Barton — “one of the most important men alive,” according to Glenn Beck — is frequently criticized as a pseudo-historian by progressives and academic historians for his claims about the Founders. He is now facing scrutiny, however, from evangelicals. After Barton’s speech in the Capitol, John Fea, chairman of the history department at evangelical Messiah College, accused Barton of “peddling falsehoods” about Washington, and asked, “Is it time to gather Christian historians together to sign some kind of formal statement condemning Barton’s brand of propaganda and hagiography?”

There is no question that Barton’s history lessons are important to the conservative wing of the GOP. Barton, who was named one of Time magazine’s top 25 most influential evangelicals in 2005, was also tapped by Tea Party Caucus chairwoman Michele Bachmann to teach classes on the Constitution to congressional members in 2010.

During the GOP presidential primary season, Barton was a central figure in the religious right’s effort to crown a religious conservative as the GOP front-runner. In 2011, at the Rediscovering God Conference in Iowa,  Mike Huckabee gushed:

I almost wish that there would be a simultaneous telecast and all Americans would be forced, forced at gunpoint no less, to listen to every David Barton message and I think our country would be better for it. I wish it’d happen.

In 2010, before Newt Gingrich decided to run for president, he appeared on David Barton’s Wallbuilder’s radio show, telling Barton:

And I can assure you that if we do decide to run next year, we’re promptly going to call you and say “we need your help, and we need your advice, and we need your counsel…If we decide to run, David, we’re going to need you.”

Most recently, speaking in Statuary Hall, Barton related a legend about George Washington’s prayer in the snow at Valley Forge. In the story, a British loyalist overheard Washington praying, went home to his wife and proclaimed that the revolutionaries will win the war because of Washington’s fervent prayers. According to historian Fea, Washington probably did pray for success, but the story of Isaac Potts stumbling upon Washington praying in the snow is a legend. In his book “Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction,” Fea demonstrates that the facts don’t add up. For instance, Potts was probably not near Valley Forge at the time and he was not married at that time, meaning he could not have had a conversation with his wife about Washington’s prayer. Fea says this kind of revisionism is common, saying that “Barton continually tells stories of the past that are not true.”

Over the past year, I read some of Barton’s claims about history, checked them out, and found most of them to be problematic. Some of these claims have been restated in “The Jefferson Lies.” For example, Barton claims that Jefferson did not free his many slaves because of restrictions in Virginia law. Barton says Jefferson could not free them because by 1826, when Jefferson died, the law forbade such emancipations. This claim is quite misleading. In 1782, Virginia passed a law on manumission, which allowed the emancipation of slaves at any time, not just at death. In fact, many slaves were freed by other slave owners after this law passed. However, after this law passed, Jefferson sold some slaves for cash, instead of freeing them. Although legal provisions relating to emancipation were tightened a bit in 1785 and further in 1806, there was a 24-year window wherein Jefferson could have freed his slaves while he was alive.

In 1806, Virginia law was changed to require emancipated slaves to leave the state or face being resold into slavery. In fact, Jefferson favored deportation. He wrote in his autobiography, “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them. It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation peaceably …” In “The Jefferson Lies,” Barton refers to the 1806 law but minimizes Jefferson’s views on deportation, and does not indicate that emancipation could have occurred before a master’s death.

One chapter in “The Jefferson Lies” deals with the so-called Jefferson Bible. The Jefferson Bible refers to Jefferson’s extraction of passages from the New Testament Gospels that he believed were really the words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth, leaving aside what he believed was added by others. Jefferson said the work was like extracting diamonds from a dunghill. Jefferson made two such efforts, one in 1804 and the other sometime after 1820. In “The Jefferson Lies,” Barton tells readers that Jefferson included miracles of healing from Matthew chapters 9 and 11. However, a review of the table of texts used by Jefferson to construct his works reveals that he did not include the passages Barton claims.

While there are many false claims in “The Jefferson Lies,” another obvious historical molehill Barton makes into a mountain is Jefferson’s signature on shipping passports that are dated with the words, “in the year of our Lord Christ.” Common diplomatic language at the time, those actual words were required by treaties with European nations and included on preprinted forms. Barton says Jefferson chose to include that religious language into his presidential business. Not so. Jefferson, like Adams before him and several presidents after him had no choice because, as Jefferson once told Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, “Sea-letters are the creatures of treaties.”

My co-author Michael Coulter and I have addressed these and other claims in our book, “Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims About Our Third President.” For an article that later became a part of that book, I wrote Barton and called Wallbuilders without response. In April, 2011, Barton declined to appear with me on a Christian radio program. According to Fea, this is not surprising. “When he is called out on these falsehoods by a respectable historian, even evangelical historians who for the most part share his faith, he refuses to admit to his errors.”

After years of being attacked by progressives, will Barton reexamine his claims due to friendly fire? With “The Jefferson Lies” hitting the New York Times list of bestsellers, it seems clear that being fast and loose with the facts sells well. All the more reason for people in the evangelical community to subject claims about the Founders to a renewed scrutiny.

