The Life and Opinions of Kathryn Elizabeth, Person

Guard Your Heart, Part Two

Sat, 25 May 2013 12:02:49 -0400

This is part two in a two part series. It was originally written as part of the Homeschoolers Anonymous series, “Homeschoolers Are Out.”

In this series: Part One | Part Two

*****

Sometimes the hardest person to come out to is yourself.

After spending a few years post-college working as a wedding and gift registry consultant (turns out I liked studying computer science a lot more than doing it), I decided a change of course was in order, packed up everything and moved to Vietnam to teach for a year. I had a wonderful time and learned a lot about myself and also learned tons from the very talented and accomplished Vietnamese faculty at the university where I taught. Coming back to the US sent me into a tailspin of reverse culture shock and I spent a long few months feeling like I didn’t know which end was up or what ground was solid. During that time I found myself questioning all sorts of things as I tried to figure out what to do with myself and which direction was forward. It was during that time that I began to realize that it wasn’t just that I had been really good at guarding my heart, and that it wasn’t just that I hadn’t found the right guy, it’s that I never was attracted to guys in the first place.

When you’re the model homeschool child, “gay” is something that happens to other people. As a kid it was those people I’d see on TV marching, or who my parents’ religious right friends would rail against, but it’s certainly not the sort of thing that a good little homeschooled church kid would consider to have anything to do with themselves. And it’s most definitely not the sort of thing that even crossed my mind as something to consider as an answer to make sense of things in my life as I was growing up.

In retrospect, all sorts of things about my past make sense, from never having an answer when my sister would ask me who I had a crush on when I was little, to not being able come up with a guy I thought was hot when asked by my hall mates in college, oh, and the reason I watched xXx about six times in the theater my senior year of college wasn’t just because I liked the car chases (though the car chases didn’t hurt), and it certainly wasn’t Keanu Reeves who I was watching The Matrixfor. But back then, I was so busy guarding my heart that I didn’t see any of that.

I won’t pretend that finally realizing and coming to terms with being gay was easy because it wasn’t. I knew that I needed to live honestly and that doing so meant that my life wouldn’t be quite the same as I’d envisioned for myself—staying in the closet was not an option I was willing to consider.

I’m fortunate though, in a number of ways. First, by the time I figured it out, I was out of the homeschool bubble. When I was growing up I was the model homeschool child. I don’t think my parents were ever aware of the pressure I felt I was under with other people telling their children to be like me—I never said anything about how kids would comment about what their parents had said about how brilliant my siblings and I were—but when you know that other people think your family is wonderful there’s pressure not to let them down. By the time my younger brother finished school, my parents were more than ready to hand any responsibility they still had off to others and to just be done with the whole homeschool world completely. While I didn’t feel it, there are a lot of queer former homeschoolers who do feel the pressure of what their coming out will do to their parents’ reputation within the homeschool community.

Second, by the time I realized I was gay, I’d already thought for years that LGBT people deserved full equal rights, and had concluded that the belief that it was a sin came from taking scripture massively out of context. For kids, homeschooled or not, who grow up in evangelical households, the sin issue is usually an enormously difficult thing to grapple with.

Ironically, perhaps, I feel like the other issues aside, my background as a homeschooler actually helped me. As mainstream as my family was, and as much as I worked to blend in with my surroundings so I wouldn’t stand out as the “weird homeschooler,” homeschooling—or at least homeschooling during the era I was homeschooled—at its core is a countercultural movement. Fundamental to any countercultural movement is a willingness to go against the mainstream, to stand out, to be different, and to question the dominant paradigm. By homeschooling, parents do not just teach their children academics or a particular set of theological or political beliefs or worldview, the very act of homeschooling is teaching children how to think and act counter-culturally. That’s not something that just gets turned off or erased when you graduate.

The recurring theme when I try to write about my homeschool experiences is the tension that exists between what is and what was supposed to be. Homeschooling was supposed to produce activists, and here I am, an activist, but I’m on the opposite side from where I was supposed to be. It was supposed to teach us how to learn and keep learning on our own, and it did. It’s just that I kept learning enough to learn how much of what homeschool “leaders” were saying wasn’t true. And homeschooling was supposed to produce young adults who could stand up for what they believe and who wouldn’t be buffeted about by external pressure. Well, here I am. I was taught not to care what society thought and I’m not going to suddenly start listening now or bending to external pressure when it comes to my sexual orientation.

I’m sure others in the homeschool world consider me to be a disappointment, wondering what went wrong because I’ve so clearly ventured off of the path that homeschooling was supposed to set me on. I don’t doubt that there are those who are trying to figure out what to do to avoid such an obvious failure as the increasing number of homeschoolers who are coming out must, in their minds, be. And, I am sure there are those—even some who are reading this piece—who are wondering what my parents did wrong, since homeschooling was supposed prevent people like me from happening.

I would argue, however, that my story is a homeschooling success story. The reason I’m here today, the person I am, is because of what my parents did right. I am the person I am today, with the internal fortitude to live my truth openly and honestly and to be my own person because of my experiences as a homeschooler. So what if that person is a politically liberal, openly gay, Christian, nerd with an activist streak a mile wide? The system worked. Just not in the way intended, and that’s a good thing.

End of series.

brucesterling: *Memories of the Space Age And this is where I...

