It was reported last night that Sarah Palin, when asked by Katie Couric to discuss a Supreme Court case other than Roe v. Wade, couldn’t come up with a single one.

In the course of a discussion of this piece of news, a friend of mine mentioned the case Wisconsin v. Yoder, which I was vaguely familiar with, but hadn’t ever read, and so I went and looked it up.

Yoder was a 1972 case in which, to quote Wikipedia, “the United States Supreme Court found that Amish children could not be placed under compulsory education past 8th grade, as it violated their parents’ fundamental right to freedom of religion.” The case was decided in a unanimous 7-0 ruling, but Justice William O. Douglas filed a partial dissent, and it’s that dissent which makes the case relevant to this blog. 

Here’s an excerpt:

The Court’s analysis assumes that the only interests at stake in the case are those of the Amish parents on the one hand, and those of the State on the other. The difficulty with this approach is that, despite the Court’s claim, the parents are seeking to vindicate not only their own free exercise claims, but also those of their high-school-age children. … On this important and vital matter of education, I think the children should be entitled to be heard. While the parents, absent dissent, normally speak for the entire family, the education of the child is a matter on which the child will often have decided views. He may want to be a pianist or an astronaut or an oceanographer. To do so he will have to break from the Amish tradition. It is the future of the students, not the future of the parents, that is imperiled by today’s decision. … It is the student’s judgment, not his parents’, that is essential if we are to give full meaning to what we have said about the Bill of Rights and of the right of students to be masters of their own destiny. If he is harnessed to the Amish way of life by those in authority over him and if his education is truncated, his entire life may be stunted and deformed. The child, therefore, should be given an opportunity to be heard before the State gives the exemption which we honor today.