Happy Humanist New Year, All You Thinking Parents! Now Get to Work

How will you mark this upcoming season of renewed dedication, to living your own best life? How about never mind the customary concentration on “no” this time of year — ask not what you can stop, or quit, or give up; ask what you can give and give more of, what you can do and do more of.

So here’s a gift for all good people looking to give and do and affirm, to celebrate values we do believe in, to be the change we mean to make in the world.

Today, January 1, 2010, marks the grand opening of a highly evolved human network that in life-changing concept means as much to me now, as the National Home Education Network did in its nascence, way back last century.

It is the Foundation Beyond Belief:

Our Mission: To demonstrate humanism at its best by supporting efforts to improve this world and this life; to challenge humanists to embody the highest principles of humanism, including mutual care and responsibility; and to help and encourage humanist parents to raise confident children with open minds and compassionate hearts.

On the educational side, the Foundation will help create and fund local groups for the education and social support of humanist/atheist parents.

I was cornered in the kitchen of a Christmas party by a well-lubricated older someone, who I’d not expected ever to pressure me about declaring Christian beliefs.

Despite his conservative political beliefs and fealty to FOX News, he’s only a church-goer in that culturally conformist, mostly secular way, if you know what I mean. I may have been a bit lubricated myself, too free of tongue in sharing my own real convictions about what is real and important right here on earth, and what gets in the way between people of good will.

So before I knew what was happening, he was staring into my eyes and declaring that I wasn’t the person he knew and admired, if I didn’t believe in his god and follow that particular god’s politics. Or else perhaps I was muddled and foolish and didn’t know my own mind; perhaps I was a good saved person who just didn’t understand how the almighty was indulging my silly disbelief, and I could come to my senses if he took a firm stand for my soul.

Well, what the hell do you say to THAT?! Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

You’ve got damned-deer-in-the-headlights stories too, I know you do, from the holidays each year and sports teams and parent involvement, public service, community projects and neighborly encounters, from the best and worst of times. Favorite Daughter the religion major does much better than I do at managing the belief-fraught social undertow that nearly drowns me on occasion (maybe because she’s still too young to drink at parties??) but she’s looking forward to this new community for good people free of religious tension, too.

We all have a lot to learn and contribute. Think of it as hmmm, a free water safety course?

The original inspiration of Dale McGowan:

There were also surely atheists and humanists among the emergency responders and doctors and nurses and counselors who fought valiantly to stitch together shattered bodies, minds and hearts . . .

The atheists weren’t absent. They were invisible.

Their bodies and skills were easy enough to see, of course. But their convictions — that this is our one and only life, that its loss is something to fight hard against, that we have no one but each other to rely on when bad things happen — those convictions went unnoticed. Prayers and songs and religious rituals announce themselves. Quiet conviction goes unseen.

I began to think about the problem of atheist and humanist invisibility

Sunday School Science Teacher Costing Schools Credibility and Cool Half-Million

Remember this guy?

Creationist John Freshwater, branding kids for Christ while on the public payroll as mild-mannered public school science teacher. . .

(Evidence of the monstrous harm done when kids are taught alchemy, that leaden lies can be transformed into golden truth, if only you believe hard enough and get a bunch of other people to believe it too?)

But wait, there’s more! This true story keeps getting less believable and more costly as the hearings drag on and his attorney plays games.

Freshwater is expected to be the last direct witness in the hearing that has been held, on and off, over about 14 months and has cost the school district more than $500,000 in legal fees. Rebuttal witnesses might be called in coming weeks.

The latest plot twist being reported this festive Christmas week is that Freshwater taught his creationist ideology as science not just with cool magnetic lab equipment, but by rigging “experiments” to exploit the awesome intelligence built into playful, wholesome, trustworthy kid-magnet Legos — sacrilege!

Freshwater described using Lego blocks to show that cars, buildings and other structures cannot build themselves.

I beg to differ.

Did you know the word “lego” is a creative fusion of the Danish words leg and godt, which my playful mind notes with glee, literally means “play well” and not the seemingly obvious “shin and calf of deity” that an illiterate literalist might insist on imagining is factual?

