Of course, these days they’re more subtle (or, if you’d prefer, cowardly) about the anti-Semitic assumptions underlying their opposition to participating in public K-12 schools. Our valiant defender of Christian values, assuming he returns to this lion’s den, will no doubt claim he has nothing against the Jews. He might, however, take issue with “secular humanists” or “cultural Marxists” or “Hollywood” who are trying to push “alien values” on good white Christian Americans like his family through the public school system.
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Most religious private schools and homeschooling movements have their roots in segregation. The moment Brown v Board of Education came down, banning segregation in schools, private religious schools and homeschooling programs proliferated. Prior to Brown there were few Christian private schools, and what few there were came from Catholic programs largely run by the Jesuits.
After Brown, these schools and programs became an all-out attack on desegregated public schools. You talk about the “quality” of public schools waning, but that’s one of the attacks that bigots have made on the system - basically, if they are forced to allow Black students into the same schools a whites, then their goal is to remove “worthy” whites from those schools and defund public schools at every level; federal, state, and local. The ultimate expression of that is the voucher system, where they can come full circle and fund segregated private schools with tax money taken out of public school funding.
I’m guessing you didn’t teach that history to your homeschooled kids.
And if you don’t understand why segregation is violence, you didn’t learn history well yourself.
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Given the silence of the OP, I suggest we just let this drop-we’re mostly agreeing with ourselves here.
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I grew up in a town that had a lot of very evangelical churches and families. There were strong campaigns against such abominations as ‘sex education’ in schools - to the point that the excellent sex-ed teacher I learned from was fired.
My high school was also rife with teen pregnancies. There were so many teen parents it became something of an embarrassment to the PTB. The Venn diagram of evangelical/Catholic school kids and teen pregnancies was almost a perfect circle.
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I still laugh when I think of some of thunderf00t’s videos about those two. Not to mention some other rando (forget the guy’s name) he had fun with back in the “Why do people laugh at creationists?” series, IIRC.
The fact that Ray has the nickname “banana man”…LOL.
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Erm, I have a different perspective than you do and a lot of the other posters here in the bb of Boing Boing.
Yes, I was home schooled (between 8th to 12th grade).
Yes, it was a christian program (a video tape correspondence program based in Pensacola in the late 90’s).
Yes, I would consider myself a christian but my beliefs are far from the evangelical and traditionalist views espoused in the program in which I was instructed in.
You’re assuming that when your kids get older they would hold those views taught at home. Yes sex is more than just a physical act and that fact is being more increasingly talked about in secular leaning school systems. There’s issues being discussed surrounding sexual violence and consent… issues around health and public health… issues around ethics in businesses and sexual harassment… and issues around emotional well being too. The list goes on. It may not be talked about the same way in your home but when your kids become adults they will eventually end up hearing about them and they will still make their own minds up for better or for worse about those topics. The only difference is that the kids in public schools will hear about them earlier and in a moderated setting where such discussion also takes place.
Defining people by if they like the same, opposite or any sex at all as an identity alone is just well, offensive. I’m hetero but that’s not the only thing about me and I don’t judge others based on those preferences exclusively hahaha. I remember a class I once took in english about the use of gender in language about what gender to use for God. The course (as well as most biblical texts) use he and him for an stand in for an unknown or undefined gender. These days I use they/them for God. It sounds like you would be upset if a few of your kids’ classmates used they and them pronouns if they went to public school.
Most home schooling programs at the time in the US at the time of my schooling were heavily leaning into the evangelical world and marketed to such. I was a troubled kid at the time. A kid who flunked 7th grade math and english yet I was able to hold at least an B+ average in remedial 9th grade math and 10th english when I was accidently placed in those courses in summer school (mainly to spite the teachers who flunked me for not doing homework and showing answers in my work). I was also expelled from school after making what’s best described as an snack food IED to impress a girl (she found it hilarious, my teacher didn’t). My emotional intelligence was utter garbage at the time and i’m glad that empathy and mental health is being focused on in public schools these days much to the disgust of many conservatives.
