I agree with Jody’s comments on the California homeschooling decision, especially about the plaintiffs perhaps not being the ideal plaintiffs for a test case. Now that the case is on the books, however, it would seem to me that any homeschooling parent in California could sue the state in federal district court, seeking a declaratory judgment that the California statute at issue, as interpreted by the California court, violates the federal Constitution. This would have two advantages: For one, the homeschoolers could choose a more sympathetic lead-plaintiff, and, for another, the action would proceed in the federal courts rather than the California state courts.

Oddly enough for us conservatives, however, since the federal Constitution is entirely silent on the matter of homeschooling, if you argue that there is a constitutional right to homeschool your children, you’re in fact arguing for a substantive due-process right. It’s substantive due process that gave us the right to abortion in Roe and the right to homosexual conduct in Lawrence, and it’s the Court’s substantive due-process jurisprudence that has occasioned the (in my view, fully justified) charge that the Court has sometimes judicially usurped politics.

To be clear, I think there is moral and natural right to homeschool one’s children, but there is no question that arguing that there is constitutional right to do so puts people who are otherwise judicial conservatives in a somewhat awkward position.

Out of California comes a court decision that denies any constitutional right to homeschool. The initial news reports made it sound bad, and the decision itself seems to go far beyond where it needed to.

But Joseph Knippenberg, Richard Garnett, and even the libertarian legal bloggers at the Volokh Conspiracy have also noticed that the facts in this particular case are weak. It’s an awkward ruling, for the defendants appear hardly the people one wants as models for asserting that parents should be able to homeschool, but, instead of deciding the case on those grounds, the court in its decision pushed on to a strong declaration against any right of parents.

ADD: Gabriel Malo makes an interesting case that the initial news report in the Los Angeles Times got the story wrong. He may well be right, but the the decision still does conclude with a denial of a parental right—which is bad news for homeschoolers, as it settles what had been an open question in a negative direction. The question to which Malo rightly points is the role of the “credentialed tutor” the state requires. Who gives the credentials? ANd what rules on the education—sex, religion, philosophy—is the credentialing power strong enough to impose?

It seems that Geert Wilders’ fifteen-minute film on the Qur’an, called Fitna, has a few nasty things to say about the Islamic text as well as some of the atavistic ideas imported into his country. So much so that it has caused the Netherlanderisherite government (I can never remember the correct adjective) to raise the terrorist threat level to “substantial.”

There hasn’t been this kind of scare over a movie since Lindsay Lohan made I Know Who Killed Me.

Seriously, though, given what happened to director Theo Van Gogh, there is probably good reason for concern.

On Tuesday, March 11, at 7:30 p.m., Father Neuhaus will be speaking at the Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi in Metuchen, New Jersey, on “The Catholic as Citizen.”

On Saturday, March 15, beginning at 10:30 a.m., he will be giving two Lenten recollections at the Philippine Pastoral Center of San Lorenzo Ruiz at 378 Broome Street, Little Italy, in Manhattan. All are welcome.

An article in the Foreign Affairs by the former chief economist of the Venezualan National Assembly shows how the populist socialism of Hugo Chávez has hurt the very poor it was intended to help. A sample:

Although opinions differ on whether Chávez’s rule should be characterized as authoritarian or democratic, just about everyone appears to agree that, in contrast to his predecessors, Chávez has made the welfare of the Venezuelan poor his top priority. His government, the thinking goes, has provided subsidized food to low-income families, redistributed land and wealth, and poured money from Venezuela’s booming oil industry into health and education programs. It should not be surprising, then, that in a country where politics was long dominated by rich elites, he has earned the lasting support of the Venezuelan poor.

That story line may be compelling to many who are rightly outraged by Latin America’s deep social and economic inequalities. Unfortunately, it is wrong. Neither official statistics nor independent estimates show any evidence that Chávez has reoriented state priorities to benefit the poor. Most health and human development indicators have shown no significant improvement beyond that which is normal in the midst of an oil boom. Indeed, some have deteriorated worryingly, and official estimates indicate that income inequality has increased. The “Chávez is good for the poor” hypothesis is inconsistent with the facts.

Chávez’s political success does not stem from the achievements of his social programs or from his effectiveness at redistributing wealth. Rather, through a combination of luck and manipulation of the political system, Chávez has faced elections at times of strong economic growth, currently driven by an oil boom bigger than any since the 1970s. Like voters everywhere, Venezuelans tend to vote their pocketbooks, and until recently, this has meant voting for Chávez. But now, his mismanagement of the economy and failure to live up to his pro-poor rhetoric have finally started to catch up with him. With inflation accelerating, basic foodstuffs increasingly scarce, and pervasive chronic failures in the provision of basic public services, Venezuelans are starting to glimpse the consequences of Chávez’s economic policies — and they do not like what they see.

Via Arts & Letters Daily