HSLDA Defends Special Needs Cages Family, Redux

Last updated on: November 10, 2014 at 1:03 pm By Libby Anne

Last year my post, HSLDA: Man Who Kept Children in Cages ‘a Hero’, garnered enough attention that HSLDA felt the need to respond. In a nutshell, HSLDA chose to respond to child abuse accusations against homeschooling father Michael Gravelle by praising him as a hero for adopting special needs kids. The allegations were subsequently found to be true. HSLDA ostensibly exists to protect the legality of homeschooling, but in practice the organization defends its various members against charges of child abuse or educational neglect. I asked at the time whether HSLDA vets the parents it defends or does anything to ascertain whether the accusations are true. As I later concluded, the answer appears to be “no.”

Now take a look at this HSLDA release from 2009, five years ago:

Hearing Canceled After School District Received Letter from HSLDA

When Tim and Karen Sue Tolin received notice that officials with Ubly Community Schools in Michigan had called a due process hearing for their son Sean, they turned to HSLDA for help.

Courtesy of the Family

Tim and Karen Sue Tolin have devoted their lives to helping special needs children through foster care and adoption.

Having already raised five biological daughters, the Tolins devoted their lives to helping special needs children through foster care and adoption. They currently have nine adopted children, seven of whom they homeschool.

Sean, their 8-year-old, has been diagnosed with multiple challenges, including congenital brain anomalies, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, gastroesophageal reflux disease, asthma and Asperger syndrome. This year, Sean started second grade at Ubly Elementary School, where his parents found that he was not receiving the care he needed. After a final incident with the school last fall, the Tolins withdrew Sean from public school to homeschool him.

Although the public school was pursuing special services for Sean, his parents were providing extra care through private professionals. After withdrawing Sean from Ubly Elementary School, Mr. and Mrs. Tolin no longer needed or wanted the public school’s services. However, school officials insisted that the Tolins have Sean undergo the evaluations they recommended and that he be given an Individual Education Plan. When Mr. and Mrs. Tolin refused, the school’s attorney called a due process hearing.

The Tolins, who were members of Home School Legal Defense Association, contacted us for help. Litigation attorney Darren Jones wrote a letter to the district’s attorney explaining that the Tolins have chosen to home educate Sean and waive his right to a free appropriate public education for the school year. He further explained that a recent decision by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals (litigated by HSLDA) affirms a parent’s right to refuse special needs evaluations for their homeschooled children. (See Fitzgerald v. Camdenton R-III School District, 439 F.3d 773, 777 (8th Cir. 2006).)

After receiving the letter, the district’s attorney quickly drafted an agreement that both parties signed, and Ubly Community Schools dropped the proceedings.

The Tolins report that Sean is now happily making great academic progress at home.

In summary, HSLDA praised the Tolins for adopting special needs kids and defended their choice to find private means of handling their children’s special education needs rather than going through the school district (in Michigan, children homeschooled under the state’s minimalistic private school law are eligible for special needs services through their local public schools).

Now of course, it is true that homeschooling parents in Michigan are within their rights to forgo all public school services for special needs children. The problem is that, without accountability, there is nothing ensuring that those parents actually find private service providers, or that they make any efforts at all to meet their children’s special needs. You could argue that this is not HSLDA’s fault, but there is a serious problem with this line of argument: Over the past thirty years HSLDA shaped homeschooling law across the country, and they have always pushed for minimalistic policies. In other words, these minimalistic policies, without accountability to ensure that children’s needs are being met, are both a product of HSLDA’s advocacy and HSLDA’s stated goal.

Five years after HSLDA defended the Tolins’ right to find their own service providers for their adopted son Sean’s special needs without accountability from the school district, Sean, now 14, has been removed from the Tolins’ custody. Why? Because last month authorities present in the Tolins’ home to resolve a civil dispute discovered that their standard of care for their adopted special needs children left something to be desired.

Police responded to investigate a civil dispute about 4 p.m. Monday, Oct. 20, to a home at 3700 Minden Road south of Priemer, when they discovered the mentally challenged male teen in a caged bed with the door chained shut, the Huron County Sheriff’s Department said in a prepared statement.

“The odor was very noticeable as the deputy began to climb the stairs,” [Huron County Sheriff Kelly] Hanson said.

Huron County Prosecutor Timothy Rutkowski said the teen was found naked in the cage with feces and urine around him, based on his review of the police report. The 19-year-old has a developmental disability called Angelman syndrome, Rutkowski said, reading from the report.

When the deputy saw the scene, the sheriff’s department immediately contacted the Michigan Department of Human Services.

“There was no doubt in the deputy’s mind that something was wrong,” Hanson said.

“Whether the parents felt they had done anything wrong or not, the individual was being confined under unsanitary conditions,” Hanson said. “DHS agreed something was wrong and orchestrated the removal. It just wasn’t us making the decision.”

He said the sheriff’s department is not releasing the police report at this time.

All of the special needs individuals, including those who were still minors (such as 14-year-old Sean) were removed from the home, and Timothy and Karen Tolin were arrested, and are currently out on bail.

“It’s not a situation that’s being blown out of proportion,” [Hanson] said. “We were concerned about the health and safety of all involved.”

There’s a lot that could be said here, and it’s clear that the system failed the Tolins’ adopted special needs children at numerous points. I’m not trying to blame the entire situation on homeschooling by any stretch. But I do think there are some things we can learn from what went wrong here.

First of all, this is another verifiable case where HSLDA defended the rights of people who turned out to be abusers. In this case, it was actual legal assistance. (I know several individuals whose abusive parents were also defended by HSLDA, but these are stories where social services never became involved and the abuse was never discovered.) Now yes, abusers should have legal defense. It’s how the system works. But HSLDA doesn’t position itself as an organization that defends all comers and sometimes has to do dirty work, it positions itself as the family-friendly smiling face of homeschooling and actively works to shape policy. That HSLDA doesn’t vet those it defends, and does in fact defend abusive and neglectful families, needs to be more widely understood.

Second, we need to be aware of the way homeschooling can contribute to concealing abuse and neglect, especially when it comes to special needs children, who are more vulnerable. I can name names, if you like—lots of names. I understand that children with special needs can be abused or neglected in public school, too, and when that happens I think it should be called out and that reforms should be implemented to keep it from happening again. But that’s the point, isn’t it? Any system needs accountability, and in our current system there is often little accountability for parents who homeschool special needs children. I’m not saying parents with special needs children shouldn’t be allowed to homeschool, I absolutely think they should be. It’s just that I think there needs to be some sort of accountability system in place to ensure that they are meeting their children’s developmental needs.

I’ll also add that parents raising special needs children need resources, and community support. I understand that raising special needs children is incredibly demanding. For this reason, families adopting special needs children need to not adopt more children than they can adequately care for, and resources like therapy need to be available and affordable. We need to call out abuse as abuse and neglect as neglect, yes, but ensuring that special needs children have the care they need involves more than this. It also means committing, as a society, to being there for those who need extra help.

My heart goes out to the Tolin children. They have been failed on so many levels.

Has Gay Marriage Harmed this Writer and Her Children?

Last updated on: September 23, 2014 at 12:47 pm By Libby Anne

I recently came upon an article titled “Breaking the Silence: Redefining Marriage Hurts Women Like Me—and Our Children.” I was intrigued, because I often hear or read that allowing gay and lesbian individuals to marry harms opposite-sex marriage, but I rarely find any case made for what that harm actually looks like, or how it is caused. The article, by a woman named Janna Darnelle, begins like this:

Every time a new state redefines marriage, the news is full of happy stories of gay and lesbian couples and their new families. But behind those big smiles and sunny photographs are other, more painful stories. These are left to secret, dark places. They are suppressed, and those who would tell them are silenced in the name of “marriage equality.”

But I refuse to be silent.

I represent one of those real life stories that are kept in the shadows. I have personally felt the pain and devastation wrought by the propaganda that destroys natural families.

In the fall of 2007, my husband of almost ten years told me that he was gay and that he wanted a divorce. In an instant, the world that I had known and loved—the life we had built together—was shattered.

At this point I stopped reading and almost laughed. I realize this is very serious subject matter, but Darnelle seems unaware that if LGBTQ individuals had equal rights and full social acceptance, she would not have been put in this situation. Her family was torn apart not as a result of her now ex-husband’s “decision to identify as a gay man” but rather because he, a gay man, felt he had to hide who he was. If he had been able to accept himself and come out earlier, he would not have married her, leaving her free to marry a straight man who could love her more fully.

The problem is that many people view being gay as disordered, and would rather force a gay person to leading a straight life and thus living a lie than allow them to live authentically. The result is that there are gay individuals who marry members of the opposite sex, and as the climate changes and being gay becomes more acceptable they regret it and in some cases (such as that of Darnelle’s husband) leave the lie they are living for a new life. Is this process painful? I can’t see how it could not be. However, the growing acceptance of marriage equality and LGBTQ rights should mean this will happen less and less.

In other words, this is not so much a story of how gay marriage destroyed a family as a story of how LGBTQ acceptance moved to slowly to prevent the destruction of a family.

