The blog for MarriageDebate.com has a post today about an interesting - and a bit disturbing - ruling last week by a trial court in New Jersey.  The case involved a divorced couple with seven children, all of whom lived with the mother and had been homeschooled.  Apparently the father had originally consented to the homeschooling, but has since changed his mind.  The court eventually decided not to rule on the father's request; however, in the process, the court issued a very unusual ruling.

According to the MarriageDebate.com blog:

            The court first orders that the children be tested for the 
            grades they would be in if they were in public school 
            (this portion of the opinion is very confusing since it is 
            not separated from a discussion of an earlier case). 
            The court then opines at length about the perfidy of the 
            school district allowing the children to be home schooled 
            without state intervention. Noting that the school district 
            had not sent officials to the home to check on the children’s 
            progress, the judge said: “This is shocking to the court.” 
            The court characterized the children as being “left unsupervised” 
            solely because of the lack of state intervention. (I suspect 
            children who are at home with their mother would not describe 
            themselves as “unsupervised.”) The judge also found it shocking 
            that the state Department of Education allows parents to home 
            school without state intervention.

            The court expresses the opinion that home schooling is fine if 
            parents who home school are required to (1) register with the 
            school district, (2) file curriculum with the local district and be 
            involved in a “training seminar” (with strange specificity, the court 
            says “a four hour video would suffice”) and (3) have their children 
            tested annually.

Apparently this judge does not realize that he is not the one responsible for making law.  The laws of the state of New Jersey allow families maximum leeway when it comes to homeschooling.  The state Department of Education, as part of the executive branch, is only responsible for enforcing the laws passed by the legislature, based on their reading of those laws and previous court interpretations of the law.  The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) spells out New Jersey's laws:

            Home School Statute: None.

            Alternative Statute Allowing for Home Schools: N.J. 
                    Stat. Ann. § 18A:38-25.

            To home school, parents must meet the following requirements: 

            1. The child must attend a public school "or a day school in which there 
                        is given instruction equivalent to that provided in the public schools 
                        for children of similar grades … or receive equivalent instruction elsewhere 
                        than at school." Home schooling is generally allowed under the "elsewhere 
                        than at school" portion of the statute.

            2. Based on State v. Massa, 95 N.J. Super. 382, 231 A.2d 252 (Morris County 
                        Ct. Law Div. 1967):

                a. If legal action is initiated, parents must carry the burden of providing 
                            the local superintendent with evidence that the child is in fact receiving 
                            equivalent instruction. 

                     b. Then the burden shifts to the state to show that there is a lack of 
                            equivalency in the particular home school. The court in Massa 
                            stated that the state must prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that 
                            the parents failed to provide their child with equivalent education. 
                            231 A.2d at 257.

                c.  Note: The Massa case interpreted "equivalent" as requiring only a 
                            showing of academic equivalency, not equivalency of social develop-
                            ment derived from group education. Massa, 231 A.2d at 257.

                d. In Massa, the court held: "This court agrees with the above decisions 
                            that the number of students does not determine a school and further, 
                            that a certain number of students need not be present to attain an equi-
                            valent education." Massa at 256. The court reiterated Commonwealth v. 
                            Roberts, 34 NE 402 (1893) by emphasizing that the object of the statute 
                            is that "all children shall be educated, not that they shall be educated in a 
                            particular way." Id.

            3. It is clear from the New Jersey courts that "parents have a constitutional right 
                        to choose the type and character of education they feel is best suited for their 
                        children, be it secular or sectarian." West Morris Board of Education v. Sills, 
                        110 N.J. Super. 234, 265 A.2d 162 (N.J. Super. Ct. Ch. Div. 1970).


