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Chairman’s Address delivered by Michael P. Farris, Home School Legal Defense Association National Conference for Christian Homeschool Leaders, Nashville, Tennessee, September 28, 2006

Tonight I want to talk to you about the most important thing that HSLDA or any of us will ever be involved in in the political, legal sense. And that’s something I talked to you about — those of you who were at the Summit this spring — I talked to you about a potential amendment to the Constitution of the United States on parental rights.¹ And I want to go into that again in a little more depth tonight and update you with information that I was handed at about six forty-five tonight by Scott Somerville — a decision of the European Court of Human Rights that I’m going to talk about here in just a few minutes.

But ladies and gentlemen, I want us to understand what we’re in is in the battle of our lifetimes. You saw me saying on this screen² — and boy, did I need makeup. I looked old and red and bloodshot and ugh. But in any event, maybe I am old and red and bloodshot. I have to recognize that. I found out last night also that the ninth grandchild’s on the way . . . so we’re taking over America one grandchild at a time.

But this issue is not a small issue. It’s the biggest fight we’ve ever been in in our lives. And I want you to just kind of sit back and breathe for a minute and rise up out of the day-to-day. In homeschooling, there’s a day-to-day of homeschooling your own kids, and you’ve all seen that in your own lives, where you homeschool for 10 or 15 years, and then a child graduates, and then you get a little distance, and your child goes off and comes back, and you get to see it from a distance. And when you see it from a distance, you see how important those years invested in homeschooling were. But you didn’t see it that much day-to-day-day-to-day is a lot different than that long-range view.

In running homeschool organizations, there’s a day-to-day as well. And sometimes getting immersed in the day-to-day, you won’t see the long-range; we won’t see the perspective that we need to see by rising up above it and getting out of the details, and getting up at a higher percentage.

What I’m going to suggest to you tonight, and the case I’m going to try to build to you tonight, is that there’s a tsunami coming. The earthquake’s already happened and the wave is headed toward the United States. Now, there’s still time to build the tsunami wall. But the question is, are we going to get up high enough so that we see the tsunami and we build the wall?

That’s the issue, and let’s see what I can do in making this case to you tonight. Read the rest of this entry »