Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
Is this for real?? I cannot possibly see how this could be happening.
I haven’t benn ablr to find it, but there is a song lyric - the refrain of the song is “Life’s like like that sometimes” It goes like this:
So there I was looking back at him,
And I said, “Just who do you think you are
to judge me like that?”
He looked back at me and said,
“Well, I’m Judge Smith
of the Superior Court.”
Life’s like that sometimes.
This is an interesting case that pits state power against substantive due process, which in my opinion is a constitutional abomination. Each State has broad police powers, including the power here to deprive liberty to achieve some legitimate state interest - I haven’t looked into the statutory authority for what the Judge did, but I am assuming he acted pursuant to a statute. The only check on such police power is the State constitution first, then the federal constitution.
Following Dredd Scott, where the Court vitiated the Missouri Compromize, the Supreme Court slowly began to protect individual rights not specifically ennumerated in our Constitution. The evil spawn of substantive due process has been privacy rights, which has federally protected the murder of tens of millions of the unborn. But I digress...
With respect to education, the Supreme Court to recognized a substantive due process right “to control the education of one’s children” and void state laws mandating that all students attend public school in Pierce v. Society of Sisters. So the Court made it safe for religious education, and bought itself some goodwill with the religious public, when it said:
We think it entirely plain that the Act of 1922 unreasonably interferes with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control. As often heretofore pointed out, rights guaranteed by the Constitution may not be abridged by legislation which has no reasonable relation to some purpose within the competency of the state. The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.
There is more than enough to have decided this case based upon the free exercise of religion rather than substantive due process, but that is adiscussion for another day.
Without spending too much time with research, it seems to me that the issue in this case is, given that you have a liberty interest in choosing how to educate, e.g. Pierce v. Society of Sisters, do you have a liberty interest in choosing not to educate? It sure would seem to follow, IMHO. Which illustrates the danger an ill logic of federal substantive due process rights in a federal system. Police power justs drains slowly to the King - oops, I mean Washington, not the King...
If Ohio wants to legislate a fiduciary society by jailing parents of students who fail, that is their right, as I see it. However, as it stands now, the people of Ohio just expect to be saved from their legislator’s stupidity by a federal judge. So why bother picking up your pitch fork and run to the satehouse? Absent changing the law, your other option is to move to another state, whose social experimentation regime is more friendly.
So substantive due process protects the incumbency of idiot legislators, while at the same time homoginizing our country at the expense of the general liberty of the States and their citizens. It may also protect this poor fellow. Whoppie for the feds!
</rant>