Sat, 25 May 2013 04:18:02 -0400

brucesterling:

*Memories of the Space Age

And this is where I must quote the children’s book about Skylab that we had when I was little. “Skylab is in trouble, a wing is jammed, a shield is torn. An astronaut must take a spacewalk…” Yes, I was a nerdy child, why do you ask? I can’t believe I still remember that. And yet Skylab had already fallen to earth by the time I was born.

Guard Your Heart, Part One

Fri, 24 May 2013 23:00:00 -0400

This is part one in a two part series, I’ll be posting part two tomorrow. It was originally written as part of the Homeschoolers Anonymous series, “Homeschoolers Are Out.”

***

It turns out that it’s easy to guard your heart when you’re not attracted to someone, but I’m getting ahead of myself here. To begin this story, we need to go back in time, back to when I was a homeschool kid growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Despite my parents running the private school for homeschoolers, and my mom finding herself spending far more time on the phone giving advice to new homeschoolers than she would have liked, and that one time that they wound up helping to put together a state-wide homeschool convention (something they vowed never to do again), my family wasn’t nearly as connected to the homeschooling subculture as many people. There really wasn’t that much of a homeschooling subculture when my parents started homeschooling, since back in the mid ‘80s there weren’t many homeschoolers.

Most of the national opportunities like debate weren’t around until I was done, or nearly done, with high school. Also, my mom didn’t particularly like hanging out with other homeschool moms and talking about each other’s children, and (with the exception of the aforementioned convention) avoided homeschool conventions like the plague. The parade of supermoms in denim jumpers and white sneakers who sewed all their own clothing, baked all their bread, and still found time to design grade-appropriate unit studies made her feel inadequate—after all, she didn’t do a single unit study in 18 years of homeschooling, hated denim jumpers, and especially wasn’t going to be sewing the aforementioned jumpers. That’s not to say I didn’t have more than my fair share of homeschooled friends, but they were mostly ones I knew from non-homeschool circles, and I never considered myself one of those homeschoolers. We were about as mainstream as they come.

I don’t remember where we first heard about courtship, just that somewhere along the line when I was in middle school it began to become fashionable even among the friends who were mainstream homeschoolers. These were not the people who made their daughters wear shapeless jumpers and wouldn’t let them cut their hair; they were the cool people with the latest clothes who educated their sons and daughters equally, and it all seemed so reasonable couched in the idea that it was all about waiting until you were done with college and had a career before pursuing a serious relationship. And didn’t it make sense? After all, when my parents met my dad had already finished his first master’s degree and my mom was 28, independent, and had even studied in the UK and traveled around Europe. What was the point of rushing into a series of relationships before you even had the chance to live?

This not being the 19^th century, none of us knew how this whole courtship thing was supposed to work in the modern era, but then someone had given someone else some tapes from this guy who talked about courtship, and he went by the name Little Bear Wheeler, and, oh, you should listen to him because he might be a little out there but he’s entertaining. And so off my family, who hated homeschool conventions and avoided them like the plague, went to hear this Little Bear fellow speak. That’s how these things seem to work in the homeschool world and how normal families get pulled into extremism. You start out reasonably and the next thing you know you’re wearing your one and only denim skirt (because you instinctively knew that’s what you needed to do to blend in) and you’re listing to a guy cosplaying as a pilgrim who’s telling you that the Puritans didn’t date.

I don’t remember many details, it’s been nearly twenty years, but I do remember hearing, over and over, that you needed to, “guard your heart.” If you guard your heart, then you won’t give pieces of it away to the wrong guy. If you guard your heart, then you won’t have frivolous crushes on guys who would never be suitable mates. Guard your heart. Guard your heart. Guard your heart. If you’re really spiritual and godly, you’ll be able to guard your heart until the right season of your life.

It was a message that grew into a chorus in the homeschool circles I grew up in. Guard your heart, always and in every situation, guard your heart. By the time I neared the end of high school, the chorus had grown into a cacophony, as courtship went mainstream into evangelicalism with Josh Harris’ “I Kissed Dating Goodbye.” And by the time I made it to college, it seemed as though everyone had read it, and even if they called their relationships, “dating,” it was still operating on those general principles.

Through all of this, I patted myself on my back because I wasn’t getting any “frivolous” crushes on guys, and clearly this meant that I was super spiritual and doing a great job of guarding my heart. It turns out it had less to do with being super spiritual than it had to do with being super gay.

But again, I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’ve never asked my parents about this, so I don’t know what they would have done if one of us had wanted to date in high school, or what they would have said if we’d have read all of the courtship material, listened to the speakers, and announced that we thought it all bunk. My parents didn’t have a problem with me voicing an opinion that was different than theirs, and if I had objections to courtship back then, I suspect that I could have brought those up and we would have discussed it. Except that I didn’t have any objections because my siblings and I all bought into it. It didn’t matter that we were as mainstream as they come, that my sister and I both wanted educations and careers and had been taught we could be and do whatever we set our minds to, that my brothers didn’t want to marry someone who wasn’t their equal, we still bought into it. Their experiences and opinions are not my story to tell, other than to say that despite all buying into it, eventually we all decided that the whole courtship system was a problem.

