Recently I have been contacted by several people who have questioned some of our Association’s endorsements. That is not unusual, but this time we were being questioned about opposing elected officials who we had endorsed in the past. So I thought it would be beneficial to address this issue publicly.
Five Seats on the Texas Supreme Court could change your freedoms. For whom should you vote?
It isn’t difficult to see that the U.S. judicial system is succumbing to a lack of integrity and a lack of commitment to upholding the Constitution. In the face of this, there are five important Texas judicial races that home schoolers should care about when they go to vote in the Texas Primary election this February and March.
This is the season when some home schoolers begin to ask THSC why we “do all this political stuff.” We are in the midst of the primary election time when voters will choose what will become not only the political party nominations for local, state, and federal offices, but what will also be in many cases the actual elected official.
While many of us parents would like to focus on the important issues of raising our children in the admonition of the Lord and educating them for life, I and many other Texas parents learned 30 years ago that we ignore the process of choosing those who represent us in our government at our own peril. These officials at every level can and often do make decisions that directly impact our rights as parents to direct the care, control, and upbringing of our children; and if we wait until there is a problem to help these officials understand parental rights and home education, it will be too late.
As we begin the year 2016, I am reminded of the ongoing battle to protect home school families and parental rights in Texas. Over two years ago the Tutt family was ripped apart by an unelected judge issuing an order to remove their children with no evidence of abuse or neglect, much less evidence required by law that the children were in imminent physical danger.
The caseworker in this case has testified under oath in two court hearings that she knew the children were not in danger but chose to falsify an affidavit to justify the judge’s order to have CPS remove the children.
For almost two years, Texas Home School Coalition (THSC) has been battling the Texas Ethics Commission (TEC) and its efforts to limit the political speech of associations like THSC, even though the organization’s principal purpose is not political. Last year, in response to a federal lawsuit filed in Lubbock, THSC forced the TEC to acknowledge that THSC had the right to participate in political speech regarding campaigns and candidates.
In spite of spending a great deal of time and resources to explain the legal problems with the TEC’s new definition of a Political Action Committee (PAC), the agency finalized a new definition in December that is in clear contradiction of federal and state law. In fact, the chairman of the TEC in a hearing in which THSC’s attorney laid out these problems, said that it would just adopt the rule and let the courts sort it out.
By Tim Lambert While the issue of the legality of home ...
