Maryland lawmakers are following the lead of hysterical California kooks and are proposing new guidelines for Maryland homeschoolers.  Proposals include intrusive monitoring requirements, compelling homeschoolers to submit to in-home visits by school bureaucrats, according to the Free Thought Project.

The anti-homeschooler legislators' rationale is the recent case of child abuse and torture allegedly inflicted by a California couple on their 13 kids.  Did you hear about that case?  The one in which the parents kept the kids chained to beds, kept them malnourished, and so on.  So just because those parents happen to homeschool their kids, the apparatchiks are slamming their iron fists down on all homeschoolers.

The rulers are hardcore control freaks, and education is an important means to control the people.  So is the "child protection" racket.

The State compels kids to attend unsafe government schools and creates draconian restrictions if parents want an alternative.  There are the State's abusive "child welfare" agencies.  And the schools are not safe either because they are an Orwellian police state or because teachers and staff are disarmed by law and unable to protect kids from intruders.

There are now many examples of the various government child care agencies such as CPS (Child Protection Services) and DCF (Department of Children and Families) that demonstrate the viciousness and indecency of the State.

To begin, according to Jenifer McKim of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, between 2001 and 2011, at least "95 Massachusetts children whose cases were overseen by state social workers have died directly or indirectly because of abuse or neglect."

In 2014, this Boston Globe article disclosed that "hundreds of children in the Massachusetts welfare system" had gone missing.

More recently, as reported by Masslive.com, "there were 76 deaths of children under state care or supervision" in fiscal 2017.

This is happening not only in Massachusetts. As of December of 2017, more than 70 foster care children were missing in Kansas.

This 2013 article discussed the Oklahoma state Department of Human Services and the 78 missing children from its CPS who may very well have been taken into sex-trafficking.  The late Georgia state senator Nancy Schaefer worked to expose (PDF) CPS and its alleged child sex-trafficking connection.

Why would government child "protection" involve sexual misconduct of any kind?

The Boston Herald has covered several disturbing cases in Massachusetts, including an 11-year-old foster boy who alleged that he was sexually assaulted [only after eleven paragraphs does the Globe reveal that the case involves two males – ed.] in that foster home.  DCF dismissed it as "consensual sex [sic]."  There are many other cases, including one in Worcester, as reported by the Herald, in which DCF degenerates worked feverishly to get three kids in foster care back to their parents, even though the kids made "allegations against the parents of rape, molestation and being 'taught' sexual acts they performed on each other and the parents, physical beatings, and a lack of food in the home[.]"

According to the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, a policy known as "viewing bodies" involved strip-searching the foster children on each visit, without probable cause.  They continued the strip searches even though that procedure was determined illegal.

Why is child "protection" becoming so sexualized and invasive?  One conclusion by the American Dream Blog is that the government schools seem to be playing a major role.

I think that intrusiveness toward others in a most private way is something that now pervades the left, from government child "welfare" to the radical LGBT extremists.  When the activists infiltrate the schools with sex-related matters that little boys and girls are too young to be exposed to, then I view that as extreme intrusiveness, and it becomes "abuse."  It is just immoral to treat a child in that kind of invasive way, or to invasively expose a child to "alternative" adult lifestyles.

The State is intimately enmeshed in these intrusions because the State controls the education of most kids.

Moreover, the Massachusetts child "welfare" departments openly promote sickos to be foster parents.  In 2014, the Boston Herald reported that a Massachusetts DCF handbook stated that people with criminal records and who have been convicted of "inducing sex from a minor ... violent offenses, including assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, armed burglary and involuntary manslaughter" are suitable to be foster parents.

In 2013, a five-year-old foster child, Jeremiah Oliver, had been missing and was later found dead in a suitcase.  Apparently, the children in that foster home had been abused by the mother and her gang-member boyfriend.

And I have covered the case of now-19-year-old Justina Pelletier, who had been treated for a mitochondrial disease.  At one point when she was taken to see a doctor at Boston Children's Hospital, her case was seized by psychiatrists who changed her diagnosis to "somatoform disorder" and immediately withdrew her from her treatment.  Custody of her was seized by the state of Massachusetts, and she was then involuntarily placed into a mental health facility for troubled teens, even though she was clearly not "troubled."  Her physical condition deteriorated, and she then had to use a wheelchair.

Justina then found herself in captivity and under the constraints of "behavior modification" ideology-driven and research-driven psychiatrists, according to her father, Lou Pelletier.  The Pelletier family is suing Boston Children's Hospital and the doctors, and the lawsuit trial is still pending.

That hospital and the doctors are clearly private-sector workers.  However, in this case, doctors relied on the state's DCF seizing custody of Justina.  The doctors' receiving government research grants also plays a large role here.  Some people refer to this case as "medical kidnapping" by the doctors and their government partners.

Now, this is not to suggest that all these problems occur solely because "child protection" has been monopolized by the State.  There actually are some decent government social workers who rebuked their agencies.

In the private sector, however, workers are made to be accountable under the law, while the agents of government-monopolized services have shown themselves time and again to be above the law.

The invasive sexual deviancy and the "child welfare" racket and CPS abuses are bad enough.  Add to that the crazy police state in the schools, as discussed by John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute, and terrifying terrorism drills in the schools.  And now Donald Trump wants to impose an escalated police state in the government schools?

In my view, the police state inflicted on kids for no good reason is a form of child abuse – along with its imposing gun-free zones, mandating that no one may be armed in the schools, and therefore that no one may be able to defend the kids from a psychopathic shooter.  With civilian disarmament and mandated gun-free zones, the government schools turn kids into sitting ducks.

No wonder people want to homeschool their kids.  Imagine the government's local homeschool "supervisors," as threatened by Maryland and California bureaucrats.  Could they be just as bad as the government "child protective" social workers?

It is time to finally take control over education away from the government, as well as remove its monopoly over "child protection."

Scott Lazarowitz is a libertarian writer and commentator.  Please visit his blog.