By the time you make it through college you think that you know yourself. College is when you’re supposed to find yourself, after all. And so, even after I decided that courtship was bunk, I never stopped to consider that the reason I hadn’t met the right guy had anything to do with anything other than the fact that my hometown has a serious dearth of college educated, available men. Seriously, it’s quite literally one of the worst metropolitan areas in the country for a college educated single woman to find a guy with an education, and there are plenty of statistics to back that up. It was an easy excuse, especially considering that my sister spent plenty of time complaining about the demographics too. So easy an excuse, in fact, that it never crossed my mind that it was an excuse.

To be continued.

Memo to the US: We may have the one of the best freight rail systems in the world but it’s...

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:00:50 -0400

Memo to the US: We may have the one of the best freight rail systems in the world but it’s terrible for passenger travel. I’ve taken trains all over the world, in first world countries and developing ones and I’ve never been bounced around as much as on this Amtrak train from Tampa to DC. I’d compare it to the 3rd world but any comparisons would be unfair because the 3rd world has functioning passenger rail. There’s no need for a smooth ride with freight but if we’re ever going to have a functional passenger rail system we need high speed dedicated passenger lines. If China can cover the county with rail lines surely the US can manage.

And that’s not even going into Rick Scott killing high speed rail in Florida.

Such a cool old train station. Also, currently a big...

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:45:59 -0400

Such a cool old train station. Also, currently a big thunderstorm, that’ll make things nice to look at out the windows.

"Following in the footsteps of former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum, conservatives faced with these..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:15:04 -0400

“Following in the footsteps of former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum, conservatives faced with these self-evident facts have taken to Fox News to cite the problems previous flat budgets have already created to call for a wholesale elimination of the National Weather Service. It’s a classic self-fulfilling sophistry of the right: Ignore the positive work an agency does, keep the agency’s budget flat so that its capabilities do not keep up with the times, then cite the agency’s reduced capabilities as justification to keep cutting it.”

- Anyone regret slashing National Weather Service budget now? (via wilwheaton)
I seem to recall going on a twitter tirade about this. Could Republicans please stop trying to kill the National Weather Service? So many more lives would have been lost without all the advance warning.

John Piper and Tornadoes, 2.0

Tue, 21 May 2013 01:19:03 -0400

One of the first blog posts I ever did on this incarnation of my blog was about John Piper’s insensitive comments after deadly tornadoes.

He’s at it again. This was tweeted at 11:58 pm on Monday, just hours after scores of people were killed in Oklahoma.

“Your sons and daughters were eating and a great wind struck the house, and it fell upon them, and they are dead.” Job 1:19
— John Piper (@JohnPiper) May 21, 2013

And, in case he deletes it, here’s a screenshot:

There is a time and a place to be quoting Job, this isn’t it, or at least it isn’t the time and the place to be quoting that particular verse. The bodies aren’t even cold yet. To his credit, he’s also tweeting links to disaster relief, but this is so insensitive, I don’t even have anything more I can say. I’m too disgusted.

At least this time he didn’t blame it on the gays, I guess that’s progress?

The one thing you should never ask a homeschool kid

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:40:22 -0400

The local paper does stories on all of the high school graduations, and where the stories for the other school graduations follow the same formula—mention something from the speaker, go with a few quotes from graduates about going out into the world, the homeschool support group graduation story includes quotes from kids talking up homeschooling as a concept.

Don’t ask that question of kids. Seriously, just don’t. No kid should be put in the position of defending and explaining their education to adults.

Aside from the fact that in 2013 it’s not like homeschooling is something nobody’s heard of, that’s just not something you should put on a kid. It’s too much pressure and it makes the kid feel even more like an outsider, an “other,” and not part of mainstream culture. Even if a kid had an absolutely wonderful experience, homeschool apologetic isn’t something a kid should be expected to do. Parents, don’t ask this of your kids. Random strangers, don’t put a kid on the spot and start asking questions. It’s not fair to the kid.

I had to put up with random strangers asking me questions about homeschooling since I was six. Six. Let that sink in for a second. How in the world would anyone think that’s remotely something that you should put on a six year old? I can’t even count how many times I was wandering around the public library minding my own business looking for interesting books when I’d be stopped by a stranger asking me, “why aren’t you in school?” Now, granted, back in the ’80s, homeschooling was a novelty, but still. It would have been one thing if it had ended with me responding, “I’m homeschooled,” but nope, the next question was, “Is it legal?” Seriously, people would ask a little elementary schooler to explain the legality of their education. No six year old should ever have to cite statutes for any reason, but I spent a good chunk of my early school years explaining the legal status of homeschooling to adults who wouldn’t stop asking questions. It took me a few years after I finished college before I could begin to look at homeschooling objectively because so many adults spent so many years putting me on the spot, asking me to defend it to them. I still don’t understand why an adult would ask that of a child, especially a very young child, but that’s what happened to me and my siblings. It would make me feel like I was some kind of performing freak show to them.

So next time you encounter a homeschool kid and feel tempted to ask them about homeschooling, resist the urge. No kid should be put on the spot to defend their entire system of education,

And thus ends Kathryn’s rant.

What other fandom would a bunch of people accidentally get sent the season DVD with the season...

Sun, 19 May 2013 03:45:07 -0400

What other fandom would a bunch of people accidentally get sent the season DVD with the season finale a week early and not have the whole plot plastered all over the Internet and the video on torrent? I didn’t even have to make an effort to avoid getting the Doctor Who finale spoilered. I guess all the River Song “spoilers” lines over the years sank in.

Just watched the season finale of Arrow. So good. So many feels. If you didn’t watch the first...

