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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?"
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
I'm sure what he really meant to say is that these things are okay as long as it's not the government who is doing these things, then it's a work of the devil.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
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.
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.