conuly | JFC, the HSLDA is well and truly unhinged

For reference, despite their claims they're not really for homeschoolers. They're for fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers who are really into spanking their kids. If you're homeschooling because, say, you hate homework and like sleeping in till noon, they don't want anything to do with you.

They're still happy to take your money, though!

And this is what they've been blathering about apparently the past few months.

In Maine, you're required to notify the state every year that you're homeschooling, by sending a notice with your child's age and the year you'll be teaching them. And apparently the HSDLA is trying to rile people up because Maine is now offering a form (!!!) and that form has space for the birthdate instead of age (!!!) and, for administrative purposes, sets start and end dates for the school year (!!!) and that's just wrong. Oh, and they also tell parents that if they don't provide an email address they won't get acknowledgement of receipt in their email, and that's bad too because parents might feel they have to provide an email address. And they ask parents in the form to confirm that they'll follow all relevant homeschool laws, even though the law doesn't require parents to confirm that.

I'm counting four articles about this up at the HSDLA website, one of which compares put-upon homeschool parents who are valiantly fighting against government overreach (how dare they ask for the child's birthdate instead of their age!) to Frederick Douglass. No, really, they quoted him: “Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.”

Because, you know, one day you're quietly agreeing to share your child's birthdate instead of their age, and the next you're on a plantation, hoeing cotton.

This, by the way, is also the most ridiculous deliberate misreading of the Bible I've ever seen. There is absolutely no way you can say "The Bible forbids me from ever giving even slightly more information to a government than is legally required, even if it's technically information that they already have" with a straight face.

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From:

alexseanchai

I thought "render unto Caesar" was both famous and not that ambiguous.

From:

conuly

Ah, yes, but if you give Caesar even one penny more, you're sinning.

From:

jack

Now I think about it, the gospels present Jesus' attitude as when comes to the regular civil law of the society you actually live in, like traditional jewish law, you should obey a common sense version of the law and not play semantic games, but when it comes to an occupying power like the romans, you should do passive aggressive resistance to the maximum extent you can get away with. Which makes a lot of sense really.

So I'm not surprised they can find a lot of support in the gospels, but only if you consider the USA government as an occupying power (which is true for some cases, but I don't think these people yet).

From:

alexseanchai

fundamentalist Christian types own the US government in its entirety, or anyway those parts Putin doesn't, so I do not understand how they could consider it an occupying force without also recognizing that that makes them the occupying power and consequently in the wrong

…of course there are a great many things about fundamentalist Christian thought I do not understand, generally because my brain's response to noticing I have been practicing doublethink varies from a nails-on-chalkboard screech to the crunchy sound of a five-car pileup, which seems like it ought to be a universal experience (especially among people who contend that Genesis contains exactly one creation narrative and it does not contradict itself, rather than multiple ones that disagree with each other!), but apparently that is not the case

From:

silveradept

Fundamentalist Christianity assumes the existence of themselves and the secular everyone else, because anyone not them is secular, and purports that the state, since it is not fundamentalist Christian theocracy, must be the oppressive seculars who intend to stop them from bringing about the destiny of the country. That's how they make themselves into an oppressed minority, because there aren't enough people who think exactly like them to be a majority.

From:

alexseanchai

ugh. yeah, that sounds about right.

From:

alexseanchai

Yeah, how dare they submit to helping fund any initiatives that might go to undeserving—

“[...] Then a black man, traveling in his pickup truck came that way and saw the fellow. He was moved to tears. He stopped, bound up the wounds as best he could, drew some water from his water jug to wipe away the blood, and then laid him on the backseat of the pickup truck. He drove into Albany and took him to the hospital. He said to the nurse, “You take good care of this white man. I found him on the highway. Here are the only $2 I have. You keep an account. When payday comes, I will come back and settle up with you.”

“Now, if you had been the man held up by the gangsters, which of these three – the white preacher, the white song leader, or the black man – would you consider to have been your neighbor?”

The teacher of the adult Bible class said, “Of course the…I mean…the one who treated him kindly.”

—Cotton Patch Luke, tr. Clarence Jordan

—wait a minute…

I have a distinct recollection of the entire Cotton Patch New Testament being freely available online and yet it is not, and though I do seem to have found where, the earliest Wayback Machine crawled that page is still later than the update to that page describing how the copyright holders told the people whose typing-it-up labor they probably stole to take it down. I am displeased. A few books are still up elsewhere but only a few.

From:

lydy

Ok, give me back my eyes. They rolled so far they fell out of my head and I can't find them, because I can't see without my eyes.

From:

conuly

Sorry, I'm not legally obligated to do this and, you know, responding to reasonable requests is a bad idea. What if you expect me to ALWAYS return your eyes to you? Better play it safe.

From:

lydy

ROTFLMAO.

Hey, found my eyes while rolling about! They were under the sofa. So there!

From:

siderea

The actual page at HSLDA.org linked to in that article 404s now, but I dug it out of the Internet Archive.

What it actually says is:

At the meetings where I spoke, I shared the downsides of giving officials what they want.

First, every additional place a child’s birth date is listed increases the odds that an unscrupulous person will steal that information and use it for unlawful purposes. This could include obtaining a credit card in a child’s name and running up unpayable debt.

Second, families who submit are giving the Department encouragement to add yet more demands not authorized by law. Finally, families who submit send a silent message: “Keep it up, it’s okay to demand this information.”

