Source: https://www.lutheranforum.com/blog/meyer-v-nebraska-a-lutheran-contribution-to-constitutional-law
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 10:21:01+00:00

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One of the U.S. Supreme Court’s most important civil liberties decisions arose out of a case that began in a one-room Lutheran schoolhouse in rural Nebraska. On a May afternoon in 1920, Robert T. Meyer, a teacher at Zion Lutheran Church’s elementary school near Hampton, Nebraska, boldly continued teaching German in defiance of state law when the Hamilton County attorney entered his classroom. Meyer, a forty-two-year-old father of six, knew that this elected official did not want to offend the area’s large German-American community and would not prosecute unless he witnessed Meyer violating a statute prohibiting the teaching of foreign languages to children who had not completed the eighth grade. “I had my choice,” Meyer later told his lawyer. “If I changed into English, he would say nothing. If I went on in German, he would arrest me. I told myself that I must not flinch. And I did not flinch. I went on in German.” Meyer believed that he had the same duty as a pastor to teach children “the religion of their fathers in the language of their fathers,” particularly to enable them to participate in Zion’s German-language worship services and to help them prepare for their confirmations.1 Like most Lutheran schools by 1920, Zion’s school provided its basic curriculum in English, teaching German only as a language.
Shortly after deciding Pierce, the Court began the long process by which it has incorporated into state law nearly all of the liberties prescribed by the Bill of Rights. Meyer, however, has remained a precedent for the controversial proposition that there are some constitutional rights that are not found in specific provisions of the Constitution. Judges, lawyers, and scholars have interpreted its Delphic dicta in highly divergent ways.
Meyer has served as precedent in various u.s. Supreme Court decisions that have struck down laws restricting abortion,37 homosexual activities,38 and contraception.39 In Roe v. Wade, for example, the Court cited Meyer in support of its contention that a right to privacy can be inferred from the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Some scholars and judges, however, have argued that Meyer’s protection of parental autonomy provides no valid precedent for such decisions and may even compel contrary rulings,40 and political conservatives have invoked Meyer and Pierce in support of homeschooling rights and school vouchers.
William G. Ross is Lucille Stewart Beeson Professor of Law at the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, and the author of Forging New Freedoms: Nativism, Education, and the Constitution, 1917–1927, a study of the Meyer and Pierce cases.
1. Arthur F. Mullen, Western Democrat (New York: Funk, 1940), 218.
2. Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923); Bartels v. Iowa, Bohning v. Ohio, Pohl v. Ohio, and Nebraska District of Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Missouri, Ohio and Other States et al. v. McKelvie et al., 262 U.S. 404 (1923).
3. Meyer v. Nebraska, 399.
4. See Frederick C. Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974).
6. See William G. Ross, Forging New Freedoms: Nativism, Education, and the Constitution, 1917–1927 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).
8. Nancy Derr, “The Babal Proclamation,” The Palimpsest 60 (1979): 114. Harding and the State Council of Defense, however, granted various dispensations to Lutheran churches. Ross, 44–45.
9. Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty, 15; Frederick C. Luebke, “Legal Restrictions on Foreign Languages in the Great Plains States, 1917–1923,” in Languages in Conflict, ed. Paul Schach (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), 9–10.
10. Author’s interview with Clarence Heiden, Hampton, Nebraska, June 27, 1990. In 1920, Heiden was the student of another teacher at Zion.
12. J. M. Weidenschilling to Theodore Graebner, April 13, 1918, Theodore Graebner Papers, Box 122, Concordia Historical Institute, Clayton, Missouri [hereafter cited as TGP].
13. Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty, 284.
14. Martin Graebner to Theodore Graebner, Feb. 4, 1918, TGP Box 122.
16. Theodore Graebner to H. Grueber, Sept. 27, 1918, TGP Box 122.
17. A. J. Schlichting to Theodore Graebner, Oct. 26, 1918, TGP Box 122.
20. The New Menace (Bronson, Missouri), May 13, 1922, in MSS 308 (microfilm), Papers of Benjamin W. Alcott, Oregon Historical Society, Portland, Oregon.
22. John Fahning to Theodore Graebner, Dec. 22, 1920, TGP Box 40; Theodore Graebner to John Fahning, Dec. 27, 1920, tgp Box 40.
23. Author’s interview with Raymond Parpart and Clarence Heiden, Hampton, Nebraska, June 27, 1990. Parpart was receiving instruction from Meyer when the county attorney entered Meyer’s classroom and is mentioned by name in the Supreme Court’s decision.
24. Theodore Graebner to F. A. Hertwig, June 5, 1921, TGP Box 40.
28. Theodore Graebner, “An Impossible Amendment and an Anti-Social Petition,” published by the Lutheran Schools Committee, in Lutheran Schools Committee file, TGP Box 40.
30. Ibid., 148–9, 156–9, 168.
31. Rudolph Messerli to F. Pfotenhauer, Nov. 10, 1922, Lutheran Schools Committee file, MSS 646, Folder 19, Oregon Historical Society.
34. Society of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary v. Pierce et al., 296 F. 928 (D. Ore. 1924).
35. John J. Burke to Thomas F. O’Mara, March 25, 1925, Records of the United States Catholic Council, Box 14, Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.
36. Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 535 (1925).
37. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 152–3 (1973); Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 717, 849 (1992).
38. Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, 564 (2003).
39. Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 481 (1965); Carey v. Population Services, 431 U.S. 678, 684–5 (1977).
40. See, for example, Ross, 198–200; Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. at 593 (Justice Scalia, dissenting).
41. Robert T. Meyer to Arthur F. Mullen, Apr. 29, 1938, Arthur F. Mullen Papers, Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska. Meyer continued to teach until 1942 and died at the age of ninety-four in 1972. Ross, 185.

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