Replies

Actually, a good case can be made that teachers can be required to make such a reference to parents as a matter of constitutional principle. In concept, that is where courts say the teaching of faith and morals resides, and there is a First Amendment right of intimate association that supposedly protects families and parental authority. These could be the basis for legislative measures and litigation to protect parental authority in matters of faith and morals.

In practice, Christian Right legislative proposals and litigation usually try to attack settled and offensive school practices and case law head on. That is good for stirring up congregations and contributions, but it often results in court defeats that further cement the power of the opposition.

The Christian Right ought to take a lesson from the Catholic Church in Poland under the communists. Marginalized and vastly diminished in the early postwar years, the Church avoided confrontations with the government that they could not win and adopted a long term strategy of undermining its moral authority. In Hungary, where the Church fought head on with great courage, they made martyrs, got most of its hierarchy and priests imprisoned, and the Church ruthlessly suppressed. In Poland, the Church compromised and avoided losing fights -- but they utterly ate away the foundations of communism and, in doing so, undid the regime and set in motion the end of communism in its original stronghold in Europe.

Of course, a large segment of the Christian Right still regards the Catholic Church with a combination of disdain and suspicion. In secular terms, the lesson is that when you are on the defensive strategically, one has to fight all the smarter. That means not just to find the resources to keep fighting, but to pick fights that can produce an accumulation of small victories to reverse a losing trend. Find and attack the enemy's weaknesses, not their strengths.