That’s why Klein has updated the book in a new edition published this week to detail the ways that sexual rights have actually become “increasingly tenuous” under President Obama. Sure, abstinence-only programs have been greatly defunded, but the battle over sex education still rages on — as do assaults on reproductive rights and all manner of sex-related business, entertainment, expression and experience.

Klein points to examples like “restrictions on access to abortion, pointless expansion of sex offender registries with increasingly punitive conditions, restrictions on the availability of adult entertainment, protections for licensed medical personnel who reject their professional responsibilities, and heightened entrapment programs (often motivated by federal grants) to pursue adults in adult chat rooms engaged in fantasy age-play,” as well as unprecedented kowtowing to “religious sensitivities” that almost always relate to sex. The onslaught also became increasingly mainstream — just consider the rhetoric this year from mainstream GOP presidential candidates about banning pornography and outlawing birth control.

Klein blames part of this sexual devolution on “the lack of a coherent vision of either sexual rights or sexual health coming from the president” — but of course the real culprit, the aggressor in all this, is the religious right, which he says has “become stronger, smarter, richer, and more aggressive with regard to sexuality.” I spoke with Klein by phone at his home in Palo Alto, Calif., about our best tools of defense and whether this battle will ever end.

What’s been the single biggest change in the war on sex since the first edition of the book?

The two things that jump out to me are, number one, the attacks on sexual orientation have ramped up because sexual orientation is the one arena in which there is actually more sexual freedom now than there was five years ago. The other arena that’s really evident is the continuing and highly successful attack on reproductive rights. The fact that contraception is back on the public policy agenda is shocking, to say the least, and it represents an extraordinary victory in the war on abortion and in terms of a reconceptualization of what sexual health means. Am I just going to depress the crap out of you during this whole interview?

I know, I just felt my heart sinking. I suppose we could talk a bit about the positive changes we’ve seen.

The sexual orientation arena is really where a lot of the positivity is. One of the things that’s very heartening is that young people really have a completely different take on sexual orientation now. When Kinsey did his work in 1948, he talked about sexual orientation more as a snapshot that anything else. Through the ’80s and ’90s and the zeroes, we started to see sexual orientation more as a movie than as a snapshot, and now young people are bursting out of that movie and they’re really attacking the very categories themselves. That really is a reflection of sexuality at its most profound.

While there is a tremendous rear-guard action in the war on sex to sort of reestablish the world that never existed of simplistic sexuality, young people, they’re not defending sexuality the way it supposedly used to be. They’re saying, “I’ve got a body, other people have bodies, let’s throw all the arms and legs up in a pile and see what happens.” That’s very heartening and that’s not going to change.

As these younger generations grow up, what will happen to the war on sex?

That is the crucial question. I’ll tell you what’s been going on since the book was published for the first time and that is that America has simultaneously gone in two extremely opposite directions. On the one hand, externally, outside the bedroom, Americans are more sexually conservative than they were 10 years ago. There are more laws restricting and regulating sexual behavior today than there were 10 years ago or even 25 years ago. On the other hand, Americans’ private bedroom behavior has more variety, more experimentation, more sex toys, more non-monogamy than ever before.

So when people, especially from other countries, ask me, “Is America becoming more conservative or less conservative sexually,” I say, “Yes, it is.” When you ask me about the future, I think that those two trajectories are going to continue, that externally it’s going to get worse and in the bedroom it’s going to get more humane. Sooner or later, there’s going to be a collision of those two trends. I don’t think it’s going to be in the next three days or three years, but sooner or later those two trajectories have to reconcile themselves — but for now I see them continuing.

There is so much political benefit to scaring people about sex. There is so much political capital to be gained by insisting that, sexually, America is more dangerous today than it was 10 years ago — how endangered our children are on the Internet, how pornography destroys lives — that politicians are going to continue to respond to that opportunity.

Why do we see people supporting the attempt to restrict behaviors that they themselves engage in?

That is the question of the century. That famous sex therapist Karl Marx [laughs] used to talk about false consciousness. The bigger question is how is it that people are persuaded to support public policy that is demonstrably against their best interest. It’s not just around sexuality. You have people who are demanding to have less healthcare options. You have people demanding that they don’t have the right to do something that they don’t want to do.

In terms of sexuality, I think people are so afraid of their own sexual impulses, people feel so guilty, and people are so wigged out by the complete failure of monogamy to deliver what they desperately need emotionally that they’re open to demagoguery. When it comes to sexuality we’re looking at the Weimar Republic here, we’re looking at 1933 in Germany.

We’re looking at people who are desperately frightened and lonely and sad and upset about their own sexual impulses and they’re turning to any place they can find to comfort themselves. Ironically, the religious right and the extreme right-wing of the Republican Party and Fox media, they’re offering a kind of comfort. It’s a Pyrrhic victory because the public doesn’t walk away feeling, “Oh, I have this wonderful sexuality and this wonderful body.” No, no, no. People get to walk away with, “Phew, I dodged a bullet, here are the sexual restrictions that alleviate my guilt, lower my anxiety about my neighbor’s sexuality, that make me as a parent feel less anxious.” People walk away with their sexuality diminished but they feel less anxious about the complicated world in which they live.

What are our best weapons to fight back?