So, while I appreciate your contention that HSDLA is a bunch of fundamentalist wackjob child beaters, they are apparently horrible people who are basically correct about this. Speaking as someone very concerned about health data and technology, I only wish everybody else took the demand for disclosure of DoBs as seriously.

I would really appreciate it if non-funadmentalist wackjob child beaters would stop treating PII disclosure as NBD. It's very irritating to us hackers to have number-of-the-beast nuts be the only people who actually listen to us when we talk about these things.

And as a side note, I'm pleased to watch them use their resources to push back on bureaucrats inventing more and more form fields, without legislative justification, for them to fill out. Pretend I put a link to "A Dollar a Question" here. They are absolutely correct that letting it slide lets the nose of the camel into the tent.

Everybody who screams bloody murder when bureaucrats helpfully invent more and more paperwork for other people to do is helping shift the larger norms around wasting other people's time (and exposing them to data theft risks). So good for them. What they're doing, everybody should be doing.

I'm counting four articles about this up at the HSDLA website

Where are you finding these? I only found one article about ME at all, and it was something about grandparent visitation from 2007.

From:

alexseanchai

…that is a good point

From:

conuly

I just hit the search box for Maine. I found four.

From:

silveradept

That sounds like an argument for government answering both questions of "do you really need this data?" and "How do I know you'll actually protect my data?", both of which are made by more than just this group, I would hope.

Given how many people have given up hope on the second question, they may not even think it worthwhile to contest the first, since it doesn't appear to matter if it's compromised in one or a hundred places, once it gets out, and there's no obvious thunderous repercussion to any entity that has their data breached.

If they wanted to be seen as credible on the issue, the HSDLA could do a lot to first not behave as fundamentalist wackjob child beaters.

From:

chelseagirl

How are these children even going to function? There are many good reasons to homeschool, but none of them involve teaching your children to hyper-overread one book, in translations of varying accuracy, in ways that will have you opt out of basic compliance with laws which are enacted for you benefit.

From:

maju

I recently read a book ("Educated" by Tara Westover: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35133922-educated) in which the author was "homeschooled" by her parents. Nobody in her family seemed to know her actual birthdate because her father was so paranoid about government interference that he did not register the births of several of his children.

From:

conuly

Shockingly, they're not the only ones. Not getting a BC, even a delayed one, is a bit unusual, but a shocking number of these guys don't get their kids SSNs because technically you don't have to. And even when they do get their kids all typical and/or required identification, they don't always hand those off to their kids at the age of majority.

From:

greghousesgf

more dopey crap from bible thumpers. I just feel sorry for those kids. (and I used to envy homeschooled kids....)

From:

landofnowhere

Whew, somebody else who gets how awful HSLDA is. I'm pro-homeschooling on balance, but every so often I see a left-libertarian share an HSLDA pro-homeschooling meme on Facebook, and I cringe.

As I understand it, their MO is pretty much to get people worked up about how their rights! to homeschooling! are being threatened! -- even though homeschooling is legal in all 50 states and minimally regulated in many -- so that they will give HSLDA their money. But then the vast majority of homeschooling-related court cases are custody battles between divorced parents, which HSLDA won't get involved in -- because family values! -- so then HSLDA ends up with $$$ to spend on conservative causes, because *clearly* LGBTQs are the biggest threat to homeschooling!

And my understanding is that it has only gotten worse over time -- back in the 80's and 90's they at least helped lobby for homeschooling to be legal and transparently regulated, even if they had a tendency to steamroll over local grassroots activists. But now they don't have anything better to do than stir up panic by complaining about having to fill out forms.

(Back in the Obama administration they were also all over the homeschooling family who was seeking asylum in the US because their kids had been forced to go to school in Germany. But of course these days it's *crickets* when it comes to any asylum seekers.)

(Is NYHEN still a thing? Their "current state government issues" page says "This page was last updated on March 11, 2015.")

From:

conuly

Nevermind that of course the German homeschoolers could have, much more easily, moved to Austria or any other EU state and homeschooled there.

From:

lilysea

Because, you know, one day you're quietly agreeing to share your child's birthdate instead of their age, and the next you're on a plantation, hoeing cotton.

Oh, but I do like your snark here! ^_^

From:

lilysea

I'm counting four articles about this up at the HSDLA website, one of which compares put-upon homeschool parents who are valiantly fighting against government overreach (how dare they ask for the child's birthdate instead of their age!) to Frederick Douglass. No, really, they quoted him: “Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.”

Because, you know, one day you're quietly agreeing to share your child's birthdate instead of their age, and the next you're on a plantation, hoeing cotton.

By the way, I just read a graphic novel which, among other things, talks about the connection between home schooling and racism. The authors mother literally decided to home school her daughter because the author's MOTHER had unpleasant experiences during school integration.

No Ivy League by Hazel Newlevant.

"When 17-year-old Hazel Newlevant takes a summer job
clearing ivy from the forest in her home town of Portland, Oregon, her only expectation is to earn a little money.

Homeschooled, affluent, and sheltered,
Hazel soon finds her job working side by side with at-risk teens to be an initiation into a new world that she has no skill in navigating.

This uncomfortable and compelling memoir is an important story of a girl's awakening to the racial insularity of her life, the power of white privilege, and the
hidden story of segregation in Portland."

https://www.bookdepository.com/No-Ivy-League/9781549303050

Edited (typo that significantly changed the meaning - it was the MOTHER, not the author who had unpleasant experiences during school integration) Date: 2019-09-12 12:53 pm (UTC)