Are you ready for a wild trip through the ups and downs of a girl empowerment business at a homeschool conferences? Picture this a dynamic duo teaching girls about their worth and potential using the stories of legendary women an old boy. Do they face some interesting encounters from a mom worried about being woke in a way she might not even understand, to a guy giving an impropetuy really bad history
lesson on Rosie the Riveter. From a nice mansplaining point of view, this journey is a menagerie of curious encounters and an unexpected push up contest for boys. It's really a wild homeschooling ride. But there's a twist in this tale. Despite the anxiety and occasional upset stomach, our real hero, Heather, is determined to change the conversation about feminism and unexpected places. So get ready for a homeschool adventure like no other. This article is by Heather Stark and
was published by huff Post on October twenty ninth, twenty twenty three. And I happen to know that our very own Jimmy Junior has actually been in contact with Heather. So Jimmy, I want you to take the segment off. Oh all right, thank you, Yeah, I yeah. This dichotomy, the dichotomy in this story is a little upsetting because it's it's great. Feminism is a wonderful thing, and we really need to voice that more, especially
in these religious circles that teach kind of the inferiorization of women. Two men and I particularly love the subtitle of this article. I'm twenty minutes into the presentation when a woman interrupts me. When are you going to talk about God and all of this? She asks? And that right there tells you everything that you need to know about this article. It's full of anecdotes that really
portray the way that religion is kind of opposite feminism. And so the article centers on an organization called Grays and Grit that is managed by the two individuals that you spoke of, Kelly and looking at their website, they characterize their curriculum kit as stories of notable women in history that are used to teach girls about their worth and potential. So these conferences they attend are homeschool conferences.
They offer an alternative learning style by having a curriculum that is geared specifically toward notable historic women and as a young girl, Heather, the author of this article, think that she needed to conform to culture standards, our culture standards of what a girl should be perfect body, perfect emotions, perfect face. And I'm taking that, of course from their website as well. And while she does face this kind of thing at these conventions that she attends, it's
not only what she's encountering, because this isn't religion. Just doesn't stop there with the way that maybe a woman should look or how they should act. They advertise they encourage defining gender roles in a way where a woman should behave inferior and these lessons kind of men in a position of dominance over women. So Heather tried to be neutral through these things, put the business first.
And the article actually leaves off with her partner suggesting that they shouldn't hold back anymore, right, they should no longer be so compliant in the future, and she responds by joking, well, we'll get canceled if we do that. So ironically, that's exactly what they did. So I reached out to Heather actually and I said, hey, whatever happened? Did you guys decide to be you know, more outspoken more, I guess feminist in your approach.
And the update she gave me was that in less than forty eight hours after she wrote this article, Grays and GrITT received an email from the organization that hosts these events to inform them they're no longer welcome. And so I told her that we would be discussing her article. She was thrilled that we'd be mentioning it and that we would be joining her in our voice for feminism,
because she says that feminism needs every voice that it can get. And I asked her, you know, is there anything else that you'd like me to relay, and she just wanted to let everybody know she's going to continue with her mission. They've launched their own podcast, they will be attending a variety of secular events that they've been invited to, and they'll not only use the podcast and the attendance at these events to continue to advocate for women,
but they have their newsletter as well. And so that's how my correspondence tied into my analysis of this article. And I just think the whole story is great, Cidy, what do you think you know? Joheneral Iver did a piece on homeschooling a couple of weeks ago. I don't know if you If you guys saw it, and it was basically as you would expect, a corp system with no regulation, allowing for all the worst people to take advantage of it. And that's basically what we see in the article. You mentioned
religion, but there was also politics talked about in the article. So from outside the US, you can't imagine how frustrating it is to see that almost half of the US still fighting for this unregulated ultra capitalism, while at the same time seeing so many including those same people, suffering from it. We were talking about self inflicted wounds in the previous episode, Well that's basically the same, but on steroids. Because it's so ingrained in the mentality of the
right that regulations are bad. But yeah, regulations are. They exist for a reason, and the European Union we have a lot of regulations and we are protected from this kind of behavior. I have to say reading this article was very very much unnerving, and especially one of them. One of the events that she mentions and it says, so I am in Texas, my home state. Mom wanders in, picks up a journal and reads about Kate Warne, the first woman detective. Where do you do your research? She
