Christian Girls, Interrupted

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574398963953876266.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

[The Wall Street Journal] 8 Sep 2009--Two Christian girls. Two sets of distraught parents. And two state courts smack in the middle of it.

One of these courts is in New Hampshire, where a judge recently ordered that home-schooled Amanda Kurowski be sent to public school. The order signed by Family Court Justice Lucinda V. Sandler says the 10-year-old's Christian faith could use some shaking up—and that the local public school is just the place to do it. So while the child's lawyers at the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal outfit, filed a motion asking the judge to reconsider, last week Amanda started fifth grade at a local public school.

At about the same time Miss Kurowski was starting school in New Hampshire, a state court in Florida was considering what to do with 17-year-old Rifqa Bary. Miss Bary fled to Florida from Ohio a few weeks back, where she sought refuge with a Christian couple whose church she had learned about on Facebook. She says she ran away from home because her father discovered she'd become a Christian—and then threatened to kill her. On Thursday, Circuit Judge Daniel Dawson ordered the girl and her family to try mediation and set a pretrial hearing for the end of the month.

Miss Bary's case doesn't fit neatly into the standard categories. On the one hand, Mr. and Mrs. Bary are flying the parental-rights flag typically associated with conservatives. They say that whatever fears their daughter has of them have been put in her head by evangelical Christians hostile to Islam....

On the other hand, the fear of an honor killing—even in the United States—is not irrational. In Texas last year, an Egyptian-born father (still sought by authorities) is thought to have murdered his two daughters because they dated non-Muslim men. A few months later in Georgia, a Pakistani man told cops he strangled his daughter because she wanted out of an arranged marriage.