Based on the laws of New Jersey, the state Department of Education has formulated certain regulations.  But those regulations don't allow the Department of Education (or individual school districts) to simply ignore the way the laws are written.  Instead, the regulations provide an interpretation of the laws as they are written.  Homeschooling parents can't be required to register with the district, or to submit their curriculum, or to test their children (whether annually, bi-annually, or under any other terms) unless the law requires it.  The decision in Commonwealth v. Roberts, 34 NE 402 (1893) that the object of the statute is that "all children shall be educated, not that they shall be educated in a particular way" prevents exactly the type of micromanaging that this judge is advocating.

It is quite disturbing that the judge feels he somehow has the right to create his own law, in spite of the New Jersey legislature's wording of the law, the Department of Education's clearly stated regulations, and previous court rulings in support of those regulations.  The only explanation I can come up with is that, as far too many judges these days, this judge thinks his opinion supercedes the laws. 

Not only does this judge apparently believe he can re-write existing law, he makes it his business to tell the father how to make the mother's life even more miserable.

            Since it is not ruling on the father’s request, the court gives 
            him suggestions to accomplish his aim. First, the court says 
            he can take the children’s test scores to the local Board of 
            Education so they will sue the mother for the children’s 
            non-attendance. If this does not satisfy the father he can file 
            a complaint of “educational neglect” against his wife with the 
            state Division of Youth and Family Services.

First he requires the mother to have seven children tested, no small accomplishment in itself in terms of practicalities as well as expense.  Then he tells the father to file a complaint with DYFS, meaning she will be dealing for months with intrusive social workers who will automatically assume she is trying to harm her children.  And the odds are that once she provides evidence (even if it's pretty sketchy) that the children "are receiving equivalent instruction," the state will be unable to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that they aren't. 

It would seem that in spite of New Jersey's relatively low regulation of homeschoolers, this judge believes his opinion supercedes all written laws, Department of Education rules, and previous court opinions.  He is determined to re-write New Jersey's existing laws in order to increase regulation on homeschooling, apparently solely for the purpose of ensuring that homeschoolers provide the particular kind of education he thinks they should.  Hopefully HSLDA and other organizations that care about liberty will fight this ruling in order to discourage this kind of activist judging and to preserve the freedoms of homeschoolers everywhere.

Unfortunately for Al Gore - and in spite of his wins the other night at the Academy Awards - the truth is much less convenient (for him) than he'd like us to think.  Patrick J. Michaels, in his National Review column of Friday titled Inconvenient Truths, makes it clear that the science behind Gore's film is questionable at best, and maybe downright dishonest.

The film asserts that scientists believe global warming will cause most of the Greenland ice shelf to melt, raising sea levels by more than 20 feet.  However, research simply does not support that claim.  According to Michaels,

            Under the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 
            medium-range emission scenario for greenhouse gases, a rise 
            in sea level of between 8 and 17 inches is predicted by 2100. 
            Gore’s film exaggerates the rise by about 2,000 percent.

            Even 17 inches is likely to be high, because it assumes that the 
            concentration of methane, an important greenhouse gas, is 
            growing rapidly. Atmospheric methane concentration hasn’t 
            changed appreciably for seven years, and Nobel Laureate 
            Sherwood Rowland recently pronounced the IPCC’s methane 
            emissions scenarios as “quite unlikely.”

Not only does Gore exaggerate dramatically the rise in sea level, he also ignores the data about the melting of the Greenland ice shelf.  Michaels again:

            According to satellite data published in Science in November 
            2005, Greenland was losing about 25 cubic miles of ice per 
            year. Dividing that by 630,000 yields the annual percentage 
            of ice loss, which, when multiplied by 100, shows that Green-
            land was shedding ice at 0.4 percent per century.

            “Was” is the operative word. In early February, Science 
            published another paper showing that the recent acceleration 
            of Greenland’s ice loss from its huge glaciers has suddenly 
            reversed.

Obviously we can't hold Gore responsible for not knowing about research that was only released in early February.  But he ought to be aware of information released in November 2005 in a magazine as easily available as Science.  And .4 percent per century is not going to increase our sea levels by anywhere near 20 feet!

Michaels goes on to show the shoddy research that went into the drastic claims Gore apparently believes.