That’s a great question and there are a number of answers. The first might seem like a lame one but I really believe it: It’s to call it the “war on sex,” because we just saw a great example of not calling it the war on sex: when that Rush Limbaugh thing came up, calling Sandra Fluke a slut, immediately followed by all this anti-choice legislation, and then people saying it’s a war on women.

Calling it a war on sex takes the moral high ground away from the people who are doing it. They say the war on sex is really about protecting parents’ rights, pharmacists’ rights; they come up with all these justifications and now, of course, the war on pornography is being framed as a public health issue rather than as an issue of immorality. That’s another tremendous victory in the war on sex. Thirty-five years ago people were saying you shouldn’t look at porn because it’s immoral; now they’re saying you shouldn’t look at it because it’s bad for your health. So, my first answer is: Let’s call it what it is and take away all these justifications.

The second thing we can do is begin to own our own sexuality. This has always been a battle about who controls whose sexuality. Morality in Media wants to control your eyeballs when it comes to sex. Who controls your genitalia when it comes to sex? I think we need to be talking about who is in charge of your sexuality. We thought we dealt with this in 1970 with “Our Bodies Ourselves,” but apparently not.

The third thing is, and this sounds so square: People have to get in touch with their legislators. They have to call up their local state assembly representatives. The democratic process has trouble adjudicating issues when people are not willing to identify themselves as citizens. If the government decided to pass a law taxing Toyotas extra, every Toyota owner would call their representative and say, “Hey, I’m a Toyota owner I want you to stop.” But when the local community says, “We’re going to eliminate adult bookstores or strip clubs,” very few people are willing to say, “Excuse me, as a person who goes to strip clubs, I don’t want you to eliminate strip clubs.” As a result, the democratic process can’t function successfully.

As long as you have homes where Joe goes to strip clubs on his lunch hour and his wife doesn’t know, because if his wife knew she’d kill him, as long as you have a home like that, Joe is not going to want to go to a city council member or his county board of supervisors or his state assembly member and say, “Excuse me, I go to strip cubs, cut it out.” Joe’s going to have to say to his spouse: “Honey, don’t take this personally, but every once in a while I go to a strip cub. It’s really a lot of fun. If you want to come that’s great, if you don’t that’s OK with me, but I just want you to know that I go to strip clubs.” Believe it or not, that would be a building block toward political action on the legislative level. Because right now, people can’t go to their legislators because they’re not willing to come out.

What would you say to those who aren’t moved by the issue of sex in particular, who don’t feel that they are in jeopardy in this particular battle?

The war on sex is how the religious right and cynical politicians are using the issue of sexual regulation for undermining secular democracy. The reason the issue of sexual regulation keeps coming back up is that the religious right is erasing the line between church and state. You don’t have to care one bit about sex to care about the war on sex. You just need to care about secular democracy, free speech and the separation of church and state. If you care about any of those things, then you need to care about the war on sex, because that’s where it’s being fought.

An FBI agent from Dallas, Danny Coulson, knew better. As Andrew Gumbel and Roger Charles relate in their impressive new book, “Oklahoma City: What the Investigation Missed — and Why It Still Matters,” Coulson jumped in his car and headed to Oklahoma City as soon as he heard about the bombing, fielding a call from a CBS correspondent along the way. She told him “everybody in Washington” said the perpetrators were Middle Eastern, but he said no way. “It’s a Bubba job,” he told her. “It’s Bubbas.”

It was Bubbas. But how many of them? Timothy McVeigh was convicted on 11 counts of murder and conspiracy and was executed for his role in the crime. Terry Nichols, who helped McVeigh construct the truck bomb, is still in federal prison serving a sentence of life without parole. A third conspirator, Mike Fortier, received a reduced sentence (and immunity for his wife, Lori) in exchange for testifying against the other two. Officially, these are all the parties responsible for the bombing, the most devastating act of terrorism committed in this country until 9/11. But many, many people are not satisfied with the official account.

Of course, a lot of these malcontents are cranks, offering paint-by-numbers scenarios in which 1) the attack really was “Middle Eastern” after all and 2) the government rigged the whole thing in order to discredit the right-wing militia movement to which McVeigh and Nichols belonged. Gumbel, an investigative journalist, and Charles, a former Marine Corps lieutenant colonel who consults with national news organizations on military and national intelligence stories, are obliged to distinguish themselves from such fantasists. Nevertheless, they assert, there are good reasons to feel “skeptical that all the perpetrators have been caught,” a sentiment they say is shared by many of their sources both outside the government and within it.

Their argument, unlike other conspiracy theories about Oklahoma City, is not outlandish. Gumbel and Charles (who also worked as an evidence analyst for McVeigh’s defense team) suspect that McVeigh had other accomplices in planning the attack, in assembling the materials for the bomb and in planting it on April 19. This help came from several nodes in a loose network of right-wing extremists — gun nuts, would-be-revolutionaries and separatist Christian sects — who have never been fully investigated or called to account.

