Fundys on the march in Texas

You can't say we weren't warned. Back some 30 years ago, at the inception of the Christian Coalition, Pat Robertson and other right-wing religionists vowed that christianist conservatives would infiltrate every aspect of American life, from school boards, to city councils, to governor's offices, even the United States Congress and thereby transform the United States into a fundamentalist christianist state ruled by their version of biblical law and order.

Unfortunately, these christianist fundamentalists have been remarkably successful, as we have documented over and over again on this blog.

One of their latest victories was won in Texas, where the State Board of Education is comprised of a majority of christianist nogoodniks who have no educational qualifications for serving on an educational board, and who see the role of the schools in Texas, not to educate, but to indoctrinate children with fundamentalist christianist beliefs (which also happen to coincide in many cases with "conservative" Repugnican beliefs).

As an aside, these people love the word, "conservative," and use it to describe their philosophies and actions. But they are not conservative in any sense of the word. They are as radical as the Marxists they disavow, working to upset years of educational excellence with their own revisionist schemes, based not in reality, but in the Bible and their own pointy little heads.

The Texas SBOE has been ruled by these cretins for many years; cretins who have concluded Darwin's theory of evolution is all wrong because it seems, to them, to contradict their bibles - those ancient scribblings of scientific excellence! These cretins, also ignorant of American history, continue to perpetrate the nonsense that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation, and that our founding fathers did not intend any kind of separation of church and state.

In Texas, there are 120 pages of curriculum standards written by the cretinous SBOE. Over the past several years, about 100 amendments have been made to these standards, most all of which reflect the views of the non-intellectual misfits on the board.

One should note that as the amendments have been made, real historians, economists, sociologists or other experts were rarely, if ever, consulted!

Thus, Texas students will now be taught such things as:

- the concept of separation of church and state cannot be found in our founding documents

- the American revolution was essentially a religious revolution

- the importance of the "the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association"

- '"the unintended consequences" of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX legislation" as well as the notion that the internment of U.S. citizens who were of Japanese descent during WWII was not racially based because some Germans and Italians were also interned

- Joe McCarthy wasn't all that bad so the study of McCarthyism will include the notion that "the later release of the Verona papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government"

- Economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek (free-market believers) were just as important as Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes

- that capitalism is not a good word and "free-enterprise system" should be used in its place

- "'the importance of personal responsibility for life choices" in a section on teenage suicide, dating violence, sexuality, drug use and eating disorders"


But there's more:

A female attorney from Richmond, Texas, who is convinced the U.S. was a Christian nation from its inception, "managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Acquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone." Never mind that John Calvin was a murdering bastard who killed people opposed to his religious views! And just which "revolution" was based on the writings of Tommy Acquinas?

Another amendment requires students to learn "how taxes and regulations restrict private enterprise, and that students analyze the importance of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. Gun rights were given the same importance as free speech rights."

In a U.S. history section, the SBOE included "references to 'laws of nature and nature's God' in a study requiring "students to explain major political ideas."


What is especially unfortunate in all of this is that when it comes to textbooks, it is often the case that "as Texas goes, so goes the nation." In other words, Texas sets the parameters for textbook publishers and schools across the country.

Isn't there some way we can help the State of Texas secede from the Union. Who needs it?