. . .[Celebrating Legos] gave me a gift too, a story with power to play with in the real world, imagining how all the elements of man’s myth and reality can connect to build the most wondrous cities . . .Legos are limitless fishes and loaves in every room of OUR house, how about yours?

Freshwater’s religion belongs in his church and if he wants to get paid for teaching holy truth to kids who want to learn it, that’s fine too. Let his church put him on the payroll, not the school district. As for what my own children are learning, the true meaning of intelligent design taught through Lego power of story was found under our secular Christmas tree by unschooled and unchurched Young Son.
On a t-shirt of course.

Please know the message war is not just about “science” class any more (never really was, you knew that, right?)

So forget curriculum; today’s lesson is education by t-shirt. And if you and yours are on holiday from dogma and curriculum, at least this week if not permanently, then please enjoy this intelligently designed gift together free from church or state politics, the gift that truly keeps on giving:

Cobbling Together the Best Real Learning We Can

Political Power of Story in Smacking, Hitting, Punching

Matalin to Palin: Quit Bitching, That’s Just How The GOP Treats Its Women

If someone isn’t in tears every day, that day wasn’t all it could be advancing the campaign. I once witnessed an experienced (big) man slap a professional female colleague across the face over an ad buy… and no one thought anything of it, starting with the woman. In fact, she would have been insulted if anyone told her she should have been insulted.

. . .the reason the modern GOP mindset is broadly accepting of the physical brutality Matalin shrugs off so easily, is the work of child psychologist / reactionary Christian leader James Dobson. Nearly forty years of Dobson’s abusive child-rearing strategies have produced a modern far right wing filled with smacking, punching authoritarians who learned from childhood that might alone makes right.

Legitimizing this mindset depends on enablers like Matalin, who extend the aura of civil acceptability toward violence against women and co-workers. When this violence persists, we should remember who “thinks anything about it” and who does not.

Snooking on smacking as effective:
Can you go all day without hitting a child?:

Can anyone really deny that we are perpetuating and endorsing the lesson of “might makes right” when we rule over our children using physical punishment?

Stop every kid-hitter you can — teach ‘em a lesson!

Thinking about hitting and children

Child abuse is not home education:

Spankings were a minor part of the allegations. Hitting with objects and . . .in anger, yes, but there is much more to this
story than that. . .

Fear of fashion and it’s not even a man-purse!

[S]chool policy doesn’t have to be about religion–much less Christmas–to be soulless . . .
Sooner or later, unthinking policy at school or home–from labeling children to make them tolerant of differences, to hitting children to make them stop hitting, to clipping their wings to teach them to fly–achieves its own natural consequence, a new unthinking norm, normally to the detriment of the very children the stupid rules are meant to “save.”

Is your love for your kids controlling?

When Santa is Scottish . . .

Young Son has a bagpipe-playing Santa tree ornament involving a red-and-green tartan kilt, with knee hose and Santa pants underneath, fashioned as um, knickers? — to keep him cozy but culturally correct at the same time.

Congressional Christmas List: Stop Child Abuse at School

Congress isn’t always the enemy and bipartisan help for people in need isn’t always a cruel joke:

Across America, children are restrained, confined in seclusion rooms, and subject to aversive interventions. Roughly half of all states have little or no legal protections against restraint and seclusion in school. In several states, efforts to pass laws and adopt regulations have failed.

On December 9, 2009, the Preventing Harmful Restraint and Seclusion in Schools Act, HR 4247 was introduced by Congressman George Miller (D-CA) and Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA). A companion bill was also introduced in the Senate by Senator Chris Dodd and is numbered S 2860.

This issue of the Special Ed Advocate contains a comprehensive overview of the proposed legislation in a new article by Jessica Butler, Esq. You’ll find the provisions of H.R.4247 and will learn about the safeguards in the bill, what is prohibited, how it will impact children with disabilities, and the requirements for compliance and data reporting.

Please don’t hesitate to forward this issue to other friends, families, or colleagues. . .

Thinking of Damien Middleton Tonight, With Love

Brandon on FaceBook reminded us just as we were leaving for the Dance Studio, that this was the day three years ago, that the kids Learned the Hard Way what it was like to lose our dear, dear Damien . . .