Not a fanciful change, but at the same time a bold one, given that the multi-agency federal investigation collected a Brobdingnagian quantity of evidence: 13 million hotel and motel records, 6 million truck rental records, 28,000 interviews — an estimated 1 billion pieces of information. Yet for all this exhaustiveness, certain promising trails in the investigation went largely unexplored: over 1,000 latent fingerprints found in McVeigh’s car and motel room, for example, as well as his links to a gang of bank robbers belonging to the Aryan Republican Army, a rich gun dealer and a creepy fundamentalist compound called Elohim City.

The authors believe that federal agencies, shamed and stinging after bloody clashes with right-wing militants at Waco and Ruby Ridge, preferred not to mess with leads that might end in further confrontations. The prosecution concurred, having tried and failed in an earlier sedition trial against similar militants. They felt they’d learned not to test a jury’s ability to follow complex conspiratorial narratives with too many characters, or that asked it to believe that trash-talking backwoods paranoids could pose a serious threat to the U.S government.

“Oklahoma City” compiles a hefty collection of those unplumbed leads, some of it gleaned from newly released files and a jailhouse interview with Nichols that, they report, went into “great detail.” Given the milieus McVeigh and Nichols frequented, there are enough freak-show touches to keep an FX drama stocked for three seasons: a double-wide trailer full of snakes, a neo-Nazi with a secret life as a cross-dresser, a hot blonde with a swastika tattoo who agreed to act as an informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and so on. The authors refrain from milking this material for all its lurid charm, but somehow their deadpan delivery only makes it more grotesque.

They have excellent reasons for not treating this pack of alienated misfits as merely contemptible. As Gumbel and Rogers point out, McVeigh and many of his pals were veterans whose Gulf War battlefield experience left them with both military skills and emotional damage. “It is not difficult to see,” they write, “how new McVeighs could emerge from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lingering devastation of the 2008 economic meltdown and the anti-establishment rage embodied by everyone from the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street to the violent racists threatening to put a bullet in the brain of America’s first black president.”

The book does suffer a bit from its authors’ submersion in the story. The narrative thread — so necessary for readers whose memories of the attack and investigation have faded — occasionally gets lost as they jump around chronologically to demonstrate the shakiness of some points in the government’s version of the story. Still, it’s shocking to learn that over two dozen eyewitnesses reported having seen McVeigh with at least one other person on the morning of the bombing, contradicting the prosecution’s assertion that he acted alone on that day. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, but that’s a lot of people, and the ones the authors describe in detail had direct, highly memorable encounters with the bomber(s).

Perhaps the most persuasive aspect of “Oklahoma City” is its refusal of paranoia. The typical crackpot conspiracy theory relies on a masterly, Luciferian characterization of the conspirators, who are invariably depicted as puppet masters capable of pulling off elaborate illusions, feints and coverups without a hitch. As Gumbel and Rogers tell it, the bombing investigation fell short of discovering the truth because of sloppiness, failure of will, self-serving intra-office politics and, above all, idiotic and obstructive turf wars among law enforcement agencies. Now, that sounds more like the government that left us vulnerable six years later and that may well let us down again.

While the practice of home schooling is new to many people, my own interest in it was sparked nearly 20 years ago. I was a socially awkward adolescent with a chaotic family life, and became close to a conservative Christian home-schooling family that seemed perfect in every way. Through my connection to this family, I was introduced to a whole world of conservative Christian home-schoolers, some of whom we would now consider “Quiverfull” families: home-schooling conservatives who eschew any form of family planning and choose instead to “trust God” with matters related to procreation.

Though I fell out of touch with my home-schooled friends as we grew older, a few years ago, I reconnected with a few ex-Quiverfull peers on a new support blog called No Longer Quivering. Poring over their stories, I was shocked to find so many tales of gross educational neglect. I don’t merely mean that they had received what I now view as an overly politicized education with huge gaps, for example, in American history, evolution or sexuality. Rather, what disturbed me were the many stories about home-schoolers who were barely literate when they graduated, or whose math and science education had never extended much past middle school.

Take Vyckie Garrison, an ex-Quiverfull mother of seven who, in 2008, enrolled her six school-age children in public school after 18 years of teaching them at home. Garrison, who started the No Longer Quivering blog, says her near-constant pregnancies – which tended to result either in miscarriages or life-threatening deliveries – took a toll on her body and depleted her energy. She wasn’t able to devote enough time and energy to home schooling to ensure a quality education for each child. And she says the lack of regulation in Nebraska, where the family lived, “allowed us to get away with some really shoddy home schooling for a lot of years.”

“I’ll admit it,” she confesses. “Because I was so overwhelmed with my life… It was a real struggle to do the basics, so it didn’t take long for my kids to fall far behind. One of my daughters could not read at 11 years old.”

At the time, Garrison was taking parenting advice from Quiverfull leaders who deemphasized academic achievement in favor of family values. She remembers one Quiverfull leader saying, “If they can do mathematics perfectly but they have no morals, you have failed them.”

The implication, she says, was that, “if they’re not doing so well academically, well, then they can catch up on that later. It’s not such a big deal. It was a really convenient way of thinking for me because I wasn’t able to keep up anyway.” This kind of rhetoric, Garrison notes, provided a “high-minded justification for educational neglect. I would not have gotten away with that if I’d had to get my kids tested every year.”

