A Stitch in Haste

Chronic "I'm not a bigot!" bigot Jeff Jacoby, whom I've lampooned before, might want to consider becoming a libertarian, because "it's all about the children" --

On April 20, in a story headlined "Parents rip school over gay storybook," the Globe reported on the latest controversy in Lexington, where school officials committed to normalizing same-sex marriage have clashed with residents who don’t want homosexual themes introduced in class without advance parental notice.
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But homosexuality and gay marriage are not like arithmetic or geography; they cannot be separated from questions of morality, justice, and decency. No matter how a school chooses to deal with sexual issues, it promotes certain values — values that some parents will fervently welcome and that others will just as fervently reject. And what is true of human sexuality is true of other issues that touch on deeply felt religious, political, or ideological values.

When it comes to the education of children, there is always an agenda — and those who don’t share that agenda may find themselves belittled, marginalized, or ignored.

Put aside the sheer absurdity of the claim that homosexuality "cannot be separated from questions of morality, justice and decency." (Such a view is the very definition of the bigotry that Jacoby insists that he does not possess.) Put aside the downright obnoxious lament that it is "traditional" folk like Jacoby — and not gays — who "find themselves belittled, marginalized, or ignored" (can he be serious?). Finally, put aside the fact that books like Heather Has Two Mommies and King & King tend to have positive rather than normative themes and goals (i.e., "This is how the world is..." rather than "This is how the world should be...")

Let's just take Jacoby and people like him as a given: as taxpayers with children — and with rights — who want to see their kids educated in a certain way, chock full of questions (and the "correct" answers) about "morality, justice, and decency." How best to accommodate him?

By scrapping public schools entirely (i.e, eliminating the public provision of education) and replacing it with a system of public financing of education through vouchers.

In a private, competitive education market, if people like Jacoby are truly the majority of parents (i.e., customers), then the majority of schools would certainly cater to them. If gay or gay-friendly families are truly a sizeable minority of parents (i.e., customers), then there would be at least some schools that would cater to them. Demand creates its own supply, and everyone is happy.

But of course this is not at all what Jacoby and people like him want. They have no real desire for choice or even for an a la carte "opt out" system in which they can cherry-pick which elements of the curriculum their students will be taught. They love the notion of a command-and-control public school system as much as any liberal; they just want to be the commanders and controllers themselves.

If you're truly "just" an opponent to a gay-friendly curriculum for your kids -- and only for your kids -- then congratulations, you might be a libertarian.

But if in reality you're opposed not only to gay-friendly education but also to gay rights and gay marriage (and gays generally), then you're probably better off in the conservative camp with Jacoby and the rest of the "I'm not a bigot!" bigots.

Unlike public education, the choice is yours.

I was fortunate (blessed?) enough to score an early copy of "Jesus Camp" from Netflix, even though it was flagged as "Long Wait."


As I watched the movie, as I saw so many young minds being twisted, knotted, ripped, shredded and generally reconstituted into crippled mush, I could feel an emotion rising up inside me. A complex emotion, an amalgam of baser feelings. Part rage, part terror. Part indignation, part resignation. Part confusion, part resolution.

It was an emotion I had only felt once before: on the morning of October 12, 1998, when I learned Matthew Shepard had died. Which, incidentally, was also the last time I cried.

One overarching theme resonates throughout "Jesus Camp": We truly are in a culture war. Complete with soldiers, training academies, casualties — and bloodshed.

Get your hands on a copy of this movie and watch it. Because there is one thing about which we and the theocrats agree wholeheartedly: Too much is at stake.

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Twenty-five years ago, the novelist James Clavell was horrified to learn that his young daughter had been taught to recite, verbatim and perfectly, the Pledge of Allegiance but had no idea at all what the words "pledge" and "allegiance" actually meant. His response to the incident was a dystopic short story, set in an American classroom shortly after the United States had been conquered by some unspecified foreign power. He called it simply "The Children's Story." While you're waiting for your copy of "Jesus Camp" to arrive from Netflix, take the time to read Clavell's prescient warning.

