I'M BACK, EVERYONE!!!

Like imagine crying on the couch and you hear his thunderous, big body SUV built ass footsteps approach you.

"Baby, what's wrong," he says tenderly as he rubs your shoulder.

You look up to explain how bad your day was with tears in your eyes and you fucking see this:

Test subject

May I present the best apple:

My parents pulled me for the fourth grade, and I was homeschooled until the end of high school. Nine entire years. They pulled me from the public schools for a perfectly reasonable reason — my mental health was in the toilet and I needed to be away from other kids who might hurt me as they had spent all of my third grade year doing. My mom has a fucking PhD in neuroscience and tutors math professionally. She was, during the ten years that my siblings and I were homeschooled, the best, kindest, most caring, understanding, lovely teacher you could ask for.

But I'm still broken. That's the thing about homeschool. You can have the best experience possible in homeschool and still come out a fundamentally broken person. My social development stopped at the age of 10. I'm a 22 year old adult woman with the social skills of a 10 year old. That's not to say that that COULDN'T have happened in public school, but being homeschooled only made it more of a certainty. Both of my siblings and I have fewer coping strategies on average than our peers with similar neurodivergencies because we basically did not live in the real world for a decade during key developmental years.

Don't ban homeschooling because of the religious nuts. There are plenty of them. Hell, I KNEW plenty of them. But there are also plenty of quote unquote "good" homeschool families. Ones that do everything you would hope the model homeschool family does. And they are still hurting their children, even if unintentionally, because homeschooling is an inhrently traumatic experience. It's isolating. For seven entire years of my life, I had no friends. Not because I was a social outcast, but because I didn't even SEE anybody regularly enough. But, nonetheless, I knew people. You generally do if you get involved in the community.

Ban homeschooling because it breaks and utterly destroys everyone who goes through it.

Everyone.

This was only 55 years ago. You can understand a lot of what’s wrong with the US if you realize that the average age of our elected senators is about 63. “Good old days” is a dogwhistle.

“The couple is given a choice: flee or go to jail. After they were arrested, the Lovings were sentenced to a year in prison. Then, a judge offered them a choice: banishment from the state or prison. They chose to leave Virginia at the time, but after several years, the Lovings asked the American Civil Liberties Union to take their case.Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschkop, two young ACLU lawyers at the time, did.”

My father just had his 70th birthday.

When my parents first met it'd been less than a decade since the ruling was official.

They were convinced it'd be overturned and did not want their children to have to suffer for it, so they did not get married and searched desperately for each other in their own races. They could not find the love they had together in anyone else. They did eventually get married.

Too late for them to have the amount of children they'd desired. They had two, adopted a third, and that was that.

It was near enough to now that I, my sisters, and my parents were directly affected by it.

The Watsonville riots of the 1930's where white mobs attached Filipino farmworkers for being seen in dancehalls with white women, are part of a very long history of whiteness violently asserting its need to "protect" the purity of it's women and future children. And these kinds of backlashes are not in the past, we've just moved to different battlegrounds, the same accusations, of defiling the purity of white womanhood and white childhood are now leveled at the dangerous "othering influences" through book bans and other right wing conservative censorship efforts.

According to PEN America’s Banned Book Index, 41% of banned books include LGBTQ+ themes. 40% feature characters of color and 21% address issues of race or racism.

Remember, if we don't keep standing up loudly for equality the biggots on the right will be louder and keep dragging us further backwards from every step towards equality we make.

That's why I write stories for mixed, brown, bi, folks to see ourselves and our loves reflected in.

Art © me A few other flags are available below for free, non-commercial use. Apologies in advance if your flag isn't here, I tried to include most of them for people to enjoy and there were so many! Happy Pride month!