JFC, the HSLDA is well and truly unhinged

[conuly]

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.

Comments

[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.