It's Thursday, March 20, 2025.

I'm Albert Mueller, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian

worldview.

Well, here it comes again, recurringly, as if on some kind of almost predictable cycle,

stories emerge in the press in which homeschooling is

identified as a problem as a vulnerability for children, because after all, children who are

being homeschooled are taken outside the supervisory power of the state. Big story there. We'll come

back to that in a moment, but the latest headline and the latest occasion for this kind of argument has come out of Waterbury, Connecticut, where just a matter of days ago, on a welfare check, local authorities there discovered a 32-year-old man, severely undernourished, held in what appears to be a state of captivity.

And the reason homeschooling is brought

into this is because as far back as 2005, persons were concerned when this individual now 32

was a child. And authorities had indicated that there would be some kind of a house visit.

But nonetheless, it turns out that, quote, a welfare check performed at the

request of the State Department of Children and Families found nothing amiss. Okay. And so now that this

man has been found, held captive, severely undernourished in this house, the accusation is this

wouldn't have happened if you had some kind of state supervision

over homeschooling. Now, let's just state that that's quite a stretch when you're talking about

a 32-year-old man, and we are talking about a situation that undoubtedly invokes criminal behavior.

There's just no question about that. That's why the police are involved. But as Matthew

Hennessy of the Wall Street Journal points out, the people who want to jump on homeschooling and

criticize homeschooling and point the finger at homeschooling have found yet they believe another

example of the kind of atrocity story. They can haul out to say what we need is more government

supervision of

...