Darnelle goes on:

My husband wanted primary custody of our children. His entire case can be summed up in one sentence: “I am gay, and I deserve my rights.” It worked: the judge gave him practically everything he wanted. At one point, he even told my husband, “If you had asked for more, I would have given it to you.”

I truly believe that judge was legislating from the bench, disregarding the facts of our particular case and simply using us—using our children— to help influence future cases. In our society, LGBT citizens are seen as marginalized victims who must be protected at all costs, even if it means stripping rights from others. By ignoring the injustice committed against me and my children, the judge seemed to think that he was correcting a larger injustice.

My husband had left us for his gay lover. They make more money than I do. There are two of them and only one of me. Even so, the judge believed that they were the victims. No matter what I said or did, I didn’t have a chance of saving our children from being bounced around like so many pieces of luggage.

Darnelle does not explain why her husband was awarded primary custody, but he was within his rights to ask for it—any father may request primary custody during a divorce settlement, and those who do, like Darnelle’s husband, are actually more likely to get it than not. If Darnelle is right in her assertion that the judge gave her husband primary custody only because he was gay, the judge acted wrongly, but there are a huge number of factors that usually go into custody decisions and its’ not uncommon for a man who asks for custody to get it.

Darnelle goes on to say that her children were forced to be in her husband’s marriage, that pictures of her husband’s new family were in the newspaper, and that her husband’s new marriage is an open marriage. She insists that her son and daughter are growing up without good good role models, but what she actually says is that they are surrounded by more varied displays of gender rather than being exposed only to “feminine” women and “masculine” men. She worries about her children’s psychological health given that one of her ex-husband’s neighbors sometimes sees a male prostitutes and another in his sixties has a boyfriend in his twenties (as though this is a gay thing). She’s upset that her children are being “used as props” by the media.

It is clear that Darnelle does not approve of how her ex-husband is raising her children, and is dismayed by the fact that she cannot control what her children are exposed to. This must be painful for her, but it strikes me that at its core this isn’t really about gay marriage. It’s about divorce.

When any couple divorces, they must come to a custody agreement. Some years back I knew a divorced woman who used to complain that when her son spent time with his father (he had regular weekend visits) he would come hope hyped up on sweets and have done nothing during his visit but watch TV. It’s not uncommon for divorced parents to worry about their lack of control over what the child does or is exposed to while with the other parent. I’m sure there are also times when one parent exposes the child to political views the other parent disagrees with, and even involves the child in political campaigning for a cause the other parent finds abhorrent. As hard as it can sometimes be, this is how divorce works.

Divorced parents should try to be on the same page on major parenting issues, and in many cases they are, but this isn’t always be possible. Sometimes, as in this case, divorced parents disagree a great deal about their children’s wellbeing. If one parent honestly believes the other parent is harming the children in some way or another, they can take it to a judge and try to get the custody agreement amended. If Darnelle really thinks her ex-husband and his new husband are causing the children psychological damage, she can take the settlement back to court. Of course, the court may decide that the things that concern her are not causing actual harm to their child—but then, they could make that same decision if her husband had left her for another woman and she was concerned about the environment they were providing the children. In other words—again—this is about divorce, not gay marriage.

Darnelle makes another point:

There is not one gay family that exists in this world that was created naturally.

Every same-sex family can only exist by manipulating nature. Behind the happy façade of many families headed by same-sex couples, we see relationships that are built from brokenness. They represent covenants broken, love abandoned, and responsibilities crushed. They are built on betrayal, lies, and deep wounds.

This is also true of same-sex couples who use assisted reproductive technologies such as surrogacy or sperm donation to have children. Such processes exploit men and women for their reproductive potential, treat children as products to be bought and sold, and purposely deny children a relationship with one or both of their biological parents. Wholeness and balance cannot be found in such families, because something is always missing. I am missing. But I am real, and I represent hundreds upon thousands of spouses who have been betrayed and rejected.

Again, the major complaint here centers on divorce, not gay marriage. How would Darnelle feel, I wonder, if someone were to suggest allowing gay marriage but banning divorce? This would solve her primary concern without infringing on gay or lesbian individuals’ ability to marry and form their own families. (Note: I am not in favor of banning divorce, merely pointing out that that would more effectively prevent families from being torn apart than does banning gay marriage.)

But while she is obviously most concerned with gay individuals who leave opposite-sex relationships to marry (something that will happen less frequently as social acceptance of LGBTQ individuals grows), Darnelle’s concern goes beyond this. She is against surrogacy and sperm donation. But once again, this is not primarily a gay issue. There are plenty of infertile straight couples who turn to surrogacy and sperm donation. If Darnelle feels that these practices “treat children as products to be bought and sold,” she should be campaigning against these practices themselves rather than against gay marriage.

Darnelle does not mention adoption by name, though she does say that surrogacy and sperm donation “purposely deny children a relationship with one or both of their biological parents.” If Darnelle is okay with adoption for straight couples and sees families formed through adoption as “natural” she would need to retract her statement that “there is not one gay family that exists in this world that was created naturally.” Her only other option is to call adoption unnatural and “built on betrayal, lies, and deep wounds.” But wait. If all gay families are built on these things (as Darnelle insists), does this mean she would say blended families—families formed through divorce and remarriage—are also built on “covenants broken, love abandoned, and responsibilities crushed”?

Darnelle is trying very hard not to be overtly anti-gay. She doesn’t mention God or religion. Instead, she tries to portray the destruction of her family and the “evils” her children are being exposed to as simply the natural results of gay marriage. But she’s wrong, because she falsely imagines gay marriage something fundamentally different from straight marriage. Straight couples get divorced. Straight divorced parents bicker over parenting practices and what the children should be exposed to. Straight couples use surrogacy and sperm donation. Straight couples adopt. None of the evils she points to—divorce, shared custody, surrogacy, sperm donation, and (presumably) adoption—are specific to gay marriage.

There is exactly one thing about her story that has to do specifically with LGBTQ issues, and that is that her husband married her and had children with her even though he was a gay man. That should be her enemy here. She should be out there campaigning for better education for youth on LGBTQ issues and greater acceptance of LGBTQ individuals. She should be out there sharing her story and spreading the message that gay individuals cannot fix themselves by entering into straight marriages. But she’s not. Instead she has misguidedly decided that it is gay marriage that is the problem, and inserted herself into the debate, decrying the destruction of her family even as she opposes others’ right to form families of their own.

WORLD Magazine Takes Aim and Misses

Last updated on: August 25, 2014 at 12:59 pm By Libby Anne

Growing up in a conservative evangelical home, I read WORLD magazine regularly. You can think of it as a sort of evangelical Christian version of TIME magazine. It covers all the issues, both internationally and nationally, but through a conservative evangelical framework. My parents have been subscribers since before I can remember, and continue to receive the magazine today. I say all of this as background to WORLD magazine’s extremely unfortunate feature article last week on the child abuse and neglect problem within the Christian homeschooling world.

WORLD magazine’s reputation on this topic coming in was already a bit troubled. In October of 2013, WORLD magazine’s Andree Seu Petersen complained that her church’s new sexual abuse prevention policies got in the way of her hugging and holding children in Sunday school. A month before that, WORLD minimized child abuse in its coverage of the Twelve Tribes cult in Germany, calling brutal beatings recorded by an investigator on hidden camera “spankings” and quoting at length from community members insisting that nothing was amiss. When reporting on Doug Phillips’ sexual abuse of a young woman in his employ, WORLD’s only response was to insist that Phillips had never been an evangelical Christian like them, in spite of the fact that they had previously published articles by Phillips. Needless to say, the track record here was not good.

And so we come to WORLD’s recent piece on abuse and neglect in the Christian homeschooling world, titled Homeschool Debate: Back to School—How to keep a few bad apples from spoiling the bushel. You can see the problem from the very outset. The characterization of abusive or neglectful Christian homeschooling parents as “a few bad apples” minimizes the problem from the beginning, and the focus on keeping them “from spoiling the bushel” suggests that the author of this piece (Daniel Devine) or his editors care more about protecting homeschooling than about protecting homeschooled children. We have seen this problem from so many circles. Rather than seeing a current threat from within to homeschooled children, they see only a potential threat from without to homeschooling as a system.

I should pause here for a word of background. In the past year or two, an increasing number of homeschool alumni have begun speaking out about the problems of abuse or neglect in the homeschooling world. It’s not about some sort of vendetta, it’s about the fact that homeschooled children have fewer protections against abuse or neglect than other children, and it’s about an increasing number of homeschool alumni whose experiences were not simply bad or negative, but much, much worse. It’s about an increasing number of homeschool graduates who want to do something about that—not to end homeschooling, but simply to help children being homeschooled today have a better and safer experience than they did.

In March of 2013, the website Homeschoolers Anonymous was launched as a platform for telling these stories. In May of 2013, the website Homeschooling’s Invisible Children was created to archive stories of serious abuse and child fatalities. In August of 2013, the creators of Homeschoolers Anonymous created Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out to focus on raising awareness and community support. The Coalition for Responsible Home Education, with its focus on research and policy change, launched in December 2013. All of these organizations were created by homeschool alumni. These organizations, together with my own investigative reporting in April of 2013, began to make waves—major homeschooling organizations, including the Home School Legal Defense Association, were forced to take note. This is what last week’s WORLD article was intended to cover.

