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Texas Approves Conservative Curriculum
Macharius writes "Today, the Texas Board of Education approved 11-4 a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the role of Christianity in American history and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light. The article goes on to mention that Texas's textbook approvals carry less influence than they used to due to digital localization technology, but is that even measurable given how many millions of these textbooks will still be used across the country?"
Will they also emphasize the decline and perversion of Christian values in Government? How about the fact that the inclusion of Christian values in government affairs necessarily renders them un-Christian? I'm not sure how "conservatives" ever became associated with Christian values.
I just finished grad school in Texas and was dumbfounded on how many arguments I got when I had to teach human evolution. Some of the most basic things that we take for granted as fact were just thrown to the wayside. Fortunately college has a way of forcefully opening your mind, but I really feel for these kids up until that point. No history book is going to be 100% objective, but it is still something that we should strive for.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
OK, now that my knee is done jerking and I've at least skimmed TFA, there are some interesting tidbits.
Dr. McLeroy pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent approach. He also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported.
This might not be such a bad thing if it leads students to learn more. For example, in going over materials regarding the Panthers, they might learn that group exercised 2nd ammendment rights. It was the fear of Blacks with guns that led to some of the first (the first?) gun control measures in California. The law was, IIRC, signed into law by... Ronald Reagan!
I'd love to be there when a student raises his hand in class to ask the teacher why a Republican would sign gun control legislation, or presents this fact in an oral report about the Panthers.
Oh, and I wasn't taught this in school. I knew nothing of it until I moved to the Bay Area and learned more about the Panthers simply because I heard they got started in this area. That caused me to become curious and read up on their history. School certainly didn't teach it.
Hearing the adults argue about all this will probably teach the kids in ways that neither side anticipated.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Well, then you can say to him that the Constitution says nothing about the right to own guns. He might be thinking of telling you about the Second Amendment says "...the right to bear arms shall not be infringed", but you could just respond that that is ambiguous, as it doesn't specify whether they mean "arms" as in weapons, or "arms" as in the upper extremities. Maybe Madison was just concerned about the government chopping them off, as he may have heard that they do in Muslim lands. Then perhaps that jagoff will resort to references of those coeval extra-constitutional writings, wherein the phrase "separation of church and state" can also be found.
Ah, the joys of willful ignorance.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
In the late 80s, the republican base was slipping. Bush I barely won against Dukakis. Keep in mind, Bush was at the center of political power his whole life, headed the CIA, and had just completed 8 years as Vice President. His campaign had to resort to a racist attack ad about Willie Horton.
In 1992, Bush lost to Clinton, and many believe it was because he refused to identify himself as a "born again" Christian. Most evangelicals had been uninvolved in politics, until they were discovered by the dying Republican movement. As long as you professed to be evangelical and pro-life, you'd have local preachers pushing their followers to vote for you. Bush II toed the line, and got elected twice for it. The only problem is now the evangelical movements want one of their own in the White House - Sarah Palin - and that's something the ruling business party cannot allow. They brought her in for the VP job, but she couldn't pull the moderate record of McCain. Palin could have been the sideshow, but the business party is greedy, not crazy, and they'll never let her within ten miles of the big red button.
The evangelicals are an enormous and active voting bloc. They do exactly as their pastor or preacher tells them, and nearly half of them are in church every single sunday. Now they are being used up by two seats of power: Republicans and their own church leaders. The Republicans get a voting bloc that will campaign against their own interests, and the church leaders get access to power and a fanatical flock that now worships money, and gives them a bunch of it.
Just try to imagine Christ at a Tea Party rally, protesting tax dollars spent on the ill and the needy, and then signing up to join the Army the next day. The evangelicals have no idea which way is north. They don't even have a coherent set of values left. They are just following orders.
I grew up in Texas, in a town that was conservative by Texas standards, and even at that I don't think any sort of "controversy" about evolution was ever brought up in high school. Most of the argument you were subjected to where probably from attitudes acquired in the home or church, not school. That said, it was much later in life, when I was living in California and working on a masters in Cellular and Molecular biology that I first had a discussion with a fundamentalist christian about evolution. The discussion ended rather abruptly after the guy pulled out an argument that was somehow supposed to show that the 2nd law of thermodynamics made evolution impossible. I'd never heard the argument (turns out it's a staple of these evolution deniers), and my response to him was basically "OK, well all that you've managed to show me is that you have absolutely no understanding of the 2nd law of thermodynamics."
Hey guys, relax! If this isn't the kind of change you were hoping for go make changes yourself! It's still a free country! Just some questions to ask yourself:
Why are you wanting people to kill themselves?
