Hi John,
That feature was meant to be controlled from Page Settings for this very reason so it can be controlled on each page and therefore disabled on the home page.
The thing is that the home page does not know that it is the home page. It can't know by it's name nor its id because you can freely move pages around in the site hierarchy and any page can be made the home page because the home page is simply the root level (ie no parent page) page with the lowest sort order, it has nothing different or distinguishing about it than any other page.
Only solution other than using the page settings to control this setting is to make a copy of your skin that does not have this enabled and set the home page to use this skin and all other pages to use the current skin.
Hope it helps,
Joe