asks? I give her several sites. That's good, she says, Now then what is your slant? My slant? Which way do you lean? Well, historical facts? I tell her. Okay, but listen, I need you to do something for me. She reaches out and takes my hand. Apparently we are best friends. Now. Right about biblical characters, she said, we need that, especially the men. I tilt my head to the side. Well, we focus on actual women from history. I say, wrong, answer, Well, I will have to think about this,
and she drops my hand and the friendship is over. And I thought that this interaction is exactly what you see and what you expect from Christian in the US, because the woman there, She's actually right. The Bible is not exactly a book you can go to if you want to show girl empowerment,
which is exactly what the author is strength to achieve. Because between Eve being a Pandora like character responsible for bringing evil to the entire mind kind for all general rations, lots of daughters giving their father drinks so they can sleep with him, Abrahm's wife being used as bait to help him get riched Mary raped by an invisible gun and many others. It's no wonder why you'd go to
men figures when looking looking into the Bible. But the fact that they put so much effort into infiltrating the educational system should scare the ship out of people, not just US cities in Eron. So people believe that the Bible is the ultimate moral authority, but those people haven't actually studied the Bible, because not only do the morals that actually but some of the morals that actionally spouses
are just plain bad and evil. But the examples that the characters in the Bible set and the things that God commands are not moral, you know, commanding condoning slavery not moral, Commanding genocide not moral. Commanding women to keep their mouth shut, that's not moral. That's not good. Those are good
things. And I challenge anybody that's that's listening the things the Bible is the ultimate moral authority to go and actually read and study the Bible, because you'll find there's some good things, but there are some really really bad things. It's not absolutely a good book in all ways. And I think you mentioned something else about regulation. Regulations have to exist because they're bad people in the world. They're bad people. They are going to take advantage of people.
There are businesses, they're going to take advantage of people that pollute, that sell narcotics in a non ethical way and get people hooked on it. There's all sorts of people that are just out for themselves. They're out for money, and that's one of the reasons government exists is to help protect us from people like that and to help protect the common good. And so a regulation is really important, and unfortunately the homeschooling area is not regulated. It's very
very poorly regulated. Last week tonight with John Oliver, they did a show in early October, on October eighth about homeschooling. They did it. They had a segment on that, and I guess the homeschooling is led by some really powerful lobbying groups. One in particular is called the homeschool Legal Defense Association,
and they fight again any and all regulations around homeschooling. You would be surprised to know that in some states you don't even parents don't even need to notify the schools that they're homeschooling, and like a third of the states they just have to notify them once but there's no there's no regulation on meeting standards.
There's no regulation on what's being taught. So people can teach that dinosaurs coincided with man, that at the Bible teaches that evolution is or that the Bible the evolution is not scientific, and that the scientific community doesn't believe in evolution. All these terrible things that are just against our educational standards. I'm all four home. I support homeschooling. If parents want to pull their kids out and it's homeschool them, thumbs up, go do that. But there
needs to be standards. If I go to school, there are standards that that those schools have to adhere to and their standards those students get tested on. And if you're going to be a homeschooling parent, you should have to meet those same standards. And I just have this one final thing before is that I have to I have to really I'm really proud of this team, of this organization, of this company because they're they're doing amazing things. They're
in a very difficult place around people that don't don't like them. And uh, I think her partner said that your thing, your thing is changing the conversation, changing the conversation on beauty culture, changing the conversation on how we raise empowered girls. How about we changed the conversation about feminism at these events. I'm really sad to hear that they got they got the boot from these
these shows, because their curriculum is really awesome. When my daughter was younger, they I found a book series called good Night Stories for Rebel Girls where there were one page stories on legendary and amazing women from history, and for a few months, we would read out of that every night and we would share. I would share her stories of amazing women and the things that they've done, because women have done amazing things, and that's all feminism is.
