By Vatican standards, there are human-rights violations in American schools

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Apr 20, 2016

Reading the address by a Vatican envoy to an OSCE meeting on religious minorities, your first inclination is probably to think that Msgr. Janusz Urbanczyk is speaking primarily about Christians in Islamic countries. No doubt he is. Still, as I read his defense of the rights of parents in the education of their children, I couldn’t help noticing that his argument applies to the situation right here in the US. Msgr. Urbanczyk said that the parental prerogative:

… requires states to ensure that instruction in public schools does not pursue an aim of indoctrination and to ensure that children are not forced to attend lessons that are inconsistent with the convictions of their parents.

So if state schools require students to read the Qu’ran and renounce all other faiths, that is an offense against fundamental rights. But if the schools require students to attend classes on gender theory and condom use, that’s an offense as well. We Americans tend to think about human-rights violations—particularly violations of religious freedom—as problems that arise only in other countries. That was true in the past. No longer.