Thu, 16 May 2013 01:28:33 -0400

Just watched the season finale of Arrow. So good. So many feels. If you didn’t watch the first season, go back and watch it now that all the shows are going into hiatus for the summer.

Pawns in the culture war

Wed, 15 May 2013 06:26:45 -0400

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes — Morpheus, The Matrix

In the few days since I wrote my post about what I strongly suspect is HSLDA’s litigation strategy to make homeschooling a fundamental right with no restrictions, not even for abusers, people have been doing some digging and have found information that quite frankly, is incredibly disturbing.

In a nutshell, in 2009 an all male group of homeschool leaders met for a summit at one of Bill Gothard’s ATI training centers to discuss the future of homeschooling. Included among the big names present were Doug Phillips of Vision Forum (and former HSLDA attorney), Brian Ray of NHERI, and Christopher Klicka of HSLDA. Among the topics discussed was a call to abolish child protective services and plans were outlined about how they would go about instituting a Christian theocracy with homeschoolers paving the way. Heather at Becoming Worldly and R.L. Stollar at Homeschooler’s Anonymous both have extremely long and extremely informative posts laying out what exactly happened at the summit, I think it’s important to go read both posts. While I’ve long suspected that there was an agenda based on the bits and pieces of memories I have from things I read and heard from various homeschooling leaders over the years, seeing the road map laid out was chilling.

I’ve snarked about the irony of HSLDA setting me on the path to where I am today by getting me interested in law, I’ve imagined how different my life would have been if I’d been accepted to the HSLDA intern program, I’ve written about HSLDA ignoring child abuse, and I’ve laid out my theory about HSLDA’s litigation strategy, but seeing Doug Phillip’s words presented in black and white in Heather’s post yesterday morning has thrown me for a loop. I’ve suspected for years that the self-appointed leaders in the homeschool movement were using us, but as long as it was just a suspicion I could shove it to the back of my brain and write it off as the conspiracy theory of an over-active imagination. I can’t do that any more, the proof is there.

I feel sick. I feel angry. And even more than that, I feel used.

My siblings and I were the successful homeschoolers. The ones that other parents could point to as the example that homeschooling could work. Other people started homeschooling because of us. My parents directed people to groups like HSLDA as a resource, never knowing that there was a broader agenda. Heck, I directed people to HSLDA. I wasn’t a debater, and I never had anything to do with Joshua Generation, but in my very existence as a successful homeschooler I helped sell homeschooling to other people.

My very efforts to be normal showed people that homeschoolers didn’t have to be poorly socialized weirdos. People who then got sucked into the system and ended up buying into the messages that I hadn’t bought into and hurting their kids as a result.

I took NHERI’s (poorly designed, self-selected) survey about homeschool graduates, and in answering truthfully about my positive experience, I became a pawn in the effort to convince the nation that homeschoolers were better, smarter, more successful than our peers. It was a message that sucked more parents into the system where they bought into the extremism and hurt their kids as a result.

Homeschooling can be great, it can be wonderful. When I was diagnosed with ADD, my doctor told me that my parents deciding to homeschool was probably one of the best things that could have happened to me. I’m the quiet kid who just stares out the window for hours and aces tests, not the class disrupter, so homeschooling kept me from falling through the cracks. And yet.

And yet.

And yet I cannot separate my homeschool experience from the nagging feeling that by providing a safe, normal, successful face to homeschooling I was a pawn in the culture war to turn America into some sort of Christian version of Saudi Arabia. That wasn’t my choice.

There are steps I took during the culture war fights of the ’90s that I regret, and even though I was still a kid back then and didn’t fully know what I was doing, at least I went into it with some personal agency and I own that and learned from the experience. Being a cog in a homeschooling movement that has as it’s goal creating a Christian theocracy where men are the absolute heads and women only stay home and produce more children for the fight was not something I signed up for. It makes me feel dirty just thinking about it.

What makes me really mad is that in being used as a pawn in somebody else’s culture war, I was used as a pawn to make my own life harder. Not that I realized it at the time, but, I’m gay. It’s not something I chose, any more than I chose my blue eyes or being right handed. It’s just something that is. I don’t have a problem with it, I am what I am, and I wouldn’t change it. Changing would make me a different person. Not to mention that I think it’s kind of bad form to tell God that he screwed up in making you. That said, my life would be easier if there wasn’t a constant push back from culture warriors making it so that we have to fight every step of the way just to be treated as an ordinary citizen. It’s a front in the culture wars that Doug Phillips specifically mentioned at the 2009 summit, and in his vision homeschoolers are leading the fight. And my very existence as a successful homeschool graduate helps legitimize the movement.

Even if I repudiate everything, including homeschooling of any kind, because I was a homeschooler I’m still a pawn. I can’t escape it, not really. If I keep my mouth shut and play the role of the good little homeschooler, then I’m propping up a system that is actively working to destroy America as we know it. But if I speak up, if I tell the truth about my life, if I’m honest about the fact that while on most points I’m still a theologically conservative Christian, I’m also politically liberal, feminist, and gay, then I’m proof of why parents need to shelter their children, keep their daughters from college, and isolate themselves from mainstream culture. I can’t win.

And so here it is, 6 am. I should be asleep but instead I’m here writing because maybe, just maybe, if I put my feelings down into words the turmoil in my brain will quiet down. I almost wish I had just done what I’ve been doing for the last decade, shoved all the niggling little memories about homeschooling back down, and gone about my business of being the normal girl who got by, on a technicality, with telling everyone I graduated from private school.