While "Jesus Camp" grabs all the headlines, another documentary that chronicles Evangelical indoctrination of children should not be overlooked — HBO's "Friends of God."

A clip:


"As a Christian you cannot believe in evolution..."

One of the great paradoxes of dogmatic monotheistic religion is why their God should demand a blind reliance on faith over reason. If Man is created in God's image (or more generally, if God created us), then He also created our rational faculty, no? How can using the brain that God supposedly gave us be a sin?

The resolution of the contradiction is of course that "faith in God" actually reduces down to "faith in clerics." It's not about obeying God; it's about obeying the preacher.

Meanwhile, a factoid mentioned in "Jesus Camp" is that something like 73% of all home-schooled children are in Evangelical and other religious families. The parents of these children are not trying to provide a "better" education for their children, but rather a redacted education. Their primary, often their exclusive, goal is to "shield" their children from evolution and from science in general.

I am a fervent supporter of the right to home school, but I reject the premise that there is a right to neglect your child by starving them of basic instruction.

(Via badscience by way of Respectful Insolence.)

Another example of radical social conservatives switching tactics from "our beliefs" to "nothing" --

Maryland school officials say they will respond as early as this week to a request to stop Montgomery County from beginning sex-education classes this month that include lessons on homosexuality and the use of condoms.
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"This is part of a growing trend across the country," said Peter Sprigg, a county resident who served on the advisory council and has written two books on the homosexual debate. "Homosexual activists are aggressively promoting full acceptance of their lifestyle in the schools."

And the activists calling for curriculum redaction -- in this instance Citizens for Responsible Curriculum and the (never-boring) reparative therapy peddlers at Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays -- aren't "aggressive"? What can be more "aggressive" that trying to gain veto power (i.e., a censor's pen) over a school curriculum?

Just as these radical social conservatives try to distort "reframe" the debate over evolution (i.e., science) versus creationism (i.e., religion) in order to give a false sense of legitimacy to their brazenly theocratic agenda, so too do these Maryland redactors try to reframe the debate over sex education from a factual lesson plan (i.e., "some people have same-gender sexual attraction") to a political agenda (i.e., "gay is okay"). That is simply not the case.

The groups "read between the lines and assume the schools are promoting homosexuality," [an opponent] said. "But none of that is actually in the curriculum.

School officials agreed. "Half of what [the groups] are charging is in the curriculum is not in the curriculum," said Brian Edwards, a county public schools spokesman.

Same with condoms: There is a simple, straightforward difference between teaching "condoms prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV," and "premarital sex is okay."

This faux debate and manufactured outrage is not much different from the situation in Massachusetts, where teaching a fact (i.e., "gay marriage exists in this state") is somehow viewed as a political statement (i.e., "gay marriage is okay"). They are simply not the same thing, and no unbiased observer could conclude otherwise.

The most recent example of this bait-and-switch is unrepentant bigot (and perpetual Catholic apologist) Jeff Jacoby:

When school systems deal with issues of sexuality, religion, politics, or the family, there is always an overriding agenda -- the agenda of whichever side has greater political clout. Parents who don't like the values being forced down students' throats have two options. One is to educate their children privately. The other is to find enough allies to force their own values down students' throats.

This is, of course, utter nonsense. Again, "gay marriage exists in Massachusetts" is a fact, a politically neutral fact. Teaching facts is the raison d'être of schools and proves nothing relative to radical social conservative indignation.

To insist, with a sweeping generalization, that "there is always an overriding agenda" may say something about Jacoby's worldview, but it does not describe the teaching of objective, neutral facts. (For a real example of a political agenda in the classroom, see here.)

There is something deeply invidious about parents who would rather have their children raised ignorant than taught "evil" facts, such as "gay marriage is legal in Massachusetts" or "condoms work." Facts are never evil, and their suppression is never righteous.

Cato@Liberty on homeschooling:

A home schooler, 13-year-old Evan O'Dorney, is once again the winner of the Scripps National ... Spelling Bee. In fact, home schoolers took fully one third of the top 15 spots in the Bee, utterly out of proportion with their share (about 1/40th) of the U.S. student population.
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Imagine what heights America could achieve if every family had the freedom to choose from among homeschooling, public schooling, independent schooling, or some combination of the three[.]

