Your Pathetic Disclaimers Aren’t Enough for Me

 

I subscribe to several Yahoo groups as a homeschooling parent. I expect these messages to deal with—you guessed it!—homeschooling. Sometimes it’s about meetups and field trips; more rarely it is about issues affecting us via legislation or even local laws, such as the newest curfew laws being debated in Kansas City. But once in a while we get religious materials that really piss me off.

If I wanted to get religious notification in my email, I would sign up for them. Contrary to popular belief, many homeschoolers are not religious. My daughter is attending the local homeschool kindergarten graduation ceremony—because she wants to and I don’t want her to miss it if that’s what she wants—and it’s through a fairly religious homeschooling organization, and I knew that before going in; the group has a disclaimer when you join that’s very honest and that’s fine.

But when you join a group about homeschooling, you don’t expect to get “pro-life” (which is ironic because it’s not pro-women’s lives; it’s really just anti-abortion) messages endorsing Ron Paul as president, nor “How to Talk About Abortion with Pro-Abortion People” pamphlets or discussions with the disclaimer, “If it doesn’t apply to you, delete.”

No, that’s just not enough. Telling me to delete something like that after you invade my inbox with it—something I would never have signed up for in the first place—is simply not enough. How about if I send a volunteering for Planned Parenthood flyer through the group next to prove my point? I did sign up for that, after all, and Planned Parenthood is much more pro-family and children (and therefore homeschoolers!) than any so-called pro-life organization that I have ever come across.

But I decide not to because I would simply be using the same tactics that I’m arguing against. (Oh how I want to, though, and preface it with, “If it doesn’t apply to you simply delete!”) And I really want to come away from this knowing that not all homeschoolers are vast right wingers (indeed, many are vast left wingers like myself!), but when they are making such assumptions within their own group, how can you not? Ugh…

I don’t really gain anything from this group anyway—it’s for general Missouri homeschoolers rather than any specific area’s—so I may just leave it. But people in my local groups have done similar things (such as the Ron Paul post) and it just burns me. “Homeschooling was specifically stated,” she argued, and then said she wouldn’t engage in any discussion—just that she’d post this offensive candidate’s page and press release or whatever and ignore anything posted after! What a privileged, fitting perspective, by the way. To me, it’s not when candidates use the Homeschooling!buzzword, but when they actually support things homeschoolers need—free healthcare, parks, the environment, libraries and other public services, birth control, etc.—that I’ll listen and cast my vote.