Some former homeschool students are speaking out against what they consider an abusive or neglectful upbringing. Last year they began posting their stories on a website called Homeschoolers Anonymous, alleging mistreatment from parents ranging from sexual molestation to what they describe as “spiritual abuse.” The stories vary widely, but echo a common charge: Homeschooling, they claim, gave their parents opportunity to abuse, “brainwash,” or neglect them.

With this intro, Devine moves on to cover the story of Heather Doney, an abuse survivor who blogs at Becoming Worldly and co-founded the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE) before moving on to other activism. The article references Homeschooling’s Invisible Children, which Heather also co-founded, but does not go in detail as to what the website covers.

But then the article takes a turn for the worse with these two paragraphs:

The existence of such cases, and the growing reach of the anti-homeschooling websites, raises questions that homeschooling defenders are primed to answer. Educational neglect? Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute in Salem, Ore., said most studies by dozens of researchers since 1985 show the average homeschooler scoring in the 65th to 80th percentile on standardized tests. (The national school average is the 50th percentile.)

What about abuse? The Health and Human Services “Child Maltreatment 2011” report noted that 4.1 percent of U.S. children were involved in abuse investigations in 2011. A 2004 study from the U.S. Department of Education found about 7 percent of eighth- to 11th-grade public-school students claiming a fellow student, teacher, or school employee had touched or contacted them in a sexual manner, without their consent. Yet only 1.2 percent of Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) members called for help in dealing with child protective services investigations—sometimes for issues as trivial as a messy house or a missed paperwork filing deadline. That figure isn’t scientific, but it suggests abuse and neglect is far less common among homeschoolers.

Devine never gives Doney or anyone else at CRHE a chance to respond to these numbers. And it’s not that there is no response—there is. After the article came out, CRHE put up a blog post responding to and refuting the assertions here in detail. In essence, Devine suggests the existence of a problem by leading with Doney’s story and her activism, but then stops it short by uncritically quoting homeschooling leaders citing misleading data and saying “no problem here, nothing to see.” This would be fine if Devine then did some actual research on the numbers cited, or offered CRHE’s response, but he doens’t. In a sense, he sets homeschooling leaders up as experts and sets the homeschool alumni up as disgruntled children. This is a huge problem.

Next Devine moves on to Homeschoolers Anonymous and HARO:

Nevertheless, stories on the Homeschoolers Anonymous website brim with pain, anger, and bitterness. Many posts are anonymous, making the accounts hard to verify, but organization co-founder Ryan Stollar told me by email, “We are creating a growing community of misfits, survivors, and allies.” One series of posts titled “Homeschoolers Are Out” spotlights homeschool graduates who have declared themselves to be gay or transsexual. He said his organization “enthusiastically supports” homeschooling as long as it is “used responsibly.”

This bit isn’t all bad, but the use of the word “bitterness” and the mention of the series on LGBTQ individuals (Homeschoolers Anonymous has done many other series, including one on Bill Gothard’s ATI and one on self-harm) prime the magazines conservative evangelicals to blow HARO off as merely the work of a few rebellious children, perhaps playing a role in a plan designed by Satan himself to discredit homeschooling.

One of Homeschoolers Anonymous’ biggest targets is the Virginia-based HSLDA—homeschooling’s top ally since 1983. Last year Homeschoolers Anonymous launched an online campaign that claimed the organization’s defense of homeschool parents had weakened child abuse investigations. It called on HSLDA to tell its 80,000 member families how to recognize and report abuse, and HSLDA did add a section to its website defining child abuse and outlining how to address it.

HSLDA has long seen less government regulation of homeschoolers as best for parents and students . . .

“It’s obvious to me that homeschool parents love their kids and don’t want to abuse them,” said J. Michael Smith, president of HSLDA. “The reason they’re homeschooling is because they don’t want to neglect their child’s education.” Both Smith and Darren Jones, a staff attorney at the organization, agreed that abuse and neglect cases do exist within some homeschooling families, but argue their number is small. HSLDA staffers call them “fake homeschoolers.”

Holy sweet potatoes, guys.

There is no evaluation of why Homeschoolers Anonymous argued that HSLDA had weakened child abuse investigations, and no evaluation of whether their assertion had merit. Homeschoolers Anonymous’ campaign actually originated here on my blog back in April of 2013, when I researched HSLDA’s lobbying efforts and gave specific examples of HSLDA’s efforts advocating against mandatory reporter laws, working to ensure that excessive corporal punishment is legal, stonewalling child abuse investigations, and even defending child abusers. None of this gets mentioned. None. (For those who may be interested, I also have a series explaining why abusive parents homeschool, and what it looks like.)

Instead of actually examining homeschool alumni’s complaints with regards to HSLDA, Devine moves straight to quoting HSLDA’s J. Michael Smith stating that homeschooling parents love their children, don’t want to abuse them, and homeschool because they don’t want to neglect their children’s education—and then calling homeschooling families where abuse and neglect does happen “fake homeschoolers.” It is clear to me that HSLDA has not changed in the slightest. The same assertions about all homeschoolers are there, the same refusal to actually deal with the fact that abuse and neglect do happen, and the same flippancy about the issue. It is sickening—but then, HSLDA has demonstrated this same lack of compassion in the past.

If you need any proof that HSLDA is part of the problem here, read this post about how they handle things when their members call with asocial worker at the door.

Next is this bit:

CRHE’s homeschool policy guidelines are aimed at tightening overall regulation of homeschoolers so as to catch families that might go awry. Among the recommendations: Homeschool students should be academically tested or assessed each year by mandatory reporters; homeschool parents should have GED or high-school diplomas; and parents convicted of child abuse or sexual offenses should be barred from homeschooling.

HSLDA agreed with some recommendations but strongly opposes expanding mandatory reporting or mandatory annual testing. Attorney Jones acknowledged that some families have used homeschooling as a shield, but stressed, “We have always taken the position that the homeschool community should deal with that.”

And there it is—the endorsement of self-policing. Rather than having legal protections for homeschooled children, HSLDA would to have the homeschool community deal with it. How, I might ask? Other homeschoolers have no legal authority to go into a homeschooling family’s home and make them stop abusing their children or force them to start educating their children. It doesn’t work like that in churches, and it doesn’t work like that in the homeschooling community either. And what about those homeschoolers who don’t plug into their local homeschooling community? What of them?

Recent events in Idaho suggest homeschoolers might be able to police their own. Barry Peters, the president of the Idaho Coalition of Home Educators, said his organization had established a cooperative relationship with child welfare officials: Under a protocol initiated 14 years ago, whenever officials from the state education department received a report of educational neglect involving a homeschool family, they forwarded the tip to ICHE, which investigated each case and reported back to state officials. But from 2000 to 2004 in Idaho, state officials logged only 15 such tips, and further investigation revealed the claims were groundless, mistaken, or didn’t satisfy legal definitions of neglect.

The education department canceled the protocol arrangement with ICHE in 2006, apparently because of the lack of legitimate reports. “There are very few cases of educational neglect that come out,” said Kirt Naylor, a child advocate attorney and chair of the Governor’s Task Force on Children at Risk in Idaho: “You don’t need regulations, I think you need more informed investigations.” He said ICHE helped improve those investigations in 2008 by drafting, in cooperation with the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, investigation guidelines for child protective services workers dealing with homeschool families.

CRHE covered this in detail in their response, pointing out that homeschool organizations have a record of defending educational neglect in homeschooling settings, that the guidelines ICHE created for the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare say what educational neglect in homeschooling settings does not look like but not what it does look like, and that there were problems with abusive and neglectful homeschooling families in Idaho during those years that this article does not mention (including the particularly horrifying case of the Halbesleben family, which included physical abuse, medical neglect, and sexual abuse and incest).

But I do want to add this comment, from WORLD’s comment section:

Further, the “solutions” it offers are mere figments of the imagination: homeschoolers self policing under the guidance of HSLDA and local groups like the Idaho Coalition of Home Educators? Not that I’ve ever seen, and I grew up as a homeschooler in Idaho.

While the details of the stories aren’t mine to tell, I know parents in the Idaho community who chose to label their children liars rather than deal with accusations of abuse. I know parents who were themselves abusive and have never faced repercussions. I know that the man quoted in the article as the architect of the Idaho homeschool policing scheme knows about unreported, unaddressed incidents of abuse in the homeschool community. While I was growing up I knew no-one who reported abuse by another homeschooler. I don’t believe any of them would have—we were counseled to always show homeschooling in a positive light, even if that meant some things didn’t get addressed well. We showed off our ridiculously high test scores to the legislators every year—but do you think the underperforming families came and voluntarily tested? I think not.