            Nowhere in the traditionally refereed scientific literature do 
            we find any support for Gore’s hypothesis. Instead, there’s 
            an unrefereed editorial by NASA climate firebrand James E. 
            Hansen, in the journal Climate Change — edited by Steven 
            Schneider, of Stanford University, who said in 1989 that 
            scientists had to choose “the right balance between being 
            effective and honest” about global warming — and a paper in 
            the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that was 
            only reviewed by one person, chosen by the author, again Dr. 
            Hansen.

In the end, Michaels make this statement:

            It would be nice if my colleagues would actually level with 
            politicians about various “solutions” for climate change. The 
            Kyoto Protocol, if fulfilled by every signatory, would reduce global 
            warming by 0.07 degrees Celsius per half-century. That’s too 
            small to measure, because the earth’s temperature varies by 
            more than that from year to year.

So in spite of the honors Al Gore captured from his colleagues in filmmaking, the facts remain.  The research simply does not support anything similar to his claims.  In fact, in creating his documentary, it would seem Mr. Gore deliberately chose the most dramatic statistics possible in order to scare the largest number of people.  Unfortunately for him, that choice has made his film seem like science fiction rather than real science.

There's good news this week in the area of religious freedom.  According to this Forbes article, the Attorney General announced yesterday that the Justice Department is beginning a program to protect people against religious discrimination.

            The First Freedom Project would increase education about 
            religious discrimination by holding a series of training seminars 
            throughout the country over coming months, Gonzales told 
            leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention.

            Gonzales said he also plans to create a Religious Freedom 
            Task Force, which will review policies and religious discrimination 
            cases. He said he doesn't know how much the program will cost.

Religious freedom in America has long been under attack, especially in business and educational organizations.  Teachers and students are often silenced by their school administrations, and those who refuse to comply may be suspended or fired.  Under the Bush Administration, the Justice Department has been actively involved in looking into religious discrimination cases, but more continues to be needed.

            Gonzales said a new report shows that the Justice 
            Department has looked into more religious discrimination 
            cases under the Bush administration. For example, he 
            said cases of religious discrimination in education increased 
            from one case reviewed and no investigations to 82 cases 
            reviewed and 40 investigations.

            The report on Enforcement of Laws Protecting Religious 
            Freedom highlights the number of religious discrimination 
            cases reviewed or investigated by the Justice Department for 
            fiscal years 2001-06 compared to 1995-2000. It details 
            religious discrimination cases involving employment, housing, 
            credit, public accommodations, public facilities and other areas.

            In the period studied, housing- and credit-related cases grew 
            from four investigations and one lawsuit to 18 investigations 
            and six lawsuits while religion-related appellate friend-of-the-court 
            briefs rose from one to 16.

            The Justice Department also reviewed 118 cases and 26 
            investigations related to land use issues since the enactment in 
            2000 of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, 
            which aimed to protect property rights of religious institutions.

The article does not clarify - and perhaps the AG also did not make clear - whether there was actually an increase in the number of cases of religious discrimination filed, or only in the number investigated by the Justice Department.  Still, the fact that the Justice Department has significantly increased the number of cases they look into is an encouraging sign.  The message should be sent clearly that religious discrimination will not be tolerated, and that our First Amendment right to freedom of religion will be strongly defended by the federal government.  Kudos to AG Gonzalez for making a very significant first step in that direction.

In this morning's Opinion Journal, Pete duPont, former governor of Delaware, has an excellent article about the new United Nations' report on global warming.  It's not a long article, and it's well worth the read.  Apparently the summary of the report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which the American media trumpeted as "proving" that humans were causing that change, in fact came to some very interesting conclusions that (surprise, surprise) the same media did NOT tell us about. 

            While global warming alarmism has become a daily American 
            press feature, the IPCC, in its new report, is backtracking on its 
            warming predictions. While Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" warns 
            of up to 20 feet of sea-level increase, the IPCC has halved its estimate 
            of the rise in sea level by the end of this century, to 17 inches from 36. 
            It has reduced its estimate of the impact of global greenhouse-gas 
            emissions on global climate by more than one-third, because, it says, 
            pollutant particles reflect sunlight back into space and this has a cooling 
            effect.

