Michigan has among the most homeschooling friendly laws of any state. Now that leniency might become the target of the statists in Lansing. A recent story of abusive parents who claimed to have been homeschooling their daughter in Michigan has some state government officials making statements like the following:

“As long as home schooling is as lax as it is,” said Charlotte Smith, a state Office of Children’s Ombudsman intake officer, “it’s an avenue for parents to hide abuse.”

The story is a horrible one. These monsters (I cannot call them parents) chained their daughter to a bed for at least two years. Recently a house fire claimed the life of their daughter, who couldn’t get free.

Now lets looks at some other abuse numbers. In 2004 the U.S. Department of Education itself reported that “between 6 percent and 10 percent of public school children across the country have been sexually abused or harassed by school employees and teachers.”

With those numbers, I would say that our government school system is “an avenue for hiding abuse.” Children are safer with their parents.

Or to make another comparison, seeing as Catholic priest abuse scandals are a favorite topic for the mainstream media, News Max quotes a Hofstra University scholar as saying: “So we think the Catholic Church has a problem? The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.”

But the Michigan abuse story is being used to bring up the state’s homeschooling issues. Compared with other states, homeschoolers here are pretty much left alone. And, compared with most every other aspect of life in this state, that’s one of the few areas that the state hasn’t recently passed burdensome laws on.

But it looks like that might change. While the headline of the WOOD TV article is “Home-schooling hid Calista’s abuse,” the byline reads “Michigan has lenient home-schooling laws.” The murder isn’t the story, it’s the alleged need for homeschooling restrictions.