Self-policing simply does not work, and it did not work when it was tried in Idaho. I’ve written about this before. Most homeschooling parents will argue that it’s fine that a twelve-year-old not to be able to read before they admit that there is actually a problem—and even those who do admit that there is a problem will go on being against any form of outside intervention. It has to do with the current culture of homeschooling, a culture that badly needs changing. In this context, expecting homeschooling organizations like HSLDA or ICHE to self-police is like asking the foxes to guard the henhouse.

The WORLD article concludes with this paragraph:

The Idaho experience suggests the homeschool community could find ways to help identify problem cases, however rare, while minimizing government interference. For Doney, it’s an important first step for people to simply acknowledge that stories like hers exist: “There’s been a culture of child abuse denialism within homeschooling.” Jones, the HSLDA attorney, said he recognizes some in the Homeschoolers Anonymous community didn’t have a great experience growing up. “I feel terrible for them. I don’t think that’s a reason to crack down on all 2 million kids who are being homeschooled across the U.S.”

And that about sums it up, doesn’t it? HSLDA feels bad for abuse and neglect victims but isn’t willing to do a single thing to help protect current and future homeschoolers from suffering the same fate. And notice again the minimizing that’s going on here—the article says that Jones “recognizes some . . . didn’t have a great experience growing up.” There seems to be very little awareness that we’re not just talking about people who had an unfortunate childhood, we’re talking about very real abuse and neglect.

The article includes a side column of sorts with additional thoughts as follows:

The role of churches

Bill Roach, the president of Christian Home Educators of Colorado (CHEC), has served on the organization’s board for the past eight years. He hasn’t spent all that time attending a traditional church: A few years after he started homeschooling the first of his five children in 1991, Roach left his Baptist church and began meeting on Sundays with several other families committed to home education and family discipleship.

They met in homes, sang hymns and contemporary worship songs (often a cappella), and set up a lectern for the dads, who preached on a rotating basis. They had no formal leadership: When the men set out to appoint elders, they broke up over various disagreements, including whether debt was permissible. Roach left the group in 2007 and has since returned to a formal church setting—an Orthodox Presbyterian church in Elizabeth, Colo., where he serves as an elder.

Roach now regrets the autonomous nature of his former house fellowship: “It got a little bit too independent.  … In some ways it was just family first,” without respect for the authority of the church, he said. Israel Wayne, an apologetics speaker who meets thousands of homeschool families annually at conferences, often hears from students and graduates asking his advice about family battles concerning teenage dating and video games. He often asks disaffected youths if they’ve talked to the elders in their church: “Almost inevitably, they tell me no,” either because they don’t feel safe discussing family issues at their church, or because they aren’t attending one.

Thankfully, in recent years homeschool leaders have recognized the problem of church disconnectedness and are working to correct it. At CHEC’s state conference in June, Voddie Baucham, a homeschooling pastor and Gospel Coalition council member, gave a keynote address titled “Why Your Family Needs the Church.” — D.J.D.

First let’s talk about the Christian Home Educators of Colorado (CHEC). There’s a lot to talk about. CHEC created a legally-questionable “independent school” paper mill in which it automatically enrolls its members so that they don’t have to participate in legally-required periodic academic evaluations through their local school districts. But that’s just small potatoes. In 2009 CHEC held a Men’s Leadership Summit which, among other things, called for an end of child protective services. Interesting how the article doesn’t even mention that, isn’t it?

But now let’s talk about the argument that homeschooling families should attend church rather than home churching, because if they attend church the church will be able to step in if there is a problem. Let’s take a quick look at how Bill Roach’s and Voddie Baucham’s churches are run. Roach attends Kevin Swanson’s church. Here is what the church website says about parents and families:

We believe that God has primarily endowed Christian parents with the responsibility of training their children in the faith (Deut. 6:6-9, 20-22, Deut. 4:9-12, Prov 1:8, 6:20-21, Eph. 6:1,2). Therefore, the church must encourage, equip, and empower parents and especially fathers to perform this God-given mandate. The church must not replace or displace the Christian parents in this task. The function of the church is not to segregate families, but to unify them, respecting the spiritual headship of first the Christian father and then the Christian mother over their home.

As for Voddie Baucham, he had this to say in a 2009 speech titled “The Battle for Faith and Family”:

Baucham begins by identifying himself with the family-integrated church movement, which is a movement, he explains, that is “committed, absolutely committed—in our structure, in our doctrine, in our practice, in our philosophy—to a very simple principle: we look men in the eye and say, “I double-dog dare you to disciple your family and we are not going to do anything structurally to put a net under you. It’s your job.”

These men are talking about church structures that elevate the parents, and especially the fathers, and afford no protections at all for the children. These churches don’t even have Sunday school classes where an abused child might be able to ask for help—no, they are “family-integrated” churches where the children stay with the parents, because the family is seen as primary over the individual. This is the solution WORLD magazine puts forward so uncritically.

Even leaving aside family-integrated churches, having churches self-police doesn’t work any more than having homeschooling communities or organizations self-police. And with evangelical and fundamentalist churches, it’s only worse. If you’re at all familiar with my blog, you will probably know that I’ve spent quite a bit of time writing about the various ways these churches and communities engage in abuse denialism. Asking these communities to self police is laughable. It does not work.

But there is also a problem with who the article chooses to quote here. They could have brought in Boz Tchividjian of Godly Response to Abuse in a Christian Environment (GRACE) to explain how pastors and church elders should respond when suspicions of abuse or neglect come up, but they didn’t. Boz is a grandson of Billy Graham and a professor at Liberty University, but he’s the real deal when it comes to dealing with abuse. He knows what he’s doing and he doesn’t hold punches, but he’s also aware of how evangelical audiences are approaching these problems and he knows how to communicate with them—because he is one of them. Instead, WORLD stuck with uncritically quoting homeschool leaders.

Bill Roach is the president of CHEC, the organization that held the 2009 Men’s Leadership Conference that called for an end to child protective services. His pastor, Kevin Swanson, spoke at that conference; has defended child marriage; has belittled the concerns of homeschool alumni and labelled those calling attention to the problem of abuse and neglect the “homeschool apostates“; and openly participates in fear-mongering about social services and urges parents to join Heritage Defense, an organization created to defend Christian families against social services investigations. As for Voddie Baucham, he worked alongside Doug Phillips for years, seemingly never noticing that Phillips was sexually abusing his young female employee. Voddie is also on record as saying “Amen, Hallelujah, praise the Lord and spank your kids, okay?” during a sermon.

For years, a big part of the problem has been the Christian homeschooling leadership, which upholds absolute parental rights, advocates for strict corporal punishment, and preaches that child protective services destroys families and is to be avoided at all costs. They accept homeschooling parents’ word uncritically and doubt children’s stories of abuse or neglect. As an example of this problem, Bill Gothard’s board members and other leaders involved in his organization knew that something was out of place, but did nothing as he abused dozens of teenage girls in his employ over several decades. And yet these are the sort of people WORLD magazine is quoting as experts on the subject, and as part of the solution.

I realize that WORLD magazine is a news source and that this piece was a news piece and not an opinion piece. But the uncritical way Devine handled the statements made by HSLDA and others—and the fact that he didn’t do enough research to bring up things like the Halbesleben case or CHEC’s 2009 Men’s Leadership Conference—is really inexcusable. One finishes the article feeling that there is some awareness that there is a problem, but that the problem isn’t all that big and is already being dealt with within the homeschooling community—none of which is true.

Even Boz Tchividjian was left unsettled:

Katlyn River, Loved and Grieved: A Story of Late-Term Abortion

Last updated on: August 11, 2014 at 7:27 am By Libby Anne

A Guest Post

The author writes at On the Road to Crunchy Mama

I’ve wanted a baby for as long as I can remember. My mom says as a toddler in daycare, when kids’ parents showed up, I’d be the one getting them in their jackets and chivvying them to the door. I started working in the nursery at church with my mom long before I was officially old enough to do so, and had my first babysitting job at 12. I started working as a nanny shortly after I got married (couldn’t previously because those jobs don’t have insurance). So all that to say, I had been getting a bit impatient about the baby thing for a while. But my husband and I had the sense to take things fairly slow. We got married after almost 5 years of dating, and didn’t rush to have a baby afterwards. Still, around our 4 year anniversary, we decided it was time to start trying.

We got pregnant quickly, and were thrilled, but at 9.5 weeks I started bleeding and an ultrasound showed that the baby no longer had a heartbeat. We grieved, healed, and tried again, only for me to miscarry again, this time at 5 weeks. But finally, a few months later, just a month before our first baby would have been due, we got pregnant with what seemed to be our “rainbow baby.” I was due September 6th, just 4 days after my own birthday, and we were nervous, but happy.

Everything seemed to be going perfectly. The baby’s growth was on track, I was able to check the heartbeat whenever I wanted with the doppler my cousin loaned me, and we were finally starting to breathe easy and believe that this pregnancy might finally end in a healthy baby. Then at 20 weeks, during the standard anatomy scan, we were told that the baby (who we found out shortly after was a girl) had a moderate hydrocephalus. The ventricles of the brain are always supposed to contain fluid, but they should never be larger than 10mm at the most. Her’s, at 20 weeks, were both around 20mm. We were devastated, but still hopeful. At that point, there would be brain damage, because the fluid was taking up space that her brain needed to develop, but it could be fairly minor. And even the worst outcome with 20mm ventricles would still allow her a good quality of life.

