Overturning Yoder would make it harder for religious parents to control what ideas schools teach their children, as the explicit right to free exercise of religion becomes subordinate to a nebulous right to an “adequate education,” as defined by the government under activist influence.
The implications of imposing mainstream education requirements on the Amish would be profound. In most states, teachers are required to hold at least a bachelor’s degree, so the Amish would not be able to recruit teachers from their own ranks. They would have to rely on the local public schools or other denominations’ private schools.
Nor is civics the only aspect of secular education the Amish Heritage Foundation thinks Amish schoolchildren should be exposed to. One of the speakers at Columbia detailed horrific cases of sexual abuse within the Amish community, which the foundation linked to its cause, claiming secular sex education could prevent such abuse.
The Amish Heritage Foundation has some legitimate concerns, such as education conducted in languages (such as Yiddish or Pennsylvania German) that leaves students unprepared to deal with the English-speaking world, and a lack of instruction in subjects such as math or geography that no religion would find objectionable. The moral case for holding sexual abusers accountable should be obvious, especially to religious leaders, and by now, it should be obvious that trying to cover up such abuse, or attempting to deal with it internally, doesn’t work in the long run. The movement to overturn Wisconsin v. Yoder should remind leaders in religious education that if they don’t reform themselves, others will be only too happy to impose reforms on them.
Far from being an imposition of a right-wing, traditionalist court, Wisconsin v. Yoder came near the high tide of Supreme Court liberalism. Yoder was decided in May 1972. The court imposed a national moratorium on the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia the next month and handed down the Roe v. Wade decision less than a year later. The court may have seen itself as sticking up for minority rights against overweening local government then, but a more aggressively individualistic and secular left, concerned with rooting out religion, especially Christianity, might be more open to overturning it.