            The IPCC confirms its 2001 conclusion that global warming will have 
            little effect on the number of typhoons or hurricanes the world will experience, 
            but it does not note that there has been a steady decrease in the number 
            of global hurricane days since 1970--from 600 to 400 days, according to 
            Georgia Tech atmospheric scientist Peter Webster.

One thing Mr. duPont points out is that the IPCC report does not explain is the "global cooling" effect that had everyone so worried back in the 1970's.  

            The IPCC does not explain why from 1940 to 1975, while carbon 
            dioxide emissions were rising, global temperatures were falling, 
            nor does it admit that its 2001 "hockey stick" graph showing a 
            dramatic temperature increase beginning in 1970s had omitted 
            the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warming temperature changes, 
            apparently in order to make the new global warming increases 
            appear more dramatic.

That does make IPCC self-reporting somewhat suspicious, to my way of thinking.  If they are deliberately omitting relevant data in order to increase the "scare value" of their reporting, that would seem to call into question the reliability of anything they publish.

Finally, Mr. duPont makes the very significant point that sometimes decisions made based on these environmental scare tactics can have critically important results.  He discusses the global ban on DDT, and the effect it had on malaria cases in Sri Lanka.

         Sometimes the consequences of bad science can be 
         serious. In a 2000 issue of Nature Medicine magazine, 
         four international scientists observed that "in less than 
         two decades, spraying of houses with DDT reduced Sri 
         Lanka's malaria burden from 2.8 million cases and 7,000 
         deaths [in 1948] to 17 cases and no deaths" in 1963. 
         Then came Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring," invigorating 
         environmentalism and leading to outright bans of DDT in 
         some countries. When Sri Lanka ended the use of DDT in 
         1968, instead of 17 malaria cases it had 480,000.

            Yet the Sierra Club in 1971 demanded "a ban, not just a curb," 
            on the use of DDT "even in the tropical countries where DDT 
            has kept malaria under control." International environmental 
            controls were more important than the lives of human beings. 
            For more than three decades this view prevailed, until the 
            restrictions were finally lifted last September.

When environmentalist demands affect not only national economies, but human lives, people ought to draw the line.  It is amazing that a jump in malaria cases in Sri Lanka from 17 to 480,000 goes unreported, while the deaths of predators due to DDT is such a big deal that it is still regularly taught to all our kids in school.  If the jump in malaria cases (and obviously deaths as a result) was that significant in a small nation like Sri Lanka, one wonders what the worldwide increase was.

Mr. du Pont's conclusion is also worth noting:

            America needs to understand clearly what is happening and 
            why before we sign onto U.N. environmental agreements, shut 
            down our industries and power plants, and limit our economic 
            growth.

On the new blog over at The Victory Caucus, Jed Babbin had a great introductory post yesterday entitled, What Is Victory?  In it, he raises the question of exactly how we define "victory" in the war on terror, and he takes issue with President Bush's definition that "victory is achieved when there is a stable Iraq, capable of defending, governing and sustaining itself, and (that) will be our ally in the larger war."  Instead, Jed believes that victory in this war on terror will be achieved when we have ended state sponsorship of terrorism.

When I was a teenager, both my parents taught college-level students to teach.  I learned from them that a good goal must be specific, measurable, and achievable.  Unfortunately, the President's goal is none of those.  After all, how does one define "stable"?  It's no wonder Americans are frustrated, and no wonder the President's political enemies are taking advantage and demanding retreat, and even his political allies are talking about "benchmarks" - everyone understands that there is no way to determine whether or not his goal has been accomplished.