I’ve seen how deep the rabbit hole goes and now I wish I’d taken the blue pill.

Nothing disappears from the Internet

Wed, 15 May 2013 01:26:58 -0400

I google myself from time to time to keep track of what’s out there with my name on it. In searching the other day, I came across a post that I had written on the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood discussion listserv back in college. I forget exactly why I had joined the group, I think because I was writing some sort of paper for doctrine on something related to submission and headship and wanted to be sure I understood the best version of the complementarian argument. I thought I’d repost part of what I wrote in that post back in 2001 because in reading it I can see the wheels turning in my head as I began to realize the whole thing was bunk.

I think that attempting to equate the equality of men and women with the mathematical concept of equality is missing the point. Up to the point that I subscribed to this list, I was under the impression that complementarians thought that men and women were equal. Not that they have the same roles, and not that it means that there is no one in authority, but that as human beings created in God’s image, they are equal. The example that I have always heard is that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are all equal in that they are all equally God, but that in position, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit submit to the will of God the Father. In the same way, men and women are created as equal in their essence, but positionally, the husband is in authority in the home, and the man is in authority in the church. It’s a question of position, not that they are created to be inherently unequal. It’s just like saying that my boss is in a position of authority over me, but that does not mean that we are not equal as human beings created in the image of God.

There are two kinds of equality. One is equality of essence—that we are all equal because we are created in God’s image. The other is equality of position or giftings. If you are looking at this sort of equality, it is true that not everyone is equal—some people have a higher position, and not everyone is equally gifted. However, just because there is not complete equality in position or giftings does not negate the fact that all humans, male or female, are equal in essence. That was what Teri and Jeannie meant when they said that men and women are equal but not interchangable. The question is how the two different equalities fit together in the context of home and church. Egalitarians would say that those areas are covered by the first kind of equality, complementarians would say that they go under the second kind.

It is very dangerous to go about insisting that men and women are not equal. In the past that idea led to women being treated as not quite as human as men, with no rights in society.

At that point in my life, you can see that I was still buying into the complementarian viewpoint, but it was beginning to dawn on me that as much as I’d been taught male headship while seeing something much more egalitarian modeled, the patriarchal complementarians really did not see women as equal in any way to men. Over a decade has passed since then, and by the time I graduated college I had thrown out the whole patriarchal view completely, in large part because of my time on the CBMW listserv. I thought that this was an interesting snapshot of a time in my life when I started questioning assumptions. And, while I know this isn’t what the denomination wanted, what I learned from my professors at Covenant definitely helped me along the way to formulating what I believe today. The last dozen years have been quite the ride, and while twenty year old me wouldn’t have anticipated where I’d finally end up, I can look at what I wrote and see how I got here.

Moi

Mon, 13 May 2013 07:53:19 -0400

If you’ve new to my blog by way of my homeschooling and HSLDA posts, welcome. Although I’ve been blogging on it a good bit lately, the homeschool stuff is a relatively minor subset of what I write about. Like most things on here, I started out mostly writing about it for myself because I’ve never really sat down and thought through my experiences. I’m pretty sure though that when you’re six years old and being asked to explain the legality of homeschooling to the adult who stopped you in the library to ask why you weren’t in school, it’s going to have an influence on your outlook on life.

It’s kind of weird though, writing about the legal issues relating to HSLDA, because I don’t know how many times I’ve told people, “I know it’s important, but there’s just no way I could do family law, I can’t handle how emotionally involved it is.” I’m taking a family law course next semester, but only because I thought I should at least take something so that I’ve got a well rounded education. What I’m really interested in is intellectual property law. The public policy that I want to be shaping is public policy in the area of technology, the Internet, and open source software. I’m a nerd, I’ve always been a nerd, the tech stuff is my bread and butter, and like how my dad took tons of math classes in college because he didn’t want to write, I found my way to computer science because I discovered I liked the puzzle of programming a lot more than writing research papers. I don’t really blog about the nerdy stuff though because on the Intarwebs, there are plenty of places to go hang out and talk to the other nerds about tech.

Stick around and I’ll do my best to turn you into a nerd too.

Of fundamental rights, HSLDA, and homeschooling

Sat, 11 May 2013 23:57:00 -0400

I wasn’t planning on writing more about HSLDA but I was talking to my mom today about HSLDA’s refusal to do anything about child abuse and how it made absolutely zero sense to defend abusers. As I moved on to talking about how I feel that they’re using the Romeike family as pawns in their effort to establish homeschooling as a fundamental right, something dawned on me.

Notice that phrase “fundamental right”? It’s a phrase they’ve been throwing around an awful lot when talking about the Romeike case. In law, “fundamental right” has a very specific meaning. It refers to those rights that are basic, foundational rights—things like life, liberty, freedom of association, freedom of movement, freedom of religion, the right to marry, and the right to due process.

Under US constitutional law, fundamental rights automatically trigger strict scrutiny. That is, for any law restricting a fundamental right to pass constitutional muster, it must be narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling government interest and must be the least restrictive means of achieving that end. Strict scrutiny is a standard that very few laws can meet. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve heard professors describe strict scrutiny as, “strict in theory, fatal in fact.” If you can get the courts to find something to be a fundamental right, you’re pretty much home free. Very few regulations of fundamental rights can survive the strict scrutiny analysis.

