exactly what's in play here.