In Jed's definition, though, we find all three elements of a good goal.  It is specific:   we must end state sponsorship of terrorism.  It is measurable:  we will know we have accomplished it when there are no more states anywhere in the world that sponsor terrorism.  And it is achievable:  with time and perseverance, America and her allies have the ability to accomplish it.  It is certainly more difficult than simply creating a "stable" Iraq - but it is also far more relevant to our national security than that goal.

So how do we accomplish that goal?  Jed's post poses the only possible way:

            We mean to win this war by ending state sponsorship of terrorism 
            by whatever combination of means – military, economic, diplomatic, 
            covert – that may be necessary.  We mean to defeat the radical Islamist 
            ideology (for that is what it is, not a religion) as we defeated the Soviet 
            communist ideology.  The ideological war is one we aren’t even fighting.  
            We fought communism – in part – by arguing relentlessly that American 
            freedoms were objectively superior to Soviet enslavement.  We can 
            defeat the Islamofascist ideology by using these same tools. American 
            exceptionalism is a fact we should stop apologizing for.

And later,

            First, it is a war against nations that has to be fought on the kinetic 
            battlefield with bullets and bombs. Second, it is an ideological war 
            that can’t be won with soft words and euphemisms.  And third - in Iraq, 
            the Philippines, and much of the horn of Africa - it is a war against the 
            ascendancy of tribes and cultures that are hostile to freedom.

Jed is right - we must win this war for the sake of America's future - for our children and grandchildren, and we must do it by whatever means is necessary.  We must also understand the critical importance of the war of words and ideologies.  And we must define victory in the war on terror as it must be defined:  ending state sponsorship of terrorism, wherever it takes place.  Ideally, the Islamic people as a group will join us in making it clear the terrorism is not acceptable; but whether they do or do not, no national government in the world can be allowed to continue to fund and encourage terrorism. 

 This afternoon Hugh Hewitt has a review of a new movie just out called The Last Sin Eater.  I had not heard that they were making this excellent Francine Rivers novel into a movie, and after reading Hugh's review, I can't wait to see it.  Here's what Hugh had to say:


        The New York Times' review begins:

                Handsomely produced, earnestly performed and 100 percent irony-free,
                 "The Last Sin Eater" is religious art for mainstream consumption.

        The American Spectator adds:

    The Last Sin Eater is engaging, uplifting entertainment. Director Michael 
    Landon Jr. is every bit the storyteller that his father was. And each 
    acting performance is inspired, especially that of lead actress Liana Liberato, 
    who plays 10-year-old Cadi Forbes. She is in nearly every scene and is 
    perfect in the role.

        Of course the film has its critics like every major release, but put me down in the 
        same camp with the Times and TAS.
 
        More important, the 15/16 year old next to me was crying at the end, as was her mom.  
        The 1:10 PM Sunday showing had a good sized crowd, and the film moves briskly 
        along powered by a beautiful score and the remote mountain scenery vital to the 
        tale's telling.  I hadn't read the novel from which the book sprang and so the story's 
        second theme was both a surprise and a powerful booster to the film's message 
        of redemption.  The Times' loved the "sumptuous scenery, graceful crane shots 
        and Rembrandt lighting," but found the Christianity less compelling.  I suspect most 
        viewers will find the latter more memorable because it is so rare that Christian 
        theology is presented without the compromises intended to "broaden the 
        audience," but certainly the beauty is there to enjoy as well (as is a wonderful 
        score by Mark McKenzie, which I hope will be on CD shortly.)

        I hope the theaters expand the number of screens for next week so that the 
        movie's excellent word of mouth has a chance to bring the audience it deserves.
        The movie's website has a theater-finder to get you to the screen nearest you.


Unlike Hugh, I have read the novel, and it is a powerful message of redemption and hope.  Francine Rivers is a well-known Christian author, perhaps one of the best of the late twentieth century.  If the movie is at all true to the original story - and it sounds like it is - this is a movie not to be missed.  (One caution:  I believe parents will want to watch this story themselves before allowing their children to see it.  The images in the novel, at least, are quite vivid and powerful, and might be overwhelming to little ones.)