At that point our options were explained to us, based on the different ways things might progress. If things stayed mostly the same, and the fluid build up didn’t get any worse, I’d probably carry to term, around 37 to 39 weeks, at which point she would come on out and they’d place a shunt (a tube that would run from the overfilled ventricles in the brain all the way to her abdomen, where it would drain the fluid). Then we would just have to wait and see how much her brain was able rebound from the compression it had been under from the fluid.

If the ventricles did keep growing, hitting around 30-40mm, they would recommend a c-section around 34 weeks. That’s when the risks of prematurity would cease to outweigh the benefits of early intervention, and she would be strong enough for the surgery. The treatment would be the same, inserting a shunt, and she would probably be in the NICU till around the original due date, so a month or two. In that case, we don’t really know what the damage might look like. It could be more severe, but since they’d be able to intervene sooner, she would have those extra two months of development without the hydrocephalus.

And if things got drastically worse, with the ventricles growing up into the 50, 60 or more range, then we were probably looking at no hope at all. She either simply wouldn’t survive, or we’d consider going to a state that allowed later termination, because at that point we really would be looking at a worst case scenario for her. There would be no quality of life possible.

We continued to go in for ultrasounds every few weeks. At 24.5 weeks, there was virtually no growth in ventricle size, which was encouraging. But at 28 weeks, they had increased fairly significantly, to something like 26-28mm on one side and 32-34mm on the other. That was a lot of growth in a relatively short time (four weeks), especially since she had another six to go for sure (remember they said 34 weeks was the earliest they could deliver, because before that the risks of prematurity would be too great, and she’d be too small to handle surgery anyway). We began making plans to deliver via c-section at 34 weeks, and started researching what we would need to do to get her the therapies she’d need, since she was definitely going to be special needs. I was scheduled for my first steroid shot, which would help her lungs develop and make the early delivery safer for her.

We had a doctor visit scheduled at 30w5d, which started off with another ultrasound. This one was just 2 weeks after the previous, which is close enough that the ultrasound tech wasn’t even sure she should bother taking measurements, because that’s not long enough to show much growth. However, the ventricles had enlarged significantly, to the point that the larger was up into the 40+ range. Worse, her head had not grown, and the increased fluid had further compressed her brain, so that the damage was now catastrophic. The neurosurgeon said that at that point the odds were in the “high 90’s” that she would never progress mentally beyond infancy. And she still had at least 3.5 weeks left before she could be delivered and the ventricle growth halted, so it would only get worse.

I don’t have any copies of her scans (nor do I want them), but a quick google search turned up some images that are comparable. The first is a moderate hydrocephalus. The fluid is the black area, and the surrounding grey is brain. The second is very similar to what we saw at this appointment. Basically the entire top half of her skull was full of fluid, so that the image was almost all black, with virtually no grey left at all. Her scan actually had even less grey around the edges than this image does.

This news left us with three options. One, we could deliver at 34 weeks as planned, have the shunt inserted, and simply see what happened. More than likely she would survive, because her brain stem was still unaffected (meaning she would still breathe and her heart would beat, etc). When the brain is that severely compressed, there is some risk that when the pressure is relieved by the shunt, the brain will spring back too quickly and tear the blood vessels supporting it. The odds of that are only around 10% however, so she would probably live. But she would have no quality of life, no higher brain function, no ability to live in any sense of the word that truly matters.

Our next option was to carry to term, and let nature take its course. No shunt, or other form of drainage to stop the hydrocephalus. Again, she would likely live, but in this case not for long. It’s impossible to say how long it would take, but eventually the pressure would destroy the rest of her brain, and she would die. It would be a short and probably painful life, and cruel to both her and those of us who care about her.

Which left us with the third choice. We could go Colorado or New Mexico, and we could terminate the pregnancy. It had to be done before 34 weeks legally, and even then we had to provide proof that this is a case of medical necessity. But it would be quick, for her, just an injection to stop her heart. For us it would be a four day process, starting with the injection, followed by two days of gradually opening the cervix, and ending with basically a combination of delivering (though with very limited pain relief) and a D&C. Of the three choices, it was the one that would hardest on us, at least emotionally. There would be no chance to hold her, or to ever see her alive other than on an ultrasound screen. But of the three choices, it was the one that would be best for her. It would give her the grace of a quick death, instead of a protracted, painful one, or a life that offered her nothing at all.

And so we began to take steps to obtain a late-term abortion. My doctor here (who was amazing throughout all of this) provided us with the information for a doctor who would do the procedure. As it turns out, there are only three doctors in the country who will. The risk is just too high. There used to be at least one more, but he was murdered, while at church, ironically. We had planned to handle it as quickly as possible, but the doctor was out of the country for the following couple of weeks, so we had to wait for him to get back.

It also turned out that the whole thing is more complicated than expected. Growing up (in a fundamentalist Christian home, though I’ve since moved away from that), I always had this thought that there were women out there getting late term abortions all the time, for no good reason. Turns out, as I mentioned, you have to provide (fairly extensive) proof that it’s medically warranted. It’s also far more expensive than we expected. The price we were given, which was based on her size, was $25,000, and, unlike most medical procedures where you simply deal with the bill later, it must be paid up front. Thankfully for us, our insurance would cover it, but the standard procedure is for us to pay and then send the bill to insurance for reimbursement. And since there are no providers “in network” that do the procedure, our insurance company would be obligated to reimburse us for only whatever they thought reasonable, and leave us with the rest. In this case, the initial amount they approved had them paying a grand total of $700 of the $25,000 bill. But we’re fortunate to have very good insurance, and my husband was able to work with them to get an exemption (to basically count this doctor as in network), which left us only responsible for our deductible. They also told us that we’ve set a precedent for this type of situation, so if someone else with our insurance faces the same thing, they won’t have to deal with the hours on the phone and tons of paperwork to get the out-of-network exemption. Unfortunately, even with the extra couple of weeks it took, there wasn’t time to get them to approve paying it up front, so we were still forced to come up with the money ourselves.

I don’t know what we’d have done if our insurance didn’t cover it. There is an organization (a charity of some sort, I assume) that helps with the costs in situations like ours, but it’s based on income. We make enough that I doubt they’d be able to do much for us, but that doesn’t mean we have $25,000 just sitting around. And we had to deal with our travel costs no matter what, not to mention the sick leave my husband had to use for the week that were gone. (Again, we were lucky in that his company gave him an extra 40 hours of sick leave for it, but many people wouldn’t have that available.) It makes me really, really angry that it was so hard. This situation was incredibly difficult already, and added to that was a ton of financial worries, travel, and stress, so that we could go to an office where every single employee is risking their life every day just by doing their job and helping people like us who are facing an impossible choice. We’re not just some flighty kids that made a baby and then decided that maybe we don’t want to deal with it after all. We didn’t make this decision because we were unwilling to raise a child with special needs and wanted to just scrap this attempt and try again. This was a baby that was badly wanted, but whose medical situation was so dire that the only kindness we could offer her was to let her go as quickly and painlessly as possible. We shouldn’t have had to go through so much to do something that’s already the hardest thing we’ve ever had to do. And the people who helped us should be seen as heroes, not murderers.

The two weeks between making the decision to terminate and actually doing it were hard, but not terrible. In some ways it was good to have that time to say goodbye, and not feel rushed. My husband spent plenty of time with me, including taking some extra time off work. Though at that point it hadn’t really sunk in. There were some tears when we first found out, but not really after. That came when we had to actually say goodbye, and go through with it, and continue on without her. Thankfully my husband didn’t try to pretend she was already gone. He still wanted to feel her move and talked about her. Part of me did want to put on baggy clothes and pretend I was just fat, but it wouldn’t have been right. We had the whole rest of our lives to mourn her, but we only had those last couple of weeks to be with her.

We did have maternity photos done. We wouldn’t have, but my amazing sister-in-law put the whole thing together. They have a cousin who lost a baby under similar circumstances, and she told my sister-in-law that we would regret it if we didn’t do it. So she called around and found us a photographer willing to meet us last minute (on a Sunday, no less), and a hair stylist who touched up my highlights and did my hair, and even a makeup person. She also paid for the photographer (the other two worked for free for us, though I tipped them). It was kind of hard to do, and I don’t exactly expect I’ll want to keep the pictures displayed to look at all the time, but I’m really glad we did it. This might be our only pregnancy (we may pursue adoption, though we’re not really thinking that far ahead right now), and I think the cousin is right that we would have regretted not having the pictures as a sort of remembrance.

We’ve boxed up all of her things and put them in the attic. We are keeping pretty much everything for a future baby. To us they’re for our baby (and we will have one someday, one way or another), not for her specifically. I did choose not to use any as props in the maternity photos for that reason. That would have made them actually hers. The only exception, I think, will be the blanket my cousin made for her. For whatever reason, that feels like it should be kept special. I’ll have that, and I’ll be getting some sort of Christmas ornament as well. I never did get one for the miscarriages (I might yet), but she needs one.

