Comparing and Contrasting Yoder with Ginsburg
At face value, the cases of Yoder and Ginsburg appear quite different to me. After
all, one deals with an Amish parent who took her children out of highschool for religious
reasons and the other case deals with a Luncheonette owner who sold a 16 year old boy
"questionable materials". While each case deals on its own with differing state laws and
statutes, they come together in the effort to answer the question; how much authority does
the state possess over other people's children?
The decisions in Yoder and Ginsburg are quite conflicting. Regarding Yoder, the
court decides that if your religion conflicts with your highschool, then you don't have to
go. This generally puts religion before education. In Ginsburg the State comes out
victorious and presents itself as the end all authority over what kind of material a child of
16 can see or read. This decision paints the state as having supreme authority over
parents, yet in Yoder the parents are the authority over the State and the Board of
Essentially in Yoder, the child is the victor in a sense. The state hands over its
authority to the parents and loses the upper hand. In this case the child is the victor
especially because she did not want to go to school. In the Ginsburg decision, a minor is
deemed still a minor when it comes to obscenity, and the state holds on to their authority.
The point is, that when we are dealing with something as important as school and
something as nonconsequential as incredibly soft pornography, the court allows a child to
not look at either at a book or a Playboy. It seems almost incredulous to me at least. I
Can it be said, then, that religion comes first over education? Isn't our country
founded on the separation of church and state? The Yoder decision clearly combines the
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