Over time, Garrison lost faith in her fundamentalist ideology and became aware that her children’s education was being neglected. Eventually all but one of her six younger children ended up entering and excelling in the public school system.

Why did she stick with home schooling for so long, despite her difficulties? “We were convinced that it would be better for our kids not to have an education than to be educated to become humanists or atheists and to reject God,” Garrison says. “We became so isolated because the Quiverfull lifestyle was so overwhelming we didn’t have time or energy for socialization. So the only people we knew were exactly like us. We were told that the whole point of public school was to dumb down the children and turn them into compliant workers – to brainwash them and indoctrinate them into this godless way of thinking.”

Garrison believes that home schooling has become so popular with fundamentalist Christians because, “there is an atmosphere of real terror among some evangelicals. They are horrified by the fact that Obama is president, and they see the New Atheist movement as a vocal, in-your-face threat. Plus, they are obsessed with the End Times, and believe that the Apocalypse could happen any day now… They see a demon on every corner.

“We home-schooled because we wanted to protect our children from what we viewed as the total secularization of America. We listened to people like Rush Limbaugh, who told us that America was in the clutches of evil liberal feminist atheists.”

*

Just how common are stories like Vyckie Garrison’s? Unfortunately, it’s hard to know. The federal government only maintains very broad demographic statistics about home-schoolers in this country; federal data only keeps track of what kinds of people are home schooling and why. You can find plenty of information about home-schoolers according to race, family income or highest education obtained by the parents. But as regards neglect related to home schooling? The government cannot tell you — and there is no systematic state-by-state record of the percentage of truancy convictions (possibly the best measure of educational neglect at present) that involve home-schooling families versus those involving enrolled students and/or their parents.

Capturing that kind of data is essential to understanding the scope of this problem, but getting real numbers will always be complicated by the fact that many home-schooling families choose not to comply with the law by submitting to state home-school regulations, or even report their home-school activity to the state. While it’s possible that some forget, others intentionally fail to report because they fear too much government intervention in their lives. For many conservative Christians, this is a key aspect of their decision not to report.

Given the scarcity of numbers on this issue, the best one can hope for at this point is anecdotal information about the problem. But because home schooling is such a highly politicized issue, it is often difficult to get a clear sense of what is happening from home-schooling parents themselves. And because many parents see themselves as advocates of home schooling, they are not always very eager to discuss potential gaps in home-schooling education.

Luckily, more than a few adult home-school graduates are eager to talk. And as I talk to more and more people who recount first-person stories of home-school-related neglect, it becomes hard to write off what home-school advocates would call “exceptions” simply as fringe outliers.

Erika Diegel Martin’s story is particularly haunting. A home-schooling graduate of the mid-1990s, and an ex-Quiverfull daughter I have known for many years, Diegel Martin was pulled out of public school at 14. Because she was old enough to remember several years of public schooling, she says she never really believed her parents’ dire warnings about it. Her younger brothers were another story. “When the school bus would come by, my youngest brother would go, ‘There goes the prison bus.’ Our parents had them believing that public schools were these horrible places, just dens of iniquity.”

The narrative about public schools, she says, went something like this: “How would you like to get stuck in a building with no light – and secular, godless, atheist teachers for seven hours of the day without even being able to see your parents or go out to play?” As a result, she says, “My brothers were terrified of the public schools.”

Like Garrison, Diegel Martin recounts notable educational gaps in her own family, where there was little academic encouragement. One of her brothers decided to quit school at 16 and faced no parental opposition. The youngest, Diegel Martin says, ceased his formal education at the age of 12, when she left home and was no longer available to teach him herself. And though she was fortunate enough to receive sex education before leaving public school, her siblings were not so lucky. Their parents never taught the three other children about sex, and Diegel Martin remembers giving her 21-year-old sister “the talk” the week before she got married. She also had to intervene to ensure that her younger brothers learned about sex.

As for herself, when she completed her schooling, she says her parents did not allow her to obtain her GED as proof of high school graduation. Their reason? “The girls weren’t allowed to get a GED because we were told we wouldn’t need it. It would open up opportunities that were forbidden to us. We would work in the family business until we got married, and then become homemakers.

“When I talked about wanting to go to college, my parents said, ‘Well, you’re a girl. You don’t go to college.’”

Melinda Palmer, 29, is another home-school graduate who is forthcoming about the problems she encountered as a home-schooled child. She had no experience of public education, and quickly came to fear it. Her father cast the local school as a corrupt example of the dangerous world outside the home. The family’s isolationism created an environment in which everyone was so terrified of the outside they saw no choice but to submit to her father’s abusive rule for many years. She says they had come to believe that the tyranny of their father was preferable to what might await them on the outside.

The oldest of eight children, Palmer grew up in an extremely conservative family that ultimately went entirely off the grid. They lived in a rural country home in Vermont without running water or electricity. Though she says home schooling started out with good enough intentions, it ultimately fell by the wayside, in part because of the sheer amount of work it took to subsist in Vermont without basic amenities while also maintaining the large family’s produce and livestock. It took so much time and energy to complete each day’s chores that they rarely had enough time to study.