Our children are neither schooled nor churched, but they both were drawn to and “belong” within an extended family of artists and performers centered around their dance studio.

This week the learning is especially hard and especially personal.

We’re Off to Another Musical Audition

Young Son and Favorite Daughter are both auditioning tonight for the first local production of this musical, but for Young Son it’s mostly for the experience; the men’s parts all pretty much require beard follicles as well as a man’s voice, I think.

He is singing “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” from Guys and Dolls. She is singing In His Eyes” from Jekyll & Hyde.

We have to go out in a freezing dark drizzle; wish them leg-breaking but don’t mean it! I’l report in over the weekend about how they did and later, about the casting . . .

Young Son’s Shakespeare Set to Scotland’s Pipes

As promised, a sampling of family photos from the first annual Fall Weavers Festival at historic Millstone Plantation here in Tallahassee FL.

You can see Young Son playing as Richard the Third in morning scenes staged under the Great Oak, then as great highland bagpiper with the Edinburgh-born McIlroys in the afternoon, as the sheep pasture shadows lengthen toward Lake McBride:

Speak Up When Pro-Child Politics Are Attacked as Anti-Parent

Here we go again. Families, child-rearing and home education publicly
stereotyped as conservative extremism and anti-human rights, sigh. If
you parent and/or educate children and don’t fit this stereotype, make
your voice heard too. Don’t let this define your principles.

Parental rights rally on Washington planned: Your stories needed!
November 11, 11:01 AM
by Lynda Ackert

The Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted by the General
Assembly of the United Nations on the 20th of November 1989. As part of a celebration, internationalists backing this UN Convention have
declared November 20th of this year as ‘Children’s Day.’

In response, ParentalRights dot org will rally in Washington, D.C. on that day. The rally will be held at the U.S. Capitol from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., on the East Lawn across from the Rayburn House Office building.

Speakers during the rally will include Rep. Peter Hoekstra and Sen. Jim
DeMint, the lead sponsors of the Parental Rights Amendment; Gerard
Robinson with Black Alliance for Educational Options; William Estrada of
Homeschool Legal Defense Association; Dean and Julie Nelson of National Black Home Educators; and Steven Groves of Heritage Foundation.

Whether you homeschool or not, parental rights have been and are
continuing to be under attack.

Want your voice heard? ParentalRights.org wants to hear from you. If you have experienced any assault or threat to your parental rights, make your story known by emailing ParentalRights. . .

Homeschooling is a parental right…Let’s keep it that way!

Source: ParentalRights dot org

For more of JJ’s thoughts on the UN and this political meme setting up “parental rights” in opposition to child and human rights, start with:

Homeschool freedom fighting: It’s so not about the UN

Parental Rights and responsibilities: Parenting sex and parenthood

Latest Homeschool Freak-out from World Net Daily

Tough case: Church v State for the life of Daniel Hauser

Sunday Afternoon Doing Shakespeare in the Park with Llamas

The first annual weavers’ and art fall festival at Millstone Plantation happens here Saturday the 14th, and Young Son’s Summer of Shakespeare group will be reprising their Richard III all day. Today for on-site rehearsal, they had the bright, beautiful, breezy lake setting all to themselves — except for the resident llamas, who seem to just love the Bard and wanted to be right in the thick of the action.

It was glorious.

Maine Repeals Gays as Human; Public School Parent Protests Gays as Animals

Dan Delong of Carlinville, Ill., at teacher at Southwestern High School in the nearby town of Piasa, will face a school board hearing November 2, after being suspended from teaching. A parent of one unidentified student thought the optional reading assignment was inappropriate for her child . . .

When this and this coincide in the same week, what are kids actually learning do you think, about the values woven into America’s power of story?

The teacher’s disciplinary hearing was Monday night, and perhaps there’s a better lesson in how it ended than in how it started, a fitting lesson of today’s American president as true to yesterday’s American precedent:

See Google This Morning and Smile!

Then call any handy family members over to share the smile.
I just did.

UPDATE: See CSM’s favorite video clips from the 40-year run. And here’s one of mine, as a sax lover: