A Brazilian couple just got sentenced to 50 days in prison for homeschooling their two daughters, and one of the court's actual complaints was that the girls prefer sacred music over trap and sertanejo. You read that correctly. A judge looked at two accomplished, multilingual young pianists and thought, "Yeah, these kids need more explicit lyrics in their lives."
As Trending Politics reported, Audato and Ieda Denardi were convicted of "intellectual neglect" by a Sao Paulo criminal court for educating their 15 and 11 year old daughters at home without following a state approved curriculum. According to Alliance Defending Freedom International, which is supporting the family legally, the court specifically faulted the parents for not including programs on "gender and sex education" and "tolerance and diversity" in their homeschool plan.
The family's attorney, Isabel Monteiro, said the judge made an "ideological decision to convict them" based in large part on the older daughter's preference for sacred music over mainstream pop. Because apparently in Brazil, your taste in music can be used as evidence of parental neglect. Somewhere a Gregorian chant enthusiast is sweating nervously.
Here is where it gets truly absurd. Even the state prosecutors, the people whose job it is to argue for a conviction, told the court to acquit the parents. An independent educational psychologist evaluated the children and found no signs of neglect. The girls were thriving socially and academically. The family submitted more than 3,000 pages of evidence. The judge rejected all of it.
Instead, the judge accused the parents of "using their daughters as pawns in an ideological struggle" and providing "unregulated education." So to be clear, the prosecution said the kids are fine, the psychologist said the kids are fine, the evidence said the kids are fine, and the judge said prison.
The Denardis told Fox News Digital they started homeschooling in 2020 during the pandemic after deciding their daughters' schools were not cutting it. The girls did so well that the family kept going and officially withdrew them from school in 2022. That is when state officials started showing up at their door and pressuring them to re-enroll.
The couple remains free while appealing the sentence, which is believed to be the first criminal prosecution of its kind in Brazil. Their appeal will be heard by the 7th Criminal Chamber of the Court of Justice of the State of Sao Paulo.
"It has affected a lot. Now we have to sleep and wake up every day thinking about that we can go to prison," Audato told Fox News Digital. His biggest worry is what happens to the girls if both parents are locked up for 50 days. "We're going to have to stay 50 days without them and who's going to stay with them?" he said.
The legal mess exists because Brazil's Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that homeschooling was not unconstitutional but needed legislative regulation. The House passed a bill in 2022. The Senate never acted on it. So families are stuck in a gap between a court ruling that did not ban the practice and a legislature that never bothered to write the rules.
"We are waiting for real justice and the court to give us this acquittal that we think we deserve because the state can't change law [based on] ideology," Audato said.
Nothing says "tolerance and diversity" quite like jailing parents because their kids play piano instead of listening to trap music.
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