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I came here to say the same thing. Thank you so much for saying it far better and quicker than myself.
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Aww, buddy. You thought you were just going to wander into BBS and get the same sort of response you’re used to seeing from conservatives when asked to substantiate their bigotry, but instead you got respectful engagement on every one of your points, including from the author. I bet that felt like a real mic drop for you, huh?
So, are you going to respond to any of the thoughtful, respectful responses or are you going to do what literally every conservative I encounter does when asked to prove or substantiate their stance and go bury your head in the sand?
Looks like the latter. Prove me wrong.
Yeah, they love to crow about the decline of the family, divorce, adultery, etc, despite the fact that areas that trend conservative have far higher incidence of all of the above than liberal areas.
A true American Christian who showed and taught deference and tolerance for all. Kinda like Jesus.
“But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.“
- James 1:22
“So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.”
- Romans 12:2
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You forgot the latest code word “Globalists” and a reference to the bogeyman “George Soros”.
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Which one?
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Right wingers suck at engagement. It’s usually 1-3 scripted points followed by “duh” and various insults. When they have to use their own words to respond, the intelligence level drops precipitously.
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I can say that there are homeschooling resources that can be sought out that help someone to find good secular materials and avoid the xtianist dreck.
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Welcome to BoingBoing.
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IT works better for them when they brigade in teams. But yeah, when it’s just one of them, their job is to run in, scream at people, then run out proud of themselves for giving those liberals what for.
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Last year the Peas Twins’ school went full remote, which I heartily agreed with, but they maintained the same schedule (7:45-2:20) all on Zoom. There was absolutely no way I was going to wake them up that early to sit in front of a monitor for 6 1/2 hours. Instead, I homeschooled them and cobbled together a curriculum that the now-missing interloper would hate. Humanities heavy on critical thinking skills, BLM rallies and The Peoples History of the United States. For the rest of the core curriculum I leaned heavily on Khan Academy. That dude deserves a Nobel prize. It’s really incredible and in dozens of languages. Saved me a ton of wading through fundie rubbish that had their real mission buried under pages and pages of innocuous-sounding word salad.
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To return to the original article…in Cameron’s pitch he says something I’ve heard a thousand times from True Americans:
[People who give me their money] will determine whether or not we live in a free country, and we have freedom of speech, and economic freedom, and educational freedom, and political freedom, and religious freedom.
Running this through ImagiGoogle Translate I got:
“…whether we live in country in which I and my friends are free to do as we please and fuck everybody else, we’re free to rob from the poor to support the rich and fuck everybody else, we have the freedom to be the only ones permitted to speak and fuck everybody else, we are free to teach kids only what we want them to hear and fuck everybody else, and we’re free to run the world according to the One True Faith and fuck everybody else.”
This is why everyone in the entire world wants to come to America. Freedom!!
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Yep. People opt out for many, many, many reasons, not just for xtianist ones. If you continue, I’d “find the others” as it were.
I still want to fund public schools well, though, and treat teachers and staff properly. I think that actually might be a pretty good rule of thumb for finding out if a local or online group matches your values - ask them if they still want good public schools. There are definitely Ayn Randian types that want to FedEx/UPS the public schools, much like they want to end the USPS. And that’s just plain bullshit.
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OH for sure. My favorite being “Look how perfect the banana is!”
“Uh… the banana as we know it is from generations of selective breeding and lucky mutations, and then cloning that one “perfect” plant to grow around the world.”
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Yah, all his misogyny and queerphobia was super funny too. Let’s not forget that that dude is a piece of shit, even if he’s right about some things. He gets mentioned a lot in a positive light here on the BBS and I don’t know why. He was basically leading the GamerGate charge and behind him was the army of chan goons that ruined the lives of a lot of women and queer people. For the lulz.
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