US evangelicals aim to influence European law
In a German court battle, a home-schooled girl was taken from her parents and put in psychiatric ward.
Erlangen, Germany
For the past two months, the Busekros family has been fighting a court battle to regain custody of their 15-year-old daughter, Melissa. German police took her from her home here, and placed her in a psychiatric ward. The reason: She was being home-schooled, which violates Germany's compulsory education law.
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Melissa's plight has struck a chord with US evangelicals, who often see home-schooling as a way to instill Christian values. American evangelical groups have rushed to the family's aid, providing legal counsel and lobbying the German parliament.
Many American Christians have reached out to the Busekros family, who now have two wicker baskets stuffed with hundreds of letters from supporters. "It reminds us that we are not alone, that there are people standing behind us and giving us the strength to fight," says Melissa's mother, Gudrun.
The Busekros case is emblematic of the growing effort by US Christian legal organizations to take the "culture wars" overseas. Pushing back against a perceived assault on their values by an increasingly secular society, the groups are striving to influence European law on issues ranging from home schooling to stem-cell research to gay marriage. A few recent examples include:
• In Britain, the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), an organization founded by American evangelical leaders, is funding a lawsuit brought by a Christian man who was fired for refusing to work on Sunday. It is also helping to develop the legal strategy.
• In Sweden, ADF played a key role in persuading the Supreme Court to dismiss charges against Ake Green, a pastor who was convicted of hate-crime charges after he delivered a sermon in which he called gays a "deep cancerous tumor in the entire society."
• In Aruba and the Czech Republic, Pat Robertson's legal organization, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), helped defeat bills that would have legalized same-sex unions.
• In France, ACLJ affiliate ECLJ (the European Center for Law and Justice), is staging a legal challenge against an antisect law that it says is being used to clamp down on evangelical Christian churches.
•And on the European Union level, ECLJ is lobbying to block funding for embryonic stem-cell research.
US courts eye European precedents
Why are American groups going to such lengths to shape the laws in other countries?
"We realized that if we didn't try to mold precedents abroad, they could come back to hurt us, and that the American legal system as we know might change," says Benjamin Bull, chief counsel for the ADF.
He notes that, for example, US judges have drawn on foreign precedents and international standards in several key cases, such as the Supreme Court's 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, which legalized sodomy in the Lone Star State.
In Germany, one of ADF's allied organizations, the Georgia-based International Human Rights Group (IHRG; formerly the European Defense Fund), has had a hand in more than 40 German home-schooling cases.
Last year, the group's president, Joel Thornton, and a German lawyer appealed to the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of one home-schooling family.
They argued that forcing the family's Christian children to attend public schools, where the curriculum sometimes runs counter to their beliefs, was a threat to religious freedom.
But the EU court rejected this argument, saying, "Schools represented society, and it was in the children's interest to become part of that society."
