New Hampshire is officially dead

A 10-year old New Hampshire girl has been ordered to stop being home-schooled and to attend public school, for no other reason than that the court disapproved of her mother's inclusion of Christian faith in her education. Seriously.

Although the marital master making recommendations to the court agreed the child is “well liked, social and interactive with her peers, academically promising, and intellectually at or superior to grade level” and that “it is clear that the home schooling...has more than kept up with the academic requirements of the...public school system,” he nonetheless proposed that the Christian girl be ordered into a government-run school after considering “the impact of [her religious] beliefs on her interaction with others.” The court approved the order.

In other words, "Even though we can't find any legitimate academic or school-related reason to keep this girl from being home-schooled, we're ordering her to go to the public schools anyway." Is there any honest justification for this decision, apart from anti-religious sentiments?

I can't believe it. I'm serious. I could believe that something like this could have happened in a Leftist regime like Massachusetts, or California, or New York. But New Hampshire? New Hampshire?! The "Live free or die" state?

I'm despondent right now. I grew up in New Hampshire. In my late 20s, after I began to escape the haze of Leftist thought I'd spent the previous 7-8 years in, I came to really appreciate my home state's historically libertarian bent. New Hampshire has no sales tax or income tax. It has no paid legislature. It has no seat belt laws or helmet laws. It has, hands down, the greatest state motto ever -- Live free or die -- and for at least 200 years, it lived up to that motto.

Then, in the late 70s, southern New Hampshire started to become a bedroom community for Boston. By the late 80s, it seemed like close to half of the people living in southern New Hampshire worked in Massachusetts. By that time, many people from Massachusetts had started moving to New Hampshire -- bringing with them their Massachusetts sensibilities and values, which, in the proper role of government, often clashed with New Hampshire values. Now it seems that they've begun to tip the balance. This court decision would have been unthinkable in New Hampshire even 10 years ago.

What happened to the state I grew up in -- the one where people actually appreciated and understood freedom? It seems to have died.

This is a very sad day.