So, how does this apply to homeschooling?

Right now, homeschooling is protected under parental rights to direct the education of their children. Religious freedom comes into play to some extent (especially if you’re Amish—the courts don’t like to mess with the Amish), but with parental rights it’s still a balancing of the right of the parent with the right of the child and the interest of the state. In other words, parental rights are not absolute by any means, and while a parent does have the right to direct the education of their children, they don’t have the right to decide that their child doesn’t get an education at all, and parental rights are limited by the fact that children have rights as well.

As it stands, homeschooling is not a fundamental right. No court has ever found that there is a fundamental right to homeschool your child. There is no precedent to support HSLDA’s repeated assertion that parents have a fundamental right to homeschool. Clearly, HSLDA believes there should be a fundamental right of parents to homeschool their children, otherwise they wouldn’t be repeating it over and over again to get the idea into the national consciousness.

Knowing that HSLDA believes that homeschooling should be a fundamental right, how are they to get there?

Here’s how. To review basic civics, our legal system relies on what judges ruled in earlier cases. That is, the decision the court makes in a current case is based on the precedent of what judges ruled in earlier cases. Suppose that the current case law says that Position A is constitutional, but you believe that Position A is wrong and that instead Position Z should be constitutional. You aren’t going to get the court to change from A to Z when 100 years of case law all says that A is correct. The way you change things is to start litigating cases that you can use to build precedent. So you take a case on Position B that’s just a little bit different than A and get the court to distinguish A from B and to rule in favor of B. You then take the ruling in B and use it to support your argument for Position C, and on you go building more and more precedent to bootstrap yourself to where you want to go. That way, when you finally take your case on Position Z to the Supreme Court, you’ve got cases B through Y to point to as precedent for why the court should rule in favor of Z.

Now, here’s where I’m going to be very careful. I’m not saying that this is what HSLDA is doing because I don’t have any sort of inside knowledge about their legal strategy. What I will say instead is that here is what I would do if I were sketching out a legal strategy to turn homeschooling from a subset of the right of parents to direct the education of their children into a fundamental right to homeschool.

What I would do in order to start expanding the right to homeschool is to go to work on the cases that expand the margins for what’s allowed. It’s pretty easy to make the case that good, highly educated parents should be allowed to homeschool and that’s fairly well established. It’s not much harder to extend that right to good, but less well-educated parents who are going to get academic help for the areas where they’re personally weak academically. HSLDA spent the ’80s and first half of the ’90s ensuring that even parents who don’t have high school diplomas are allowed to homeschool.

Once you’ve established that the good parents of children of average intelligence are allowed to homeschool, you then move on to establishing that good parents of special needs children can homeschool. Again, that’s something that HSLDA has already done.

But remember, we don’t just want the law to say that good parents are allowed to homeschool as a subset of the right of parents to direct the education of their children. We want to get to the point where it is a fundamental right subject to strict scrutiny where it’s going to be well nigh impossible for any regulations to pass constitutional muster.

To get there, we need to get to work expanding the margins once again. Let’s get to work by fighting for a custodial parent’s right to homeschool in child custody disputes. Yep, HSLDA’s worked on that too.

So far, so good, and we aren’t in territory that’s particularly controversial.

If we want to expand the right to homeschool even further though, we’re going to have to start getting into the iffy areas. Here’s where we get into the kinds of cases that Libby Anne has written about extensively. If I were trying to make homeschooling into a fundamental constitutional right, those are precisely the cases I would take to get there. If I can establish that even parents who have been convicted of abuse or neglect in the past are allowed to homeschool, it gets me pretty far along the way to establishing that any parent who still has their parental rights is allowed to homeschool.

Let’s see then what HSLDA has done.

To begin with, HSLDA is advocating for a “Parental Rights Amendment” to the constitution, and HSLDA founder Michael Farris is the president of ParentalRights.org. Section 1 of their proposed amendment states that, “The liberty of parents to direct the upbringing, education, and care of their children is a fundamental right.” See, here is that fundamental rights language again, but here it is not just talking about homeschooling, they want the right to direct the upbringing and care to be a fundamental right as well. To remove all doubts that they want strict scrutiny applied, Section 2 includes the magic words for strict scrutiny, stating that government interest has to be “of the highest order.”

But Kathryn, you say, that doesn’t say anything about parents having the right to abuse their children. Not specifically, but by making the right to direct the care and upbringing of the child a fundamental right, it means that any law banning abuse has to be the narrowly tailored to meet a compelling government interest in the least restrictive way possible—if it’s over-inclusive or under-inclusive, it automatically fails. So, for example, if a law bans the caging of children, defining a “cage” as a movable structure with four walls in which the walls are made up of either bars or chicken wire, it fails the strict scrutiny test because baby cribs can fall under that definition. A law banning parents from preventing their child from leaving the house fails too because grounding a child for a week could fall under that ban. Or a law preventing a parent from striking their child with a wooden dowel, wire hanger, or plastic tubing would fail as being under-inclusive because it doesn’t actually meet the stated interest of protecting children since it doesn’t ban things like rulers, metal spoons, or dictionaries.