Though she says all of the children in her family are literate, she tells me that, in math, she never made it past the start of pre-algebra, and that she has not yet obtained her GED. Since leaving the Quiverfull movement, she has found success as an artisanal cheese-maker, but many opportunities remain unavailable to her because of her upbringing. She speaks hopefully of continuing her schooling at some point, but feels self-conscious about working toward the GED at 29, when some of her younger sisters have already earned theirs. “I study and read things all the time,” she says, “but I haven’t done anything official yet.”

Palmer insists that her family was not alone in home-school neglect. Among the various fundamentalist families that ran in her family’s social circles, she says, “I knew several families whose children were not very literate.” Moreover, she points out, education is “more than just learning math and science and the facts of history – it’s learning how to interact with the kids around you, and figuring out what different kinds of personalities bring to life.

“You can do home schooling right if you’re very careful,” she acknowledges. “Know all the ways it can go wrong and guard against these; have outside interaction; get help with what you need help with and use a decent curriculum.” But most home-schoolers, Palmer points out, “are woefully lacking in every area” of their education.

Palmer sends me a note after we talk that reads, “I know of a family right now in pretty much the exact same situation we were in back then. They reported [their home-schooling status] to the state once, eight years ago, and never after that, to my knowledge. The state never caught on… They are one of the families I know whose children are functionally illiterate. Their 18-year-old daughter can read, but can barely write a paragraph… and the education goes significantly downhill from there. Her youngest brother, almost 11, has barely learned to read.”

I follow up to find out if anyone has reported the family to social services. She says they have been reported, but very little has changed.

*

Still, this is not to say there aren’t many home-schooling parents who are doing an excellent job of ensuring that their children receive a quality education. Most parents realize they are taking on a tremendous amount of responsibility when they commit to home-schooling a child, so I am not surprised to find many – secular and religious – who are doing well by their children.

Maria Hoffman Goeller is one of those. A lifelong family friend, Goeller is a home-school graduate raised in a conservative Christian home, where she never lagged behind in academics. Now she has a son with special needs in the California public school system but educates two other school-age children at home. “Part of the reason we home-school is because I’m choosing what worldview or what subjects I want to introduce my child to,” she says. But she understand the limits of her own skill, which is why she placed her special-needs son in public school. “While I can teach my children reading, writing and arithmetic, I am not trained in special education,” she says. “I want my child to have the best education he can get, which at this time is public school.”

Though she considers herself conservative, Goeller does not demonize public schools as some families do. And contrary to stereotypes about Christian home-schoolers, Goeller is adamant that she will not sacrifice academic rigor, or shield her children from views different from her own. In fact, she says she would welcome more opportunities for them to interact with public school students, for example, in sports and even in certain classes now and then.

Certainly, Goeller is not alone in the care and thoughtfulness she takes with her children’s home-school education. But in light of what Garrison, Diegel Martin and Palmer tell me, it seems irresponsible to assert, as many home-schooling parents do, that home-schooling neglect is just a fringe element in the homschooling world. And getting a straight answer about the scope of the problem from people who champion the cause is difficult at best.

Take Kelly Hogaboom, a secular “unschooling” mother who maintains a popular home-schooling blog called Underbellie, and boasts of having “two terminally truant children.” Hogaboom is an advocate for home schooling and “unschooling,” a type of home schooling that often forgoes curriculum in favor of more child-directed education. She is dismissive of the cases of neglect that I bring up, saying, by way of shutting down my inquiries: “Like yourself, I too had…a deep fear of religious fundamentalism and an erroneous belief state institutions could and should stamp it out.”

Of course, her response misses the mark; the issue of “stamping out” religious expression isn’t the point here. The issue at stake is educational neglect — which is, as the anecdotal evidence shows, an actual problem. My hope is that by looking to home-schooling parents for insights, they will be able to provide an honest assessment of their own successes and failures — in order to paint a more textured picture of the actual potential for neglect.

But in the end, Hogaboom declines to discuss the topic at all, urging me instead to read alternative theories of education she thinks I may have missed. And just in case I don’t understand that she has dismissed the concerns I raise, she concludes our email discussion by saying: “I get a laugh [at] how many grown-ups enjoy talking amongst themselves about what’s best for children” – and following it up with a smiley emoticon.

Though I am frustrated by her failure to engage with me, on some level, I understand her irritation. Home-schooling parents are probably called upon to apologize for neglectful home-schoolers quite a bit. But apologies are not what I’m looking for. I want to know about their experiences – positive and negative — as a way of understanding how to better prevent neglect.

Of course there are parents who are qualified to teach their children at home, and who do an excellent job of it. And there are children who excel in home-schooling environments. These families may well constitute a majority of home-schoolers. But this does not mean that all children do so well, and just as public schools are obligated to educate children who fall behind, so are parents who opt out of the system.

*

Kathryn Joyce, author of “Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement,” confirms that there are legitimate reasons for being concerned about a lack of oversight among home-schoolers. She acknowledges the diversity of the home-schooling movement, but notes, for example, that, “among the Quiverfull community, there are families that home-school in such a way that education begins to diverge between boys’ education and girls education around the time they hit puberty.”

Sometimes, Joyce says, girls, “stop receiving the same education as their brothers and are trained instead to fulfill the role that they’re going to have, which is to be a Quiverfull mother and a submissive wife.”

