Obamacare & Home Educators
Our homeschool rally day March 23 coincided with a hastily planned public protest in Nashville of Tennesseans upset at the passage of Obamacare in the House of Representatives two days before. (See a report of the rally on Page 15 of the Esprit Newsletter.)
There was much mingling of the two groups — one set endorsing fee market education and homeschooling and seeking goodwill among state elected officials, the other opposing another federal imposition on a huge sector of the American economy. With little doubt homeschoolers feel as offended by a further takeover of U.S. health care as the Tea Party activists and others who organized the protest.
Our objections to Obamacare start with our convictions about God and the ideas of sphere sovereignty and limited duty that He assigns the civil magistrate. Our disdain flows onward into the economic and the political. The touchstones of our ideas are the benefits of limited government, the right to contract, constitutional restraint of power and the liberty that surges whenever bureaucracy is cut or eliminated and law constrained in its scope.
Homeschoolers are largely motivated by a love for God and a desire to obey His commandments in the upbringing of their children. Their premise of obedience to God puts children in the loving care of parents and family and leaves little room for the factory school run by the state. By nature homeschoolers love their independence from state “oversight,” even if it keeps them from accepting the state tuition freebie (plus bus service). By God’s grace, homeschoolers view the administration of coercion, taxation, surveillance, systematization and standardization in the educational realm as a judgment, a curse the effects of which are to be avoided as God in His providence allows. They have asserted their rights in court and in general assemblies, and in the U.S. have won an important measure of liberty. But we must recognize the strong hand of judgment against a people who hear Jesus say, “If you love me, keep My commandments,” but who breezily believe these commandments impose no personal nor public particulars.
A whole matrix of U.S. programs exist to sap our love for God and to tempt us to yield to the commands and supply of men. Social Security tempts the Christian to rely on the state for the care of elderly parents. Public schools tempt the Christian to rely on the state for the training in obedience and righteousness of the young. FDIC tempts the Christian to rely on Uncle for the safe keeping of assets at bank companies that are definitionally and perpetually insolvent. Safety bureaucracies and insurance tempt the Christian to rely on the payments of third parties to cover costs associated with accident or illness. Public health bureaucracies tempt the Christian to distrust his neighborly farmer and believe that supplements and medicines are safe only if approved in advance by big industry-captive regulators. Obamacare, like unto these, tempts us to jettison health care and the payment of it onto an anarchy of civil authority and corporations. It tempts us to care not as we ought, but unto an alien providence. Its 150 agencies will pull us away from personal relationships (as with God) and direct us into impersonal relationships where covetousness and self-seeking are encouraged and every dealing becomes a conflict with other noisy claimants (as in hell). The Bible envisions a decentralized society, Obama a centralized one. —DJT