It would be bad enough if the Parental Rights Amendment only de facto legalized child abuse, but Section 3 is even worse. Section 3 provides the one and only exception in the proposed amendment. That exception is: “This article shall not be construed to apply to a parental action or decision that would end life.” Do you see what they did there? The only time that strict scrutiny does not apply to a parental action or decision is if that action or decision results in the death of the child. That’s all. No other protection. If you do something that kills your kid, you’re in trouble, but beating your kid within an inch of his or her life? You’re all good, it’s strict scrutiny. So Casey Anthony is still getting prosecuted but someone who just chloroformed and duct taped their child and the kid survived? The liberty of the parent to direct the care of their child is a fundamental right unless the parental action or decision ends life.

Here’s where I have to ask, HSLDA, if you’re not condoning and enabling child abuse, why does the Parental Rights Amendment that you promote provide no exceptions to strict scrutiny other than if the parent causes the death of their child?

Moving on, let’s look at some of the other things that HSLDA says on their website.

In my post on HSLDA and abuse, I argued that HSLDA should not be getting involved in cases involving child abuse until the abuse issue is resolved. HSLDA states that if homeschooling is an issue in an abuse investigation they will assist the family until the homeschooling issue is resolved—note that this is HSLDA getting involved in the homeschool issue while the abuse investigation is ongoing. More importantly, they state that they may get involved, and have gotten involved in the past, when there is a 4th amendment issue but no homeschool issue, in an effort to establish legal precedent. This is not to downplay the importance of protecting the 4th amendment search and seizure protections, but HSLDA is an organization that’s supposed to be about homeschooling and the legal precedent for exigent circumstances in child abuse investigations is well established. The law already provides broad protection for families under investigation. Why is HSLDA getting involved unless they are trying to change precedent to make it harder to protect children from abuse? Existing precedent clearly establishes that it is only exigent circumstances if the child is in immediate danger and there is no time to get a warrant. HSLDA needs to answer and explain exactly how they think the precedent in these cases needs to be changed.

Writing in opposition to proposed background checks for homeschool parents in the UK, HSLDA quotes a Norman Wells who argues, “If it is deemed unsafe for children to be with their parents during normal school hours, it is equally unsafe for them to be with their parents in the evenings, at weekends and during the school holidays.” To put it another way, as long as CPS leaves the children in the home, whether during the course of an investigation, or even a conviction for child abuse, they are opposing restrictions. It does not matter if a background check turns up multiple convictions for child abuse, if the child is in the home it appears that HSLDA thinks they should homeschool. HSLDA needs to clarify if this is truly their position because if so, it runs counter to their claim that they believe in protecting children from abuse.

And, speaking in regards to the Banita M. Jacks case, where Jacks murdered her four children (believing them to be possessed by demons) several months after removing them from the prying eyes of public school teachers, they suggest that most cases of abuse in homeschooling exist within families already known to law enforcement, and that “being in school wouldn’t all of a sudden make those children safe.” Again, HSLDA seems to be arguing that even parents who are already known to law enforcement and CPS as abusive should still be allowed to homeschool.

And here is another article where Christopher Klicka argues that the child abuse prevention system is too aggressive. Here is Scott Summerville claiming that parents who withdraw their kids from school to hide abuse already have social services on their trail. No suggestion that these parents should be prohibited from homeschooling if they’re withdrawing their kids to hide abuse, just an assertion that CPS will be watching.

I am unable to find an instance where HSLDA has indicated that they believe that abusive parents should be prevented from homeschooling. This does, of course, fit with the fundamental rights language. Again, speaking to the legal strategy I would use, if I were to set out trying to to establish homeschooling as a fundamental right, I need to protect the right of child abusers and the the really icky people to homeschool too. Fundamental rights aren’t just about the rights of the people we like, they’re about the rights of everybody.

I really hope that I’m wrong, and that HSLDA just made a mistake in judgment that they’re going to correct. The more I think about it though, the only thing that makes sense to me is that HSLDA is doing what they’re doing with abusers as part of a well thought out legal strategy with the end game being the Supreme Court ruling that homeschooling is a fundamental right that is subject to virtually zero regulations. HSLDA is welcome to tell me that I’m way off base with this. I hope I’m way off base with this. The idea that HSLDA would be using children who have been abused by their parents as pawns to expand the right to homeschooling is too horrific for me to really want to contemplate. But yet, it’s also the strategy that makes logical sense if an expanded fundamental right to homeschooling is the goal.

Please, HSLDA, prove me wrong on this. Stop fighting for the right of abusers to homeschool, and start taking proactive steps to ensure that homeschool children are protected from abuse. This is one time where I really don’t want to be right.

How do you even parody a song about a thrift shop?

Sat, 11 May 2013 11:40:32 -0400

Yesterday I posted about the rather horrible Christian knock-off of Mackelmore’s “Thrift Shop,” and made the aside that it wasn’t a parody because it wasn’t any sort of commentary on the original. That got me thinking, is it even possible to parody a hipster rapper who’s singing about shopping at thrift stores ironically? Trying to parody that seems like dividing by zero.

Love. One of the great things about the new Star Trek cast is...

Fri, 10 May 2013 21:59:12 -0400

Love. One of the great things about the new Star Trek cast is that they respect the history of the show.

On a marginally related note, it’s probably worth noting that as much hand wringing and discussion there’s been over the years about whether or not an out actor could carry a big summer action blockbuster movie, nobody cares that Zachary Quinto is playing a version of Spock that’s romantically involved with Uhura. That’s progress towards the utopian future of Star Trek, I think.