She recalls an anecdote from Quiverfull leader Geoffrey Botkin, who suggested that girls should be taught to use the tools of the laboratory they will inhabit: the kitchen and the nursery. Girls’ education should prioritize “learning how to be mothers, learning in the kitchen, helping their mothers – not merely as chores that are a part of growing up. Rather, the point was that this should be a key part of their education because this was going to be their chief role.” Though Joyce says many home-schoolers go on to do exceptionally well once they go to college, she has also encountered problems with basics like literacy.

Given these sorts of issues, I am unconvinced when Rachel Goldberg, a secular home-schooling mother from Charlotte, North Carolina, echoes what I hear from home-schooling parents of every stripe on the subject of government oversight. “I don’t think there should be any regulation of home schooling,” she says. “I’m not a libertarian or a conspiracy theorist, but I am fiercely protective of my kids and my choices about how to raise them. It’s none of the government’s business how I teach them. Just as I wouldn’t want the state to require me to submit menu plans and quarterly nutritional assessments (even though I believe nutrition is vitally important), I don’t want the state to require curricula plans, portfolios, etc.”

According to Joyce, among extremist Quiverfull families (quite unlike Goldberg’s) there is often “a sense of persecution” when it comes to oversight; many families that refuse to report their activities do so because they fear state intrusion. But their fear may have very little basis in fact. “Often, people have to look outside the United States, to countries like Sweden, where home schooling is much more heavily regulated, to make this argument,” Joyce notes. “There isn’t as much evidence that persecution is happening here, but I think they get a lot of organizing value and activism mobilization out of the argument that they’re persecuted.”

Erika Diegel Martin, whose parents were anti-government extremists, agrees. Her parents did not report their first year of home schooling to the state out of fear, but because she lived in a small New Hampshire town, the neighbors eventually noticed when the children weren’t in school. Finally, a truancy officer showed up to inquire, and as a result, the family reported their home-schooling status. “Look, any other parents [in] a public school would be charged with truancy if their kids didn’t show up at school,” Diegel Martin points out. “Why should it be any different for a home-school family that isn’t reporting their children? It’s our government’s responsibility to make sure that our children are getting a proper education.”

My old friend Maria Hoffman Goeller is a bit more cautious about the need for oversight. With one child in the public school system and two learning at home, Goeller insists that she has not experienced over-regulation in California, one of the more tightly regulated states. But she is always on the alert, she says, for any government mandate that might try to determine “what I can and cannot teach.”

Goeller tells me that her apprehension about over-regulation stems from the arrests of home-schooling parents she knew during childhood, before home schooling was well-understood in the United States. She remembers at least a couple of parents being arrested for truancy, and she remains unconvinced that they deserved this. Some families she knew opted not to report because of these cases. For those children, this meant not answering phones and hiding in the house if a stranger knocked on the front door.

No one I speak to who is home schooling today mentions that this sort of oppressive regulation is a reality for current home-schooling families. Instead, they say that today’s regulation consists mostly of bureaucratic paper-pushing – hardly the kind of home-school persecution some fear. It may be annoying, but so far as I can tell, it’s not trampling on anyone’s rights – though that doesn’t keep home-schoolers from worrying.

*

Ultimately, the women who report neglect in home schooling want their experiences to serve as a warning that either greater restrictions on home schooling are needed, or states need to do a better job of enforcing existing regulations.

For 18 years, Vyckie Garrison says, she continued home schooling even though it became increasingly evident that “we should not have been home schooling. It was a really bad idea for us, but we believed firmly that it was our obligation, that it would be sinful to send our children to public schools, which we called ‘Satan’s indoctrination centers.’” She tells me that yearly testing requirements “would have made a huge difference for our family. It would have either convinced us to quit home schooling, or to do a much better job of meeting those minimum requirements.”

I don’t believe the answer is to end home schooling altogether, and neither do any of the women I talk to, no matter what their experience with home schooling. But neither is it acceptable to allow more home-schooled children to fall through the cracks. And since no one should be deprived of an education, we have a duty to listen to those who were overlooked.

Melinda Palmer has become a vocal critic of home-school neglect since leaving her home about six years ago at the age of 22. She cites “the grace of God” as the reason for her survival, as well as the support of her mother and siblings. She is still a Christian, but says her family believed in a “warped understand of God.” Today, she is no longer a fundamentalist and no longer afraid of living out in the world. She has also gotten involved in advocacy on behalf of better home-schooling regulation.

Of all my sources, Palmer has the most concrete ideas about what needs to change in order to make home schooling safer for all kids. “First,” she says, “we should not reduce the oversight. Second, we need to make sure every child who is not in a public school is either on a private school roster or is on the home-school watch list. I know of many in Vermont right now who are not even registered as home-schoolers, and no one pays attention …When kids are far below grade level, it should raise red flags, and someone should be looking into it.”

Furthermore, as a sister to several children with cognitive disabilities, Palmer highlights the particular attention that home-schooled children with special needs deserve. “If kids have disabilities, the government needs to make sure that the disabilities are being addressed either by the parents or by an intervening agency.…A child with disabilities,” she notes, “has as much right to an appropriate education” as any other child.