It's all about making women equal to everybody else and giving them the same rights and opportunities that men have. And that's Kelly. You know, there was a cook. One of the things that really bothered me about this story was Heather's description of the red isle at the conferences, and I found that really alarming that here was all these far right political organizations at an educational rally, and it's not difficult to jump to the idea of the Hitler youth from there,
And I know, I just broke Godwin's law. I know I just did, but I think most of us can agree that a lot of the right wing philosophy in the USA right now, as Cindy had mentioned earlier, is that it's bordering on fascism. And why is there an isle of right wing political philosophy at a homeschool convention. Isn't politics an adult thing. You can't vote while you're in school, So what's going on here? It aget it. It has shades of indoctrinating children, the very thing that homeschoolers are
accusing public schools of doing. It's not enough that these religious people have to get their claws into the kids, but now these far right political ideologues are doing it too, and they can infiltrate the public schools with their nonsense. So now they've targeted homeschooling instead, effectively nearly taking it over. I was wondering if anyone on the panel at any ideas how this type of indoctrinate and in nation might play out in the future. But I know everybody else has
few things they want to say. I know Jimmy Junior has some more, so while pass it to him, Oh, I appreciate that. Yeah, man, so much to unpack here. When you start considering what the goals of maybe the far right in politics and the religious kind of footprint in this country have in common, right, they tend to align and adopt the same goals, and I think that they are finding that they really can generate a lot of support by keeping people uneducated. And that is how Christianity has survived.
That's how religions tend to survive. If you look through kind of the historical timeline of ruling churches and popes and how Christianity was able to climb to where it was, it was because the masses didn't get the same kind of education, uh that maybe the rich, elite elites got to. Instead, they were kind of subjugated and forced to attend church with Bibles that were not
you know, around in their or or available in their own language. They're still we're still seeing that today where uh, legislation is kind of forcing the removal of books, you know, the removal of historical principles. We want to keep people ignorant, and uh, I think that that is something that's pretty common in our education system today. And that's kind of my thought there on that on that aspect, on how that those two groups have something in
common. But yeah, going through these anecdotes all throughout this article, you know there's all kinds this is this is all propaganda. You know, this is being used to target children, Uh, get them while they're young, while they're vulnerable, and turn them into people who will grow up and support them. And so I think those are really the the points I had on that. One last thing, know, to Cidy's point that you know,
the right is typically the party or the ideology that frowns upon regulations. That's true until the regulation works in their favor. And then they want to see books removed, they want to see it illegal for teachers to call students by a name other than their government name, or they want to see laws removed that give teachers and mental health counselors in schools that kind of patient doctor confidentiality. Instead they're required to report now to the students' families. And we've seen
that in a variety of places. And so yeah, sure, regulation's bad unless they work for us, and we see that across the right as well. So sidey, what do you have to say about that? Yeah, I completely agree with what you just said. It's It's one of the many hypocritical aspects of the GOP right now, is they they claim they are for small government until they want to actually impose their views on people, and then they are pro government. So yeah, that's that's one of the scary parts
of the GOP today. And yeah, I really don't know how to how to fight this because when when Row was overturned last year, a lot of commentators, including us on on the non profits, we said that the right has been working on this for fifty years. They've been infiltrating every little place they could, like school boards, like every state level, city level councils, everywhere, and they're doing it again here and there's there's no blue isle
in this in these meetings, only red ales. And that's that's a big problem. They need to be fought everywhere everywhere, and we can outpen they be allowed though that's the part get booty just like Heather did. That's the problem, right, Yeah, Aaron, you want to get a last forward in Yeah, just be careful of people that come along spouting ideologies that want you to follow them, because especially from politicians, because when politicians try to
get you to identify with their with their ideologies instead of their policies. What they're really trying to do is to get you to accept and obey obey them, because when you follow their ideologies instead of their policies, they don't have any consequences anymore, and they can do whatever they want while in office and
you'll still vote for them because their ideology matches yours. Well. I think if you really needed the first hand account of how the religious right and the war on woke are having a negative impact on education, look no further than this article. I thoroughly recommend reading it. There's a link below. This has been going on for years. I have a close family that were at
that homeschooled their kids. I looked at the fifth grade level biology book and it was basically how great God was, and then you put all these animals and plants on the earth for us to use, and it just went through a general list of animals and plants. You know, Look, this was a tree. I felt like I was reading the script to a comedy show
number four the Large. But I think this was a good conversation And if you want to continue this conversation, check out our fan run facebook groups and discord server