Liberals Stole My Children!

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You know, or not.

Hat tip to The Panda's Thumb for finding the actual Court documents relating to this case. (If you haven't checked out The Panda's Thumb, you should. I only understand about one in three words of some of their posts, but it's still really interesting. And if you only read about what you already know, how would you learn anything new?)

The christosphere has been abuzz with stories of a woman who is losing custody of her children because she dared to homeschool them and raise them as good christians. In fact, check out this email from the Christian Anti Defamation League:

Dear Personal*,

A North Carolina Judge, Ned Magnum, has a issued an order that three homeschool children be returned to public school next year as part of a pending divorce settlement. This ruling is against the wishes of a Christian homeschooling mother Venessa Mills. Venessa has been homeschooling her children, ages 10, 11, and 12,for the past four years, taking them out of public schools in 2005. The father, Thomas Mills, who is an admitted adulterer, wants the children to go to public school. He is opposed to the children being exposed to "religious-based science curriculum."Judge Magnum must now decide between two competing sets of parental wishes. The way this is settled will set a very important legal precedence. The judge must decide what is in the best interest of the children. But under this very vague standard much havoc can be wrecked. Parental rights of homeschooling parents can be undermined as well as unintended harm done to the children.

Read more about the Judge's critic of homeschooling and why this is a threat to its future.

Sincerely,

Dr. Gary L. Cass

P.S. Many Christian families choose to homeschool their children instead of placing them in private or public schools. Yet, as seen in the case of Venessa Mills, this right might be taken away soon. Click here to read more about this case and why it is so important.

Wow! That sounds really dire, doesn't it? Interfering with peoples' religion and how they raise their children- hardly sounds American at all, does it?

Because that's not what happened.

As the Mills v. Mills Temporary Custody Order shows, the issue wasn't homeschooling at all.

Mrs. Mills joined a cult (don't get me started on the difference between religions and cults. We will be using the accepted definition of cult for the purposes of this post.) and went from what everyone, including her exhusband, described as a "loving mother" to an abusive control freak.

According to a member of the cult that has since left, the leader of the cult "directed me to develop a 'boot camp style' program to instill better manners in my children. The point of this program . . . should be to 'break' the children and to establish my authority as a parent, so that the children would obey me right away. The program that I ultimately devised, and that [the cult leader] approved, involved waking the children up in the middle of the night to do push-ups and physical exercises, and screaming at them 'boot camp style.' This program lasted approximately one month. My children were ages 11, 7 and 4 at this time. During this month of 'training', my middle child became stressed out to the point of throwing up. When I informed [the cult leader] that she was stressed out and need to lie down and rest, he told me that she did not need rest, but she needed to work and that I needed to 'break her.'"

As an example of what Mrs. Mills was doing to her own children at the behest of the cult leader, we have this testimony: "The children were in the kitchen doing dishes and Daniel asked for permission to go to the bathroom. Mrs. Mills said that Daniel had to stay and finish the dishes. Instead of going to the bathroom, Daniel urinated in his pants right there in the kitchen, soaking the floor." Daniel would have been 8 years old at that point.

This is not a religion issue or a homeschooling issue, and I find it appalling that people are defending this woman's abusive behavior in the name of defending Christianity.