My husband’s also getting me a ring with her birthstone, to wear with my wedding and engagement rings. It’s what I’d planned for any babies we had, this will just be in remembrance instead of just acknowledgement. We’re going to go with ruby, the July birthstone. She was due in September, then planned for August, and eventually July, so it’s hard to say which one is really appropriate. But the last date we were planning for her birthday was July 27th, and that’s the day I want to commemorate. September, I feel like, fails to acknowledge everything we went through, and in August we just had a general idea, not a specific date. I don’t want the day we terminated to be the one we choose to remember either, so as far as I’m concerned her birthday is July 27th.

So for now it’s just a matter of waiting for time to do its job, helping us to heal emotionally and (in my case) physically. It’s very slowly starting to feel a little easier, and while I’m sure there will always be bad days, I expect they’ll come fewer and farther between. We’ll be sad, but we’ll move on, and we won’t forget, but neither will it seem like such a huge, all-encompassing thing standing in our way forever. I hope so anyway.

The choices that we were forced to make will be controversial, but I’m not going to try to hide them either. It’s not fair for us to have to live with this as some big secret, nor do I think it’s something shameful or wrong that merits secrecy. And I’ve blogged all this so far in case someone else who is going through something similar finds it, and finds some comfort in it, and some reassurance that I, at least, understand what they’re going through, and there is no judgement here. I’m not ashamed of what we did. I don’t have doubts that it was the right thing to do. It wasn’t a selfish choice. If I was being selfish I’d have carried her to term, and had those days or weeks or months with her. Or maybe even have delivered early and had her get the shunt, and risked her never having any sort of life for the sake of that maybe 1% chance that she would be, not okay, but not quite as bad as the worst case. I didn’t want to give up the only time I could have with her. But our job as parents was to do what was best for her, even when it meant letting her go. And I’m not going to apologize for that, or try to hide it.

Her name is Katlyn River.

I’m Sorry

Last updated on: April 28, 2014 at 8:55 am By Libby Anne

I recently had occasion to visit my state’s capital building. As I walked through those halls, with their pillars and arches, two thoughts burned themselves into my brain. First, the capital building seems smaller than it did the last time I was here, ten years ago. Second, I am sorry, so very sorry.

Ten years ago I was a teenager, still in high school. Did I know what I was doing?

We got up early that morning, that day ten years ago, and piled into our fifteen passenger van. My dad, five or six of my siblings, some extra friends, and me. My mom stayed home with the youngest ones. The capital building was crowded when we arrived, and we quickly added our own number to the throng.

We found a spot on the balcony on the third level where we could see, then looked around at those crowded in next to us and down on the atrium below. Some kids were in school uniforms, and others were clearly homeschoolers like us. It was a weekday, after all. Many of those around us held signs or banners of various kinds.

Down below we watched.

After a bit, the center of the atrium opened and a series of speakers came forward. They told us that marriage had always been between a man and a woman. They told us that our society was built on traditional marriage, and would collapse without it. The told us that adding an amendment to our state constitution defining marriage was imperative. The crowd around me went wild as people shook their signs and cheered. I cheered too. The air was electric. There were Bible verses and prayers. There was talk of out nation’s Christian future. There were more prayers and shouts of “amen.” The atmosphere was one of a church service or a revival meeting.

Afterward, we walked out of the capital building, and there, on the lawn, I spoke with reporters. I think the idea was to give them the youth perspective. I told them what I’d been prepped to tell them—but it’s not like I didn’t actually believe it myself. I talked about marriage and family and procreation. I tried to look mature and confident. I wanted to impress the reporter with my thorough understanding of the issue. I wonder, now, what they thought of me.

Today I question whether I had any idea what I was talking about. I certainly thought I did. But at that time I had never, to my knowledge, met a gay person. I had never, to my knowledge, met someone who was lesbian to bisexual or transgender or simply queer. I was homeschooled and my community consisted of church and other Christian homeschoolers. How could I understand the issue having never had any exposure to the other side?

Since that day ten years ago many things have happened. I’ve had a friend come out as bisexual and then as gay. I’ve talked with a lesbian friend about the risk of crossing state lines with a child whose adoption is not recognized in many states. I’ve listened to a gay coworker describe his adolescent suicide attempt. I’ve been there to help a friend support her spouse coming as transgender and transitioning to life as a woman. I’ve listened to gay friends discuss the significance of which state they live in after grad school to their plans for adding children to their family someday. I’ve watched a gay colleague follow each election to see what new states he can add to his list of places he can move to after grad school.

Last year I attended a marriage equality rally for the first time. I proudly held a rainbow flag and cheered as the speakers called for equal rights for all, regardless of sexual orientation or gender expression. I cried as I stood there, surrounded by gay couples with children and other straight allies and supporters. I cried because I wondered if maybe, in some small way, I was making up for what I’d done before.

But I also know that I do bear responsibility for my activism as a teen. I know that LGBTQ members of my state community are hurt by such blatant displays of bigotry. Yes, bigotry. And I was there, I participated, I cheered. I knew there were people on the other side. I didn’t know them, and I’d been taught lies about them, but I knew they were there. I shouldn’t have been so unquestioningly accepting of my parents’ prejudices.

I sought to restrict the rights of those I had never met. I did that. Me. And so, as I stood there in the capital building recently, looking up at the balconies and the vaulted ceiling and remembering, all I could think was I’m sorry.

Guest Post: The Many Valuable Lessons I Learned at ATI

Last updated on: June 25, 2015 at 7:36 am By Libby Anne

A guest post by Laura

Originally posted on Homeschoolers’ Anonymous

The 14 years I spent as a student in Bill Gothard’s ATI taught me many valuable lessons for my life. Here are some of the highlights:

* Parents are always right.

* Men are always right. Therefore, your father is double-right.

* Getting out from under the “umbrella of authority” means you will have many problems, including being raped. (Not sure what the warning is for boys who get out from under their umbrellas. I’m a girl so always heard the rape thing.) The fiery darts of Satan will have nothing to stop them from hitting you. We all know that an umbrella is the best possible analogy because their thin, flammable fabric is the perfect substance with which to stop fiery darts.

* If your umbrella – dad or husband – has holes, then Satan will get you unless you pray really hard that they’ll patch up their holes. If you don’t, you’ll probably get raped.

* Family is everything. Except when young people go to a Training Center or Headquarters. Then it’s okay to not be together as a family unit. Or when young people go to Apprenticeship Sessions at Knoxville and make binding vows that their parents know nothing about. That’s okay. You do not need to seek your father’s permission to make such vows that will control what you do the rest of your life. Your father’s permission is implied because he sent you to this Apprenticeship Session.

* Young people, given the option, will always choose the wrong spouse. Therefore, their parents – most of whom chose their own spouse – will choose or at least approve their spouse for them.

* If you date, you’ll have all sorts of problems and can never have a happy marriage. Dating is practice for divorce. Courtship is practice for marriage. If your parents dated and have a happy marriage anyway, it doesn’t matter – dating is still bad and you will get divorced if you date.

* You should court (aka “let your parents pick or approve your spouse”) so you don’t get divorced.

* Talking to a boy is dating him. Especially if either of you have romantic thoughts about the other one. To be on the safe side, it’s best never to talk with young men. (At some Training Centers, talking with a person of the opposite sex for longer than a few seconds, unless it was obviously work-related, was grounds for discipline and/or being sent home.)

* Even thinking about a boy is probably dating him. You should immediately confess any such stray thoughts to your father, ask his forgiveness, and make yourself accountable to him lest you be tempted to have any more thoughts about boys

* If it happens that the boy you are thinking about has already asked your father for your hand, or does so in the future, you will not be informed of this until your father deems it the appropriate time. This means you could spend years fighting attraction to the man you will eventually marry, but it’s still a sin to think these thoughts.

* If you marry the “wrong person,” then after you’re married they become the “right person,” aka God’s new will for your life. You’re stuck. Deal with it. You shouldn’t have dated him anyway, or married him without your parents’ permission. We know you either dated or married without parental blessing or both, because duh, you married the “wrong person” and you would never have done that if you’d courted and gotten your parents’ blessing!

* If your parents lead you to marry a guy who’s in the Mafia (yes, this example is in the Basic Seminar, or maybe the Advanced Seminar… it’s been a few years since I watched either of them) then you need to be submissive anyway. Because your parents chose him for you, God will bless your marriage even though he’s in organized crime and likes to beat you when he gets home. You still can’t divorce him.

* Not only should you NEVER EVER EVER marry someone who’s divorced, but you probably shouldn’t marry the *child* of divorced parents.

* The sins of the fathers will be passed down to the children unless a very specific prayer is prayed over said children. We are very blessed to live in a time when we have Bill Gothard to teach us such things. Thousands of years’ worth of Christians simply had to fight inherited sins on their own, without Mr. Gothard to show them the RIGHT way to overcome such things!

* Adoption is bad. You don’t know what “sins of the fathers” are being introduced into your home.

