No, You Can't Just Pull Your Kids Out of School to Wait for the Rapture

A Texas court ruled last week that a pair of Christian homeschooling parents who stopped teaching their nine kids because they believed the Rapture was imminent (and everyone knows that the best thing about heaven is NOBODY QUIZZES YOU ABOUT THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS) are not, in fact, allowed to just do that.

As it turns out, state education requirements are not beholden to whatever absurd cosmic notions you lifted from your favorite book and/or Kirk Cameron movie.

Via Raw Story:

Michael McIntyre’s twin brother, Tracy, testified that the parents used empty space in a motorcycle dealership that he co-owned as a classroom. But Tracy said that he never saw the children reading books, using computers or doing arithmetic. Instead, the children were seen playing instruments and singing.

“Tracy overhead one of the McIntyre children tell a cousin that they did not need to do schoolwork because they were going to be raptured,” the court document noted.

…”No parents have ever prevailed in any reported case on a theory that they have an absolute constitutional right to educate their children in the home, completely free of any state supervision, regulation, or requirements,” the ruling stated. “They do not have an ‘absolute constitutional right to home school.'”

While I’m heartened to hear that the McIntyres have a strong commitment to music education guitar-noodling-in-a-motorcycle-dealership, I’m pretty sure the #1 tenet of education is that kids also need to read a fucking book once in a while.

Also, if you’re soooooooo invested in this Rapture thing, I don’t know why you’d want your kid to get to heaven and not know how to do anything but plunk out one-and-a-half chords of an Amy Grant song (JK, have you seen her flagrant display of wrists? GRANT IS OBVIOUSLY A HARLOT). Do they not have side-eye in heaven? Because also, follow-up Q: When a kid gets raptured, is he just a perma-kid in the sky forever going to naked-school on a cloud? An eternal 13-year-old with a ceaseless confusing boner who can’t even find Texas on a map or sound his way through his Welcome to Heaven Orientation Pamphlet?

Also, what if your kid gets Left Behind!? You’re saying you want to leave your beloved child to battle the Antichrist in a hurricane of venomous toads without AT LEAST having read My Side of the Mountain? How’s that kid supposed to stay off the grid and build his own mill and be best friends with a falcon (in between peeing scorpions and vomiting blood like a fire hydrant) with zero guidance?

Even if the Rapture is real, I feel like you’re working against your family’s best interests here, is what I’m saying.