More Lone Star Lunacy

Washington Battling the Secular Humanist Tiger While Crossing the Potomac?* (My apologies to the artist.)

Yes, conservatives on the Texas State Board of Education succeeded Friday in putting their own right-wing slant into history and economics textbooks (the following quotes are from that article). Not content with damaging science education - What, after all, do mere scientists know about science? Someone must stand up to the experts. - they've valiantly attacked social studies, too. And yes, Don McLeroy led this, despite losing his reelection bid.

But the changes passed on a strict party-line vote, 10 to 5. It is Texas, after all. And if you're not unfortunate enough to live there, why should you care? Well, Texas is a huge market for textbook publishers, so the textbooks your child uses in school will likely be modified to that state's requirements. Let's face it, even if a publisher cared more about your children's education than about profits, that business would likely lose to publishers with fewer ethical concerns.

“They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”

But this is the whole point. Someone has to stand up to the experts! Why would historians know more about history than the average dimbulb redneck? Why would scientists know more about science? Experts are elitist. Just because they've got more education than we do, just because they've spent their professional lives specializing in a particular field, they think they're so smart! Well, look who's laughing now! (Not me, I assure you.)

There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.

So Thomas Jefferson (who infamously coined the phrase - make sure your children are out of the room! - "separation of church and state") is out, and Phyllis Schlafly is in. Racism had nothing to do with interning Japanese-Americans in World War II. Joe McCarthy was right. (Joseph N. Welch, famous for his "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" rebuke of McCarthy in 1954, was a Republican himself. But he'd be driven out of the party these days, you can be sure of that.)

Certainly, we can't have any mention of the Treaty of Tripoli ("The government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion"), which was passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate and signed by President John Adams in 1797. But the Moral Majority, the Heritage Foundation, the National Rifle Association? Oh, yeah, they're in.

Mavis B. Knight, a Democrat from Dallas, introduced an amendment requiring that students study the reasons “the founding fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring the government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion above all others.


It was defeated on a party-line vote.

After the vote, Ms. Knight said, “The social conservatives have perverted accurate history to fulfill their own agenda.”

* (George Washington, of course, is also known for this famous quote: "Fox News cannot tell a lie. It was those socialist Democrats, traitors to these United Christian States of America, who chopped down that cherry tree.")