* Birth control is bad. God will give you as many children as you deserve. Susanna Wesley was a favorite example – she had 19 children although less than half of them survived infancy.

* If you can’t have children, then something must be wrong in your life. Clearly God gives many children to those whom he favors. He really loves Mrs. McKim. (Now I’m showing my age… these days it would be Mrs. Duggar!)

* Only have sex between days 15 and 28 of the wife’s menstrual cycle. Days 8-14 are maybe okay, but if you’re trying to be ultra-Godly, or get pregnant, wait until day 15. You want the “seed” as strong as possible.

* It’s not awkward to talk about periods and sex in mixed company when single “fellas” and single “girls” are present in the room, as long as it’s in the Advanced Seminar. Plus, we use terms like “relations” and “monthly cycle” instead of “sex” and “periods,” so we’ll all just pretend we don’t know what we’re talking about so it’s less awkward.

* Tampons will kill you. Toxic shock syndrome and all that. They’re bad. Follow God’s design for your monthly cycle and wear pads.

* Rock music is bad. It will kill your plants and cause you to be demon-possessed. It will also cause you to drink, take drugs, have sex with anyone and everyone, wear jeans, and generally rebel against everything Godly. Rock music with Christian words is even worse.

* If your family visits a restaurant or store that is playing ungodly music, you must ask the server or store employee to turn the music off. If they refuse, then the most Godly thing would be to leave the premises immediately so that your family is not harmed by the ungodly music. Plus, you’ll be a testimony of God’s principles.

* The only okay music is hymns. Classical music is okay as long as it doesn’t have a back beat. But if you’re really Godly, you’ll listen to hymns. Preferably played on a harp. The harp is the most Godly of instruments. After all, David used it to charm the demon out of King Saul. Until King Saul threw a javelin at him. Twice. During harp music.Somehow that part never got talked about when I was in ATI. Forget that. Just listen to harp music anyway.

* Cabbage Patch Kid dolls will cause you to be demon-possessed. They will also cause your mom to have her labor stall, until the doll is found & burned, at which moment, labor will resume and the baby will be born within minutes. (Another anecdote, told in the Basic Seminar I believe.)

* To be on the safe side, better not have My Little Pony, Care Bears, troll dolls, and definitely no souvenirs from Africa such as masks or figurines. You will be demon-possessed. They must be burned. Simply throwing them away is not good enough to break the demon’s power over you. It doesn’t matter if such toys are your child’s favorite toy(s), they must be burned anyway.

* Denim is bad. It’s a sign of rebellion. Even boys should wear Dockers, etc., not denim jeans.

* T-shirts are bad. They’re a sign of rebellion. Only collared shirts are allowed. Therefore, a polo shirt is acceptable attire for “fellas” or girls. A t-shirt is not. (How a girl wearing a polo shirt is not “wearing that which pertaineth to a man,” I don’t know. I never heard that addressed.)

* If you are going to rebel and wear a t-shirt, don’t ever wear one with words or a design on the front. Girls, don’t you know what when a man’s eyes are reading the words or looking at the picture, they’re really checking out your body? You’re going to get raped if you encourage men to read your chest – I mean, shirt – instead of focusing on your bright, Godly countenance.

* Beards are bad. They’re signs of rebellion. (During the 1980′s and part of the 1990′s, if the dad had facial hair, the family would not be allowed to join ATIA/ATI.)

* Men must have short hair that is obviously masculine in style. The best hairstyle for a “fella” causes you to look like your photo – complete with a navy suit – could fit right in to a high school yearbook from the 1950′s.

* Women should have long hair, with gentle curls. If God made your hair straight, then you must curl it. If God made your hair ultra-curly, then you must straighten it. Blonde is the best color. The Principle of Design (accepting your body as God made it) is suspended for hair. Mr. Gothard dyes his hair so apparently hair dye doesn’t violate the 10 Unchangeables regarding physical features or aging.

* Pants or jeans or shorts on women are so bad that I can’t even begin to stress how important this is. Men will lust after your body. You will get raped. (Girls can’t wear pants because they pertaineth to a man, even though men in Bible times wore “dresses” or robes. That was okay, though, because their robes were distinctly masculine in style, so it was still easy to tell at a distance if you were looking at a man or a woman. But pants are never okay on women because they’re too much like men’s garments so you can’t tell from a distance if it’s a man or a woman.)

* Hosiery should be skin-toned and should never have a pattern woven into it. This is an eye trap, and will draw rapists’ – I mean, men’s – eyes from your bright and shining coutenance down to your legs. He will be so busy looking at your patterned hosiery that he may very well rape you without even realizing what he’s doing, and it won’t be his fault, because you were the one wearing the eyetrap.

* The most modest attire for a woman is a navy skirt, a white blouse, and a navy neckbow. Or in later years and/or if you or a close friend have been to Russia, you may wear a black painted Russian pin at your neckline, as the ATI version of a status symbol. (Just don’t let it rain while you’re wearing your modest white blouse, or it becomes… um… less modest and more see-through… maybe *that* is why were were always supposed to be under an umbrella… and Heaven help the full-chested girl whose blouse kept wanting to gap or pop buttons in the wrong place…!)

* You must vow (not promise, but VOW) to never go to a movie theater. Bill Gothard made such a vow when he was a young man, and look how wonderful his life has been! Therefore, you MUST make this same vow.

* You should also commit to fasting regularly, at least on Sundays. Bill Gothard made such a vow when he was a young man, and look how wonderful his life has been! Therefore, you MUST make this same vow.

* You must also vow to read your Bible every day for the rest of your life. At least 5 minutes a day. Bill Gothard made such a vow when he was a young man, and look how wonderful his life has been! Therefore, you MUST make this same vow.

* You must also memorize Scripture. Preferaby by the chapter. Or the book. The most Godly of Godly people memorize the whole New Testament, *and* Psalms, *and* Proverbs. But at least start on Matthew 5, 6, & 7. And Romans 6, 7, 8, & 12. And James 1, 2, 3, 4, & 5. If you memorize random scattered verses, you aren’t Godly enough.

* Simply reading the Bible isn’t enough. You must also *meditate* on Scripture. If you meditate on Scripture, then you will get good grades in school. You will breeze through college. Bill Gothard made such a vow when he was a young man, and look how wonderful his life has been! Therefore, you MUST make this same vow.

* Public school is bad. Christian school is almost as bad as public school.Homeschooling is good. Bill Gothard attended public school, and look how… oh, wait, never mind.

* Sunday School is bad. Children’s Institutes are good. Groups of peers are bad. Young people must spend time in groups of all ages. If you insist on attending Sunday School at your church, then you should attend a class as a family, because then your children won’t be tempted to make friends with people their own age.

* Character is the most important thing in life. Education doesn’t matter – just have character. Just have good character and employers will hunt you down and beg you to come work for them. Unless you’re a girl. In which case you’d better not work for anyone but Bill Gothard or your dad, or you will have sex with a co-worker or boss. Or get raped.

* College is bad. Public school is bad. Christian school is bad. Normal homeschooling is okay but less Godly than enrolling in ATI. If a girl goes to college, she’ll almost certainly get raped. Boys who go to college will be taught about how great Satan is. After all, Bill Gothard went to college, and look how… oh, wait. Never mind again.

* The most Godly homes have Scripture posted on the walls. Generic pictures of landscapes or portraits of people were never forbidden, but if you’re *really* Godly, you’ll have Scripture on your walls. Or CharacterFirst! posters.

* It’s okay to teach in public schools, but only if you are teaching the CharacterFirst! materials. Otherwise you should avoid any and all contact with the public schooled, sex-crazed, denim-wearing, rock-music-listening, rebellious youths of the world.

* TV is bad. Horribly, horribly bad.

* The Interent is bad. But since so many of you insist on having it in your home, you should buy protection from CharacterLink. It will cost you a bunch of money every month, and won’t let you see half of the perfectly-legitimate sites you want to visit, but you must spend the money on it anyway. Especially if you have men or boys in the home. Men or boys who are allowed to touch a computer without CharacterLink installed on it will become addicted to porn and will probably become rapists. (Bet this one’s really hard to enforce nowadays, since CharacterLink is no longer owned by ATI, and iPods and iPhones and iPads and their cousins would be incredibly hard to control. I suppose ATI kids these days aren’t allowed access to such technology.)

* If you are visiting friends or relatives who turn on a TV or a computer or do anything else that goes against your Scriptural convictions, including the ones for which you have no Scriptural basis, you must stand alone. You must say, “I’ve given my life to Jesus and I can’t do that.” Sleepovers are probably not a good idea because it’s almost certain that someone will do something to offend you, at which time you must stand alone, and probably call your parents to come pick you up from said sleepover. (A sleepover where the mom decided to hold a seance was the example given. As a mother, I don’t send my children to sleepovers unless I know the parents well enough to trust my child to their care. However, in the example, the parents who sent the child there were never criticized. Rather, the child was praised for refusing to participate in a seance.)

