Locking Up Christian Parents

In this Bicentennial year, the Supreme Court of Ohio has sustained forthrightly the constitutional right to religious freedom—and to religious schooling. In the case of State of Ohio v. Whisner et al., Ohio’s Supreme Court ruled on July 28 that the Ohio State Board of Education acted unconstitutionally in bringing a criminal prosecution against the head of a little Christian school and against parents of children enrolled in that school.

This is the affair of Tabernacle Christian School, in Darke County, Ohio, discussed some months ago on this page. Two inferior courts had ruled in favor of the Ohio Board of Education, which clearly was seeking to abolish Tabernacle Christian through harassment. The Reverend Levi Whisner, minister in a pietistic denomination which operates the school, manfully withstood the bullying of the Board of Education and the educationist bureaucrats who had menaced him and various parents with fines and imprisonment. Tabernacle Christian would not comply abjectly with all the demands of the State Board: so off to prison you must go, my fair parson. But the minister and the parents engaged as their lawyer Mr. William Ball—who, in Wisconsin v. Yoder of happy memory, had persuaded the Supreme Court of the United States to exempt Amish children from having to attend “public” schools.

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Russell Kirk

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In this Bicentennial year, the Supreme Court of Ohio has sustained forthrightly the constitutional right to religious freedom—and to religious schooling. In the case of State of Ohio v. Whisner et al., Ohio’s Supreme Court ruled on July 28 that the Ohio State Board of Education acted unconstitutionally in bringing a criminal prosecution against the head of a little Christian school and against parents of children enrolled in that school.

This is the affair of Tabernacle Christian School, in Darke County, Ohio, discussed some months ago on this page. Two inferior courts had ruled in favor of the Ohio Board of Education, which clearly was seeking to abolish Tabernacle Christian through harassment. The Reverend Levi Whisner, minister in a pietistic denomination which operates the school, manfully withstood the bullying of the Board of Education and the educationist bureaucrats who had menaced him and various parents with fines and imprisonment. Tabernacle Christian would not comply abjectly with all the demands of the State Board: so off to prison you must go, my fair parson. But the minister and the parents engaged as their lawyer Mr. William Ball—who, in Wisconsin v. Yoder of happy memory, had persuaded the Supreme Court of the United States to exempt Amish children from having to attend “public” schools.