Yes, certainly, but let's not ignore the other major reason that parents choose to homeschool:

According to the US government's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 72 per cent of home-schooling parents interviewed said that they were motivated by the desire to provide religious and moral instruction.

Translation: Radical Evangelical parents less interested in providing "better" education for their children and more interested in providing "pure" education -- complete with creationism, the War of Northern Aggression, "condoms don't work" and "homosexuality can be cured." Anyone think these kids can spell a multisyllabic word more complicated than "Leviticus"?

Keep the "joy of homeschooling" in mind when you see reports like this:

"Poll after poll shows that approximately one out of two people in America reject evolution. They think the scientists, teachers and textbooks are wrong," [an education professor] says. An even higher proportion of home-schooling parents may reject evolution, [he] thinks. "And they're going to be teaching science?"

Radical Evangelicals have now created ("creationisted"?) an entire generation of homeschooled Christian ignoramuses. Which probably explains the rise of substandard radical Evangelical institutions such as Patrick Henry College and Liberty University, which are charged not with educating but with reinforcing dogma (which is increasingly homeschooled dogma).

Libertarians, who are absolutely correct to praise legitimate homeschooling, should not ignore the problematic underbelly of the movement. There is bitter to go with the sweet.

Even in a libertarian paradise, there would be no right to neglect your children. Under what circumstances religious homeschooling constitutes child neglect is an open question.

One of the sillier maneuvers that anti-gay bigots sometimes attempt is to conflate a committed gay relationship with sex-sex-sex. So, for example, there is nothing "inappropriate" about reading kindergarten students the story of Cinderella and Price Charming, but reading them a comparable book about two princes finding each other is somehow automatically perverted, or at least per se age-inappropriate (at any age whatsoever -- go figure).

Now, one bigot couple in Canada is trying to carry this inanity from fiction into reality:

The family of a Grade 7 student is trying to transfer to another school because the boy's teacher has placed a photo of his partner on his desk, and is answering students' questions about his personal life, said a source within the division.
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The family says age 12 is too young for such classroom discussions, said the source: "The lady says, 'I don't think this is right.' The issue here is, the kid is confused. The kid is coming home and talking about sexual orientation."

How exactly is this confusing, especially to a 12-year old: "Most of the time, a man falls in love with a woman and a woman falls in love with a man. But sometimes a man will fall in love with another man and a woman will fall in love with another woman." That can only be confusing to a child if bigot parents go out of their way to make it confusing.

And let's not forget what can be confusing: The child of same-sex parents being told that it is somehow "inappropriate" for couples like her parents to put pictures of each other on their desks the same way that other kids' parents get to do. But of course, no amount of collateral psychological damage is too much for a bigot parent hell-bent on seeing his precious little snowflake grow up to be a god-fearing, gay-fearing Christian.

As I have mentioned in another context: Such parents are not interested in ensuring that their children receive a good education. They are only concerned that their children receive a redacted education.

(Via Family Equality Council.)

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Maybe the provincial Human Rights Commission should get involved. (Or not.)

So no sooner do I post this comment at another blog...

There are two categories of parents who homeschool: those who want their kids to learn more than what they could learn in public school, and those who want their kids to learn less (i.e., no evolution, no reproductive anatomy, no teh gheys).

The question therefore becomes: which groups are growing or shrinking, both in absolute terms and relative to the other group?

In the U.S. those trends are depressing, approaching terrifying.

...Than this appears via yet another blog:

If you can read at a fifth-grade level, you can homeschool.

Care to guess which group is making such a claim, and why?