* Whole wheat bread is the answer to all of the world’s health and nutritional needs. It only counts if the wheat was ground *that morning,* the bread was made *that day,* and you eat it *that day.* After all, “give us this day our daily bread” definitely does NOT refer to bread purchased at the grocery store, or even made the day before. White flour will kill you. Whole wheat flour will save your life. Eat lots of whole wheat bread every day. (We have to assume that Celiac Disease and gluten intolerance are the figments of evil people’s imaginations. We’ll never know, since Celiac & gluten intolerance were unheard-of back then. I suppose that if those people were eating whole wheat bread, then they wouldn’t have Celiac Disease. ‘Cause whole wheat bread is the answer to all of the world’s health and nutritional needs.)

* A desire for white bread was a major factor in beginning the French Revolution.

* You’ll know you’re getting enough fiber when your, um, bathroom business floats. (During that Wisdom Booklet and for a time thereafter, our family announced our results to each other after leaving the bathroom.)

* Don’t eat pork. Ever. It’s bad.

* Don’t eat dairy and meat together. It’s bad. No more cheeseburgers, ever. Or milkshakes with a burger. But sometimes we’ll order pizza at our Training Centers, with pepperoni toppings. That’s okay.

* Don’t chew gum. It’s a sign of rebellion since that’s what rebellious teen-agers do.

* Games are a waste of time. Unless it’s Character Clues or Commands of Christ.

* You should avoid any game that teaches you about demons or hell. Except Commands of Christ. Its picture of hell is okay.

* Dungeons and Dragons is a game that must be avoided at all costs. It will cause you to be demon-possessed.

* Folly of any kind is a waste of time and damages your testimony. Avoid all practical jokes. Avoid loud laughter. Your time would be more productively spent reading your Bible, memorizing character qualities, or fasting and praying.

* If you memorize all 49 character quality definitions, including the ones that are so similar that no one but Bill Gothard can differentiate them, then you will not only have such great character that you don’t need college to be successful in life, but you will also beat everyone else in Character Clues. Every time. Just don’t be proud of that fact, or you obviously don’t have Humility. Since very character quality has a Bible verse reference on its card, you know they came straight from the Bible.

* There are seven non-optional principles of life. Aren’t we lucky – oops, can’t say “lucky” – fortunate – no, can’t say that either – BLESSED to live in this time of history when Bill Gothard has figured out what these seven non-optional principles are? We are so much better off than people like the Apostle Paul, becuase he didn’t have Bill Gothard to help him know how to live.

* If you reject the way God made you – any of the 10 Unchangeables – then you will be bitter and have a horrible life. (“Principle of Design”)

* If you get out from under your umbrella of authority, the boogeyman will get you and you will be either demon-possessed, raped, or both. (“Principle of Authority”)

* If you don’t meditate on Scripture, your life will be mediocre at best. (“Principle of Success”)

* If you zone out during most of the Basic Seminar and fifteen years later can only remember three of the seven non-optional principles of life, then you are surely doomed!!

* Bitterness is the root problem in this world. You need to learn how to draw little checkerboard diagrams with castles, so you can remove the strongholds of bitterness that Satan has in your life, and so that you can then teach other people how to clear their checkboard souls of Satan’s castles.

* If I, as a 12-year-old student, followed these principles in my life, then not only was I qualified to teach adults how to solve their marriage and financial and business problems, but the leaders of Russia would practically fall on their faces to worship me as a Godly young lady attired in modest navy and white with a navy neckbow. Or I might even be given a walkie-talkie to carry around at Knoxville!

* “Bright eyes” are the ultimate expression of one’s spirituality. One can accurately gauge the depths of another person’s commitment to Christ by looking at their eyes. If their eyes are “dark,” then they clearly listen to rock music and therefore have given all sorts of ground to Satan and have strongholds all over their checkerboard soul. (Note: native Russian speakers have since clarified that “bright eyes” is the translation of a Russian idiom meaning that a person is happy. It has much more to do with one’s emotional state than with one’s spiritual state.)

* If someone compliments you on anything, from having “bright eyes” to playing the violin in church, you must deflect the praise. The best praise-deflectors can turn every compliment into an opportunity to thank God (for the musical talent), but of course one must also praise one’s parents (for paying for the violin lessons) and one’s teacher (for teaching so skillfully and diligently). No compliment is ever to be answered with a simple “Thank you.” That would be prideful.

* If you’re enrolled in ATI and have learned all of these Godly principles, then you don’t really need to go to church. The only reason you would go to church is to minister to others. Or be a testimony to them. Since you can’t subject your family to the evils of rock music, if your church has compromised to the point of allowing such music, you must either stand up and leave as soon as a rock beat starts, or if this is a regular occurrence, you must time your arrival at church to coincide with the end of the song service so that your family will not be exposed to the evil rock beat. If a rock beat is used during the invitation time as well, then you must leave at the end of the sermon. Because a large, floral-jumper- or navy-suit-clad family parading in and out of church to avoid the back beat is a definite testimony of God’s principles at work in your life.

* When you are in church, you don’t really need to listen to the sermon, because you know all of these non-optional principles, therefore you are wise – wiser than your teachers, which includes the pastor of your church. Anything your pastor or anyone else says that is in opposition to the teachings of IBLP/ATI is clearly wrong. If possible, such a preacher or teacher should be lovingly confronted with the truth, as taught in the big red textbooks and/or Wisdom Booklets. (Presumably one never becomes wiser than their primary teachers, their parents. Because parents are always right.)

* If you are persecuted for your Godly testimony or standards and/or for shoving such testimony or standards down other people’s throats, rejoice! And be exceeding glad! For great is your reward in Heaven.

They called it “adultery” and made her confess

Last updated on: February 27, 2014 at 12:49 pm By Libby Anne

I have been reading about child sexual abuse perpetrated in the 1980s by Donn Ketcham, a missionary doctor in Bangladesh. The abuse came to light when one of his victims, a 14-year-old missionary kid, returned to the United States to visit relatives. While there, she told the pastor of her home church about her abuse. Her pastor interrogated her to ensure that she was being truthful and then handed her over to Russ Lloyd and Russ Ebersole, the first a Christian counselor and the second Donn Ketcham’s boss through his missions agency, ABWE.

Unbeknownst to ABWE, Donn Ketcham, who was pushing 60 and had been on the mission field for decades, was a serial adulterer—and also a serial child molester. Lloyd and Ebersole then took the girl back to Bangladesh where the confronted Ketcham and informed the girl’s parents of what had happened. Donn confessed to a string of affairs, all of which were chalked up to “adultery.” Donn did not tell Lloyd or Ebersole that the 14-year-old was not the first child he had molested, but that might not have made any difference to the way they were interpreting Don’s transgressions—it was adultery, they concluded. Lloyd and Ebersole then made both the girl and Donn sign confessions.

Here is the 14-year-old girl’s confession:

And here is Donn Ketcham’s confession:

Notice anything? They call it adultery and treat the girl as just as guilty as her abuser. When Donn Ketcham began sexually abusing the girl, he was pushing 60 and she was 12. And they call it adultery. That was the problem—Donn Ketcham, missionary doctor, had an affair with a 12-year-old girl.

You can read Lloyd’s diary, detailing the revelation, investigations, and confession.

There is something perverse about treating adultery and child molestation as the same offense. Adultery is wrong because it is the breaking of a contract, and results in harm to the non-offending spouse. Child molestation is wrong because it, like rape, involves sexual activity without consent. The two are completely different, and to suggest that a 14-year-old girl was responsible for her own abuse is utterly reprehensible. The agony this girl was put through is heart rending. Rather than being offered help and care as a victim, she was treated as a guilty fellow perpetrator—in her own abuse.

I’ve heard of this sort of thing happening before. Tina Anderson was only 15 in 1997 when she was raped and impregnated by an elder at her church. When her pastor found out what had happened, Tina was forced to stand before the congregation and confess to the sin of sexual immorality, as a guilty party in what was actually her rape. Tina was then sent out of the state to have her baby, whom she was forced to give up for adoption. Thirteen years later, Tina came forward with what had happened, went to court against her rapist, and put him behind bars.

In the last couple of years, more people have begun poking into just what happened in Bangladesh in the 1980s. In the face of rising questions, ABWE hired GRACE (Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment) to investigate and write a report. Information has been leaking out on a number of blogs run by former missionary kids focusing on Donn Ketcham’s abuse. It appears that Donn Ketcham sexually molested numerous other children during his tenure as missionary doctor in Bangladesh. When they sent him home in 1989, ABWE did not investigate to see if Donn had been molesting any of the other missionary kids living at the mission, apparently assuming that the issue was simply one of adultery, and not serial child molestation. It has also come out that there were additional missionaries involved in the abuse—and that the original 14-year-old girl told ABWE of another missionary of molesting her, but was coerced into recanting her accusation. That missionary had been accused of molestation by two others, years earlier, and the accusations had been overlooked then as well.

GRACE has since been fired by ABWE. While ABWE claims it is not trying to hide anything, it seems likely that GRACE uncovered additional things about the abuse and ABWE’s handling of it that ABWE did not want made public, and that ABWE wanted more control over the end results of the investigation than GRACE was giving them. Given how badly they handled the original victim’s case, I can’t say that I’m surprised.