Quiverfull Movement

It’s a fine line parents walk when training their kids in the way they should go.  I know because I tried with my daughter to do my to give her a good upbringing.  Her father died when she was just 14 and change our entire life.

One never knows what strange twist of fate will change your life forever.

These young people are speaking out about the hurt and speaking out.

Homeschooled Kids, Now Grown, Blog Against the Past

They were homeschooled in Christian families to be dutiful, have many children, and follow tradition. But now they are taking to the Internet to expose their painful pasts.

The Christian homeschooling movement first took off in the early 1980s, in tandem with the broader rise of the religious right. The Home School Legal Defense Association was founded in 1983 to promote homeschooling and protect parents from state oversight. Its founder, Michael Farris, dreamed of creating a generation that could do battle with the corrupt secular world and reclaim the institutions of American life for Jesus.

At the extreme edge of Christian homeschooling culture, the Quiverfull movement, which picked up steam in the late 1980s,preached the duty of women to submit, bear as many children as God would give them, and train them up as dedicated culture warriors, arrows in a divine quiver.

It’s sad when young people are affected by choices their parents made, but you can learn from it and make different choice for you own children,  but don’t be surprised when they have a problem with the  choices  YOU’VE made for them.  Kids don’t come with manuals.

She’s published a  guide  for those planning to flee bad homeschooling situations, as well as what she calls “A Quick and Dirty Sex Ed Guide for Quiverfull Daughters.” Someday she hopes to become an advocate for homeschooled children’s rights, but she writes, “all I’ve got right now is my blog.”

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Homeschool: HSLDA Does No Favors

DOJ seeks deportation of family persecuted in Germany for homeschooling

From William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection, we learn about the case of Uwe and Hannelore Romeike and their children:

A Map of the Legality of Home schooling around the world.

The Romeikes are devout Christians from Germany who wanted to homeschool their children because of what they perceived as the secularist agenda in German public schools. In the United States, the right to homeschool ones’ own children is accepted, although frequently mocked by the left. The homeschoool movement is thriving in the United States, but in Germany it is illegal, a holdover from Nazi-era law.

The Romeikes fled to the United States in 2008 after they faced mounting fines and the potential of imprisonment. The Romeikes sought asylum, and were granted that asylum by Immigration Judge Lawrence O. Burman in a January 26, 2010 decision after a hearing which included not only the Romeikes but also expert witnesses on homeschooling in Germany.

While this case is loosely connected to foreign homeschooling, American homeschoolers need to be cautious in being viewed as linked to a particular ideology. We have seen for decades and across the country that the inaccurate but highly promoted perception–of homeschoolers as being “fringe” and “extreme” and “isolationists,” etc.–has damaged our ability to work with state legislature and local school divisions to improve homeschool laws and regulations. In fact, some would say that he and his money-making machine even stole homeschooling.

In the Romeike case, the Department of Justice argues against granting asylum because the country’s law is neither “selectively enforced” nor “metes out disproportionate punishment” against people of a particular religion. You can find an interesting view on this case here. Be aware that, when Farris and HSLDA became involved in German homeschooling a few years ago, the result was disastrous for the family and for homeschooling.

Mike Farris and his parental rights arguments have been one of homschoolings’ worst enemies. His so-called national “homeschool” organization (which mixes causes) even wrote the two worst state laws in the country–New York and PA–touted them as “model legislation” and since then have made money “protecting” homeschoolers against the very laws they wrote. This insistence on promoting their own agenda, while refusing to work with state and local homeschoolers, is a well set pattern with Farris and HSLDA.

I know this firsthand, as HSLDA chose to interfere in a county regulation change that local homeschoolers had worked on for months. The national organization came in and tried to take us backward, reinstating the onerous “approval before removal” clause that was causing extreme distress to parents who were desperate to pull their child out of a bad school situation in order to homeschool.

HSLDA had the temerity to chastise me for working to change the regulation without their permission, and they refused to work with me, choosing instead to ignore my request and going about things in their hamfisted way, without regard to what this regulation was doing to the affected families.

Farris and his organizations have purported to speak for all homeschoolers and his extremist views and modes of operation have often made us all look like Ruby Ridgers and worse. He is now saying that he is afraid that President Obama will (somehow) “ban homeschooling.” This, from a man who turns a pretty penny by frightening homeschoolers and others with what I call Chicken Little marketing (“They sky is falling! The sky is falling!”).

Homeschoolers would do well to put as much distance as possible between homeschooling and  Mike Farris and his extremist and mixed causes. It is imprudent and dangerous to continue to let him use homeschooling and homeschoolers as the hammer of his cause, and his non-homeschooling issues as a wedge to divide and disempower the homeschool community.

~Shay Seaborne

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