As someone who has been warning my fellow libertarians for some time now about not being too absolutist in insisting that there is an unlimited right of parents to homeschool their children, I felt an especial sense of Whoa! upon hearing that an intermediate appeals court in California held that there is no right whatsoever to home school and that non-credentialed homeschooling can even be prosecuted as a criminal act:

The Second District Court of Appeal ruled that California law requires parents to send their children to full-time public or private schools or have them taught by credentialed tutors at home.
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"California courts have held that ... parents do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children," Justice H. Walter Croskey said in the 3-0 ruling issued on Feb. 28. "Parents have a legal duty to see to their children's schooling under the provisions of these laws." Parents can be criminally prosecuted for failing to comply, Croskey said.
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The ruling was applauded by a director for the state's largest teachers union.

I have no doubt of that last sentence.

It is a fine line (or a massive chasm, depending on your point of view) between insisting, as I do, that there is no right to badly homeschool your child and this court's ruling that there is no right to homeschool whatsoever. Regardless, I do not think it is a line that can be crossed.

The authority to regulate homeschooling derives from the obligation of the government to protect the incompetent -- in this case minor children. To homeschool poorly is simply a variation of child neglect -- malnutrition of the mind, if you will. Indeed, this particular court case began not as a homeschooling charge but as a physical abuse complaint.

But child neglect, like any other offense against another person, should have to be proven on a case-by-case basis. To adopt a bright-line rule that any homeschooling is "bad" homeschooling is arbitrary, irrational -- and likely an unconstitutional violation of due process. Even in the knowledge that some homeschooling will be bad homeschooling, the state should be required to demonstrate that a particular parent is failing to properly homeschool a particular child, just as it should be required to demonstrate that a particular parent is neglecting or abusing a particular child.*

(Indeed, the court addressed this question and preposterously dismissed it: "It is unreasonably difficult and expensive for a state to supervise parents who instruct children in their homes." Facts to support that outlandish, sweeping and conclusory assertion: none.)

The only three explanations for a bright-line rule criminalizing all non-credentialed homeschooling are: (a) intellectual laziness by legislators and judges; (b) budgetary stinginess by the government, or (c) pandering to teacher unions. But not "the best interests of the child." That is the one factor that ought to trump all else and demand a (rebuttable) presumption of propriety regarding homeschooling.

How sad that it does not.

The case is In re Rachel L., No. JD00773 (Ct.App.Cal., 28 February 2008) (PDF - 18 pages) More thoughts at Cato@Liberty South Puget Sound, QandO.

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*Regarding this "particular parent failing to properly homeschool this particular child," the record should reflect that it was indeed a case of radical fundamentalist Christians trying to provide a typical (i.e., redacted, inadequate and incorrect) "Bible-based" pseudo-education of the kind I have warned about. Indeed, it was the children themselves who sued to be removed from their abusive (but "Christian") parents and thereby receive a bona fide education (with fewer beatings in the process).

As often heretofore pointed out, rights guaranteed by the Constitution may not be abridged by legislation which has no reasonable relation to some purpose within the competency of the state. The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.
--Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925)

Some commentators, not unreasonably, are pointing out that the decision by a California intermediate appeals court finding that there is no "right to uncredentialed homeschooling" is actually based on long-standing precedent, including Pierce v. Society of Sisters, quoted and hyperlinked above.

One succinct example from QandO:

So, I'm not sure what all the uproar is about, at least in terms of the legal issues. The Supreme Court made this determination in 1925.

The "uproar," as I explained in a comment at that blog, is as follows:

Are you suggesting that Supreme Court decisions are never wrong or outrageous?

And, incidentally, your reading of Pierce is itself wrong. It did not explicitly hold there is "no right to homeschool." It held that a state may "require that all children of proper age attend some school." The notion that (acceptable) homeschooling is not "some school" is a novel and controversial interpretation.

Given that Pierce is widely considered to be one of the first "substantive due process" cases, it is hardly surprising that libertarians are aghast at seeing it now used as a sword against parental autonomy. It would be akin to suggesting that Roe v. Wade authorized state laws requiring compulsory abortions.

Again, the question, properly framed, is not whether states should have the power to ban homeschooling, but instead what authority states should have to prevent bad homeschooling, with "bad" determined on a case-by-case basis in the same way that the state intervenes in matters of child abuse or neglect.