You know what we need? A Christian version of "Thrift Shop"-- said no one ever

Fri, 10 May 2013 17:04:00 -0400

No, just no. I mean, there’s even an unironic side-hug reference. Back in the olden days, the church was a driving factor in creating music and art. Today, we’re unironically ripping off hipster rap—and no, this isn’t a parody because it’s not any sort of commentary on the original. It’s time to do better and actually make good art.

Can we all just agree now that Rule 34 should stay on the Internet?

Fri, 10 May 2013 03:34:06 -0400

Because as hilarious as this Bravo Watch What Happens Live clip of Alyson Hannigan and Zachary Quinto being asked to guess whether picture thumbnails are from ordinary sci-fi fan art or the Rule 34 variety is, something just feels wrong when this shit escapes the dark and disturbing corners of the Internet. Like, this is the sort of thing that is supposed to stay on Deviant Art and the brony forums and to get mocked on 4chan, it’s not supposed to escape out into the real world where the actors who got Rule 34’d are commenting on it. I’m almost as disturbed as the time that Newsweek wrote about slash fiction.

But the video is hilarious, so there’s that.

HSLDA and child abuse

Thu, 09 May 2013 14:00:50 -0400

I’ve made no secret that I don’t exactly have the most positive opinion about the Homeschool Legal Defense Association’s brand of religious fundamentalism but I never thought that HSLDA was covering for and protecting child abuse. For all of their scare tactics, and for as much as I think that a legal defense organization is unnecessary in a post-Tim Tebow world, I always assumed that the training-up-the-next-generation-of-culture-warriors aside, it really was just about keeping homeschooling legal. That if they were representing a family, it was because the family was wrongly accused. I found out recently that I was completely wrong. HSLDA is pursuing a course of action that is helping to protect child abusers while doing nothing to protect kids.

Blogger Libby Anne at Love, Joy, Feminism, herself a K-12 homeschool graduate, has a series of posts exploring HSLDA and child abuse. It’s a long read but I encourage you to take your time to go read it all, it’s an informative series and it opened my eyes as to just how out there HSLDA really is on this. Seriously, go read it, I’ll wait until you get back.

Have you read everything? Good, let’s continue. On Tuesday, HSLDA posted an indirect response to Libby Anne’s series by way of a message posted on their facebook page. Their response is basically a bunch of buzzwords and denials that doesn’t address any of the actual allegations. Libby Anne responds here.

I had no idea about what HSLDA was really up to and my memories are filtered through the eyes of a homeschool kid reading the Court Report. I rather suspect that this is news to some of the people reading this as well. It makes me mad because this organization that I thought was there to protect homeschooling has ended up protecting abusers. They’d trot out the “success stories,” but they only ever care about the kids if the kids are making them look good. They don’t actually care about the safety and well-being of homeschooled kids, or if they do, their actions are an awfully funny way of showing it.

And here’s the thing. The advice that HSLDA gives about not letting people into your home without a warrant, not talking without an attorney present, the whole nine yards, is absolutely the right legal advice that attorneys should be giving their clients. The question though, is why is HSLDA even getting involved in child abuse cases? Unless they think that parental rights and homeschooling include the right to lock your kid in a cage or beat, oh sorry, they call it spanking, your kid until you leave bruises and welts, just because a family homeschools shouldn’t mean that a child abuse investigation is automatically a homeschooling issue. HSLDA shouldn’t even be getting involved until the abuse investigation is resolved. And yet, when a friend sent me the link a few days ago to the story of a parents that beat their children until they broke bones and told me to, “prepare to raeg,” I wasn’t the least bit surprised to find out that HSLDA had represented the parents and claimed to World Net Daily that it was social workers persecuting a good Christian homeschool family.

Defending homeschooling should not mean defending abusers. That should be obvious, but apparently it’s not. I would argue that if you really want to protect the ability to homeschool, making it clear that the homeschool community has a zero tolerance stance towards child abuse is the best way to do it. If HSLDA’s behavior in abuse cases ends up becoming synonymous in people’s minds with homeschooling, then any parent who decides to homeschool is going to be considered suspect. The best way to protect homeschooling is to stop covering for abuse and to make it clear that it will not be tolerated. Covering it up, denying, and stonewalling protects no one but abusers.

Because of this, I am joining with Homeschooler’s Anonymous in saying that HSLDA Must Act. HSLDA needs to stop covering for abusers, they need to acknowledge the problem, and they need to implement an education program to teach their members how to recognize abuse. Instead of instilling so much fear in families about child protective services that people are afraid to call, they need to educate families that abuse can happen in even “good Christian homeschool families” and that child protective services is there to protect kids in those circumstances. It is high time for HSLDA to take proactive steps to combat abuse.

If you agree that HSLDA must act, add your name to the petition. HSLDA needs to see that this isn’t just a few disgruntled people but that the homeschool community as a whole believes that it’s time for them to do something about this. If you’re a homeschool parent, we especially need you to add your name to the list of people calling them to act. And while you’re at it, I’d strongly suggest considering cancelling your membership. If their complicity in abuse starts hitting them where it hurts—their pockets—they’re going to be more willing to act.

I had forgotten just how entertaining the Zachary Quinto and...

Wed, 08 May 2013 07:23:18 -0400

I had forgotten just how entertaining the Zachary Quinto and Chris Pine Star Trek promotional tour animated gifs were last go around.