Just before we hang up the phone, she makes a final request: “Please spread the word that it is really necessary for the government to make sure children aren’t being robbed of an education… Kids have rights too, and one of them is the right to an education appropriate to their age and ability.”

It’s an important point, and I conclude with it because it is one of the more incisive analyses I’ve heard on this topic yet. There is simply no justification for allowing cases of educational neglect – wherever it exists – to go unchecked. We need not imprison more parents to make sure this happens, but improving state and local oversight of those who opt out would be one step in the right direction. As Garrison, Diegel Martin and Palmer acknowledge, better checks on their own home education would have made a vast difference for them. This is why, they say, they will continue to speak out.

They are evangelists. If public opinion isn’t on their side, they’ll strive to change public opinion. They are dogged, well-financed and unrelenting. Their claims about the proper role of religion in governing and policymaking — which Democrats fail to contest forcefully enough — are eroding the separation of church and state, and taking down gains made in access to reproductive healthcare along with it.

Democrats have attempted to defuse the Republican framing of the issue as one of “religious freedom” by arguing that the real issue is women’s health. In making that argument, they regrettably glide over a crucial step in the logic. Yes, it’s undeniable that what is at stake here is reproductive healthcare. But in claiming that their religious beliefs entitle them to an exemption from a regulation requiring insurance coverage for birth control, clerics and their Republican allies are attempting to relitigate and overrule established Supreme Court jurisprudence in the court of public opinion — without pushback from Democrats.

As Scott Lemieux writes at Lawyers, Guns and Money, “a constitutional challenge to the contraception provision wouldn’t even rise to the level of being frivolous” under existing constitutional jurisprudence. Contrary to conservative claims, the Supreme Court has not interpreted the Free Exercise Clause as requiring such expansive religious exemptions. But in our current political climate, which causes Democrats to crouch in fear of being labeled anti-religion, such exemptions are nonetheless tucked away in legislation at the behest of the burgeoning religious lobbying industry, becoming law even if not required to protect free exercise rights.

Case in point: an exemption in the Affordable Care Act for members of healthcare sharing ministries, who reject insurance and pay for their fellow “professing Christians’” medical costs. The lobbyists approached a Democrat, former Virginia Rep. Tom Perriello, who did their bidding for them.

Indeed, the Affordable Care Act in its final form was cobbled from capitulations to religious demands. Conservatives — including Democrats like former congressman Bart Stupak — threatened to prevent passage over their false claim that the bill would require federal funding of abortions. Even a superfluous reiteration of the Hyde Amendment’s abortion funding ban, offered by Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif., failed to satisfy Obama allies like Jim Wallis. He pressed, in the name of “the faith community,” for even greater restrictions on insurance coverage for abortion, even though no taxpayer funds were going to be used for it in the first place.

Existing standards for covering birth control at the state level, which have been upheld in court and laid the groundwork for the Obama policy, are now “in danger because the right, which has now been unmasked as opposing contraception as well as abortion … stayed in the ring and flamed up an issue,” says Gloria Feldt, a  former president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and author of “No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power.”

Few people believed Feldt when she predicted in 2004 that opposition to birth control was more than just a fringe movement that needed to be taken seriously, she says. But if the right is “successful in pulling that thread,” she adds, “the entire fabric of contraceptive coverage will be unraveled.” The pro-choice movement, Feldt contends, must “set the terms of engagement or lose the battle.”

The opponents of legal abortion and readily, widely available contraception have already made extraordinary gains — enormous setbacks for women — at the state level. This week’s developments in Virginia, where pro-choice opposition prompted Gov. Bob McDonnell to back off his pledge to sign into law a bill that would mandate transvaginal ultrasound before abortion, demonstrate how robust, unabashed activism can expose the right’s extremism on these issues. But it also showed how the long game has paid off for the right, as the ultrasound bill may nonetheless become law, just without the vaginal intrusion.  “Pregnancy care centers,” some affiliated with evangelical and Catholic churches, teach that birth control is harmful and doesn’t even work. The Catholic Church — which is claiming that the federal government is infringing on its rights — disseminates false information that contraceptives do not prevent unintended pregnancy and harm women. In the ever-shifting goal post of sin, the emergency contraceptives Ella and Plan B are now falsely depicted by Obama foes as “abortifacients,” opening the door for opponents to claim the contraceptive coverage requirement compels them to cover abortion, too.

While the Catholic bishops complain that the government is infringing on their religious liberty, the government is funding religious ideology. In Texas, for example, while the Legislature cut funds to family planning, it took a federal block grant under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and created the Alternatives to Abortion program. The contractors who receive state funds under this program not only refuse to offer abortions or referrals for abortion, they do not offer information about birth control, or even referrals for it.

The opponents of birth control coverage are playing a long game. As they ransack family planning funding and prop up religious organizations, they are transforming the way information — and misinformation — about abortion and birth control is passed on to the public. Their efforts are enabled by narratives about religious persecution, demanding, in effect, to create a religious alternative to public health policy based in medicine and science. The Constitution doesn’t require or even envision that. Democrats and their pro-choice allies need to stake out their own long game.