Why do you dislike these people so much?
Do you dislike them because they are promoting Christian values?
If you do, do you dislike that they believe that God so loved the world that he sent his only Son so that who ever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life?
Do you dislike them because they try to live like Christ but recognize that when they fail, which they inevitably do, they go back to God and ask for forgiveness?
Do you dislike them because they believe in a God that you don't believe exists?
Or do you dislike them because simply because you do not like others who don't believe in what you believe?
Clearly you don't live in California. Only outside CA is the political system perceived as Liberal. Those of us who live within the state have learned that there are a few enclaves of urban liberalism, surrounded by by vast areas of rural conservatism rivaling those of Kansas or Texas.
LOL. Nice to see someone point this out for a change. And for those non-residents reading along at home, most Hollywood execs (from agents to production houses to studio heads) have political philosophies more in line with rural Kansas or Texas than those associated with our liberal enclaves. You heard it right, folks. Most of "Hollywood" is conservative. Shouldn't be a surprise, given the amount of money at stake in a given deal or project. The paeons working in the industry, on the other hand, well, creative types invariably and almost by definition espouse (often quite vocally) philosophies different from the mainstream.
I'd even go farther. There's parts of Kansas, Texas and other states in the deep South are more hip, liberal and/or progressive than what's here in California. I'm fortunate to live in a bohemian-ish enclave, but it's surrounded by miles of working-class, blue-collar neighbourhoods with American flags flying in their front yards, and Bush/Cheney stickers on their cars and trucks. In the wealthier communities, the Bush/Cheney stickers are on SUVs.
Whether you believe in God or not is not the point. The point is that this country was founded on religious freedoms. Those same freedoms that allow you to post on boards like this. Without those religious fundamentalists fighting and dieing for their beliefs you would still be stuck under the rule of the Anglican church.
For those who didn't take 14 years of church history here is a little refresher on religious freedom. The people fleeing England weren't fleeing some oppressive conservative organization. They were mostly people who thought that religion has become to liberal.
So they all moved to America. At which point they did the exact same thing which they were fleeing. They began enforcing their even stricter and more conservative laws upon the land. The punishments were the same as they were in Europe: execution, imprisonment and beatings. This wasn't a peace loving open minded bunch of religious extremists who just wanted to be left alone. These were Christian Taliban who thought their home nations were becoming bastions of sin.
The people who really advocated religious freedom weren't either the Europeans or the Puritan extremists it was the Deists and the Quakers. The Quakers were tired of being persecuted by the religious extremists who founded the country and the Deists thought religion itself was unproductive and divisive. If the textbooks want to really "present the truth of this country to school children" the textbooks would clearly state that a large portion of those who wrote our constitution and advocated religious tolerance were practically atheists. Thomas Jefferson even rewrote the bible without any miracles or super natural powers... now, questioning Christ's divinity, that's heresy in any branch of modern Christianity.
If I had to choose between being stuck under the Anglican Church (a church founded in order to liberalize church law) and the Puritans (a church founded in order to further restrict law) I'll take the Anglicans. Saying the Puritans gave us religious freedom is like saying the Taliban liberated Afghanistan from the oppressive democracy which was destroying Islam.
Republicans believe:
That there were WMD, but Saddam moved them to Syria.
That their weren't WMD, but we had good evidence he did.
That even if we didn't have evidence, Saddam said he did, and wouldn't let in inspectors.
That we've put on more debt in 1 year under Obama than 8 years with bush.
That the best thing to do in a recession is to balance the budget.
That social security is in crisis.
That Barney Frank forcing banks to loan to black people is what caused the crash of 2008.
That tax increases on the ultra rich are class warfare, but tax increases on everyone else are fair.
That gay marriage threatens marriage.
That the US has the best health care in the world.
That the most conservative, free-market based healthcare overhaul you could imagine coming from a Democrat is a dangerous socialist experiment.
That contrary to the Democratic plan, the best way to fix health care is a combination of tort reform and letting insurance comapanies pick their favorite state to regulate them.
That invading Iraq wasn't a war crime.
That torturing people isn't a war crime.
That we only tortured terrorists.
That waterboarding isn't torture.
That holding people without trial forever is ok.
That an illegal, dictatorial system of counter terrorism is better than a legal one.
That Bill Clinton was one of the most corrupt presidents.
That Sarah Palin might make a good president.
That Rush Limbaugh isn't a toxic zit on the ass of humanity.
You probably don't believe *all* of these things, but any one of them is obviously false or flatly ludicrous, and if you don't believe any of them, why would you be a Republican?
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