Forget it, Jake. It's Texas.

Tough couple of weeks for America's Bilge Pump For Bad Ideas. The state got waxed good and proper twice by the Supreme Court, most recently on Monday. I would call that a crisis for both Governor Greg Abbott and recently-indicted Attorney General Ken Paxton as they spent millions of taxpayer dollars defending an anti-choice law founded in such egregious bad faith that even Anthony Kennedy noticed, but these are the people that Texas elects so there you are.

However, the Texas Supreme Court is going to have to explain itself to me. Because, if the AP is to be trusted—and why shouldn't it be, anyway?—this strikes me as being a little nuts.

The 6-3 decision by the all-Republican court on technical grounds means nothing was decided regarding a showdown between religious liberties and educational requirements in America's largest conservative state, though it will live on in lower Texas courts. Texas doesn't require parents who home-school their children to register with state authorities. While families must meet "basic educational goals" in reading, spelling, grammar, mathematics and citizenship, they don't have to give standardized testing or otherwise prove student progress is made. Problems for Laura and Michael McIntyre, who once educated their nine children in an empty office at the family's motorcycle dealership in El Paso, arose after an uncle told the school district that he never saw the children do much of anything educational. According to court filings, he also overheard of the children tell a cousin "they did not need to do schoolwork because they were going to be raptured," or blessed by the second coming of Jesus Christ.

I don't think the McIntyres know this, but they just handed the education of their children over to the young Alvy Singer.

The family's eldest daughter, 17-year-old Tori, ran away from home in 2006 so she could return to school.

That's the saddest thing I've ever heard.

The El Paso district put her in the ninth grade because officials weren't sure she could handle higher grade-level work — a claim her parents' dispute. Attempting to investigate accusations of non-learning…

"Accusations of non-learning" seems to me to be a bit of non-English, although it's nice to see that the educational philosophy of the extended Palin clan has begun to filter down into the continental 48.

…school district attendance officer Michael Mendoza sought proof the children were being properly educated. That prompted the McIntyres to sue, arguing that their equal protection rights under the 14th Amendment had been violated and that the school district was anti-Christian. The family said it used a religious curriculum similar to one offered in El Paso's Christian schools, and noted the uncle invented claims of waiting for the rapture because he was embroiled in a dispute over ownership of the since-defunct motorcycle dealership.

Transubstantiation. The Council of Nicaea. The Arian Heresy. The Great Schism. The Reformation. And now, Who Gets The Used Harley Parts? Theological discussion has run quite downhill from the days of St. Athanasius, I can tell you that.

Assuming that the uncle is telling a modicum of truth here, what the Texas Supremes did here is one of the most ungainly dives in the history of the judiciary. Keep the 14th amendment out of this and the family in question still doesn't have a case. You can't claim to be home-schooling your children and then not teach them anything because Jeebus is going to be by in a chartreuse microbus any day now.

So even in Texas, even home-schooling has to involve, you know, school. Progress.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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