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Some thoughts on marriage, stay-at-home mothers and homeschooling as a radical feminist act

I have been meaning to write this one for a while now, but it's not just my blogADD that has kept me away from this discussion. I just so get emotionally pissed off about this subject that it becomes unbearable to try to write everything that comes shooting by my brain. Yet Nance here point to a post by Amanda Marcotte that has pissed me off so royally that I have to respond to it.

In the comments Amanda insists that she allegedly has no problems with either stay at home mothers or homeschoolers; yet in her writing she betrays herself. When she opens up her post with and I quote, "This interview in Newsweek with Laura Derrick, the president of the National Home Educator’s Network, was even fluffier than I expected it would be when I opened the link", you know that her expectation was to see a piece excoriating the "different path" of homeschooling.

It goes downhill from there because she conflates her contempt for xian fundamentalists with homeschooling:

I didn’t expect the interviewer to hammer at Derrick about the issue of whether or not it’s wise for people to homeschool their kids if they are doing so with the intention of teaching them that Noah had a pet dinosaur or that Jesus founded America (and therefore feed them into upper echelon jobs in the Justice Department), but I figured it would at least come up. No luck, though.

In the next paragraph her cluelessness about homeschooling shows with flying color when she claims to know that homeschooling is gaining steam in the left. Ahh ... hmmm ... see ... no!

Homeschooling has never been an either/or proposition for people in the left or right. It has been always a proposition for radicals; especially radicals who have a strong libertarian political background. There's conservative libertarians, Christian libertarians and then people like me, who Chris Nolan has most famously described as Social/Progressive Libertarians.

The problem is that christian fundamentalist homeschoolers in this country have had a well funded public relations machine. That's it. That's all.

The HSDLA was the pet project of Michael Farris, one of the signers of the Manifesto for a Christian Church; which really should be read as a manifesto for a extremist American theocracy.

But you already suspected as much.


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I of all people should know better. The civil rights movement in the U.S. told women to stop talking about gender issues because first the fight against racism had to be won. The feminist movement frowned at women of colour raising their issues, insisting that first the fight against the patriarchy had to be won. The nationalist movements in Africa insisted that feminism was a corrupt and decadent western import, and that first we had to capture our earthly kingdoms, and achieve our panAfricanist Nirvana, before we started looking at "side issues". And those of us who are interested in our contemporary political dynamics have fallen into the same pit of not tackling the prickly, the uncomfortable questions now: we are waiting to win the larger battle before we clean our house. There is always another battle or another issue, and the matters that matter to the foot soldiers are postponed for yet another day. Yet, these issues ARE the battle. We fight for freedom --and do not imagine we are doing anything less--because it is the freedom to live our lives the way we want, from the jobs we choose to the people we fall in love with. If we cannot tackle them, then we are not equipped to tackle anything. What are the lines of difference we draw? For what do we engage, argue, participate and in some heroes' cases, take awful risks? For what?