America For Purchase

A funny thing happened to United States history, well in Texas, much of U.S History is history.  U.S. history is being re-written by a group of right-wing, religious zealots who wielded their power to brainwash and control the young minds of tomorrow’s leaders and tomorrow’s future as the Texas Board of Education voted 10-5 recently (10 Republicans, 5 Democrats) along party lines, to replace history textbooks with their right wing political propaganda.

This is part of a greater national Republican agenda of a decades-long plot by social conservatives to redefine major turning points and influential figures in American history, often to slam liberals, promote Republicans and reinforce their positions in today’s politics and to impose a far-right ideology on the nearly 5 million schoolchildren, half which are Hispanic, in Texas.In 2010 Republican leaders initiated an effort to rewrite American history stating no terrorist attacks took place during George W. Bush’s presidency articulated by Bush spokesperson Diana Perino, and Mary Matalin and now “Mr. 9/11″ Rudy Giuliani.

Therefore it is really not surprising the Republican-dominated Texas Board of Education (TBOE) recently approved a revised social studies curriculum that extols conservatives and demonizes American icons whose contributions to history do not ‘fit’ into their ideology so they are remaking Texas Education into ‘their’ own self-imposed skewed image.  There were no historians, no experts, no sociologists and no economists consulted during the process, only the personal opinions of an over-powering Republican creationist dentist Dr. Don McLeroy who said “History has already been skewed; academia is skewed too far to the left” without providing any factual data to support his right-wing rhetoric and admitting he is a “non-academic”.  In September 2009 McLeroy argued that minority groups should be thankful to the majority for granting them rights (“For instance, the women’s right to vote. The men passed it for the women.”).  Listen to McLeroy’s comments on Intelligent Design click here. McElroy said “when it comes to textbooks, we have the power to do it. Sometimes it boggles my mind the kind of power we have.”

Other Republican TBOE members include:

• Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs.
• Peter Marshall, a Massachusetts-based preacher who has argued that California wildfires and Hurricane Katrina were God’s punishment for tolerating gays. His website commentaries sharply attack Muslims, characterize the Obama administration as “wicked,” and call on Christian parents to reject public education for their children.
• David Barton, a Christian nationalist history revisionist, former vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party; has a bachelor’s degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University; argues that the Founding Father principle there should be a wall of separation between church and state is a myth.  He made a vicious attack on the teachers who participated on the teams that developed draft revisions of social studies curriculum standards for Texas public schools.  listen to the full clip here
• Barbara Cargill, self-described ultra-conservative Republican who earned her undergraduate degree at Baylor University, the private Baptist College at Waco, has contradicted the world’s leading astronomers with her own observation, “The universe is not expanding.”  She wants Texas students to study the ideas of someone who justified treason against the United States in defense of the institution of slavery by giving Jefferson Davis the same exposure and President Abraham Lincoln.  She has also lied that “The Federal Reserve system has presided over about a 95…  Percent decline in the U.S. dollar.”
• Terri Leo, a hard-Right Christian Republican and past volunteer delegate for George W. Bush, a supporter of Bill Archer and Dick Armey, and a member of the Daughters of Liberty Republican Women’s Club and a charter member of the Texas Tea Party Republican Women’s Club, called the Republican revised standards “world class” and “exceptional.” She replaced the word “capitalism” with the word “free-enterprise system”; Terri Leo said “Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation, you know, ‘capitalist pig!
• Ken Mercer, Vice-Chair of TBOE is a solid, take-no-prisoners Creationist Republican from San Antonio. (click here ) In 2009, Mr. Mercer worked to have tossed from Texas two 6th-grade math text books, on the charge they “established New Age religious behavior in public school math instruction.” click here ) He attacked more moderate Republicans on the board who opposed his Creationist agenda, writing “I pray for my three friends, Pat Hardy of Ft. Worth , Bob Craig of Lubbock, and Geraldine “Tincy’ Miller of Dallas. They voted against the Republican Party platform and allowed themselves to be constantly lobbied by prominent atheists and secular humanists.”(click here )
• David Bradley, a strong Republican, an insurance salesman with NO college degree, told the New York Times, “I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.”

It is important to note many of these Republican board members either home school their own children or send them to private schools, while they ‘lord’ over the education of students in the public school system.

The 10 Republican members of the imposed the following to U.S. History textbooks:

• Added disgraced anticommunist Joseph McCarthy stating Liberals lied about him, he was a hero.  Of course most educated Americans remember Wisconsin Republican Joseph McCarthy who burst onto the national stage in the early 1950s with accusations that he had a list of names of known Communists in the federal government. He did not name them, (there were none) but McCarthy was censured by the Senate eventually and his name became synonymous with witch hunts — McCarthyism!  A true Republican hero.
• Added Republican Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-Equal Rights Amendment activist who said “almost everything about (Joseph) McCarthy in current history books is a lie and will have to be revised”. She also said “I submit to you that the feminist movement is the most dangerous, destructive force in our society today. [...] My analysis is that the gays are about 5% of the attack on marriage in this country, and the feminists are about 95%. [...] I’m talking about drugs, sex, illegitimacy, drop outs, poor grades, run away, suicide, you name it, every social ill comes out of the fatherless home.”
• Added Confederate leader Jefferson Davis, who supported slavery and treason against the United States.
• Added the Heritage Foundation, a right wing ‘think tank’ which supports faith-based initiatives, school vouchers, ban on abortion, overturning affirmative action programs are hostile to minorities and women, and push for upward distribution of wealth for the rich.
• Added the Moral Majority, founded by Jerry Falwell who along with Pat Robertson, blamed the 9/11 terrorist attacks on “the Pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle.”
• To avoid exposing students to “transvestites, transsexuals and who knows what else,” the Board struck the curriculum’s reference to “sex and gender as social constructs.”
• The Board refused to require that “students learn that the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others.”
• The Board struck the word “democratic” from the description of the U.S. government, instead terming it a “constitutional republic.”
• Removed Thomas Jefferson replacing him with religious right icon John Calvin. Of course they are too ignorant to know Calvinism led to only one denomination, and that denomination today is far from practicing the radical Calvinism as it conflicts severely with the current trappings of the religious right which emphasis the free choice aspects of salvation. 

Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s founding fathers, and primary author of the Declaration of Independence, was removed because, as a man of deep religious conviction, and a Deist, he believed religion was a very person matter, one which the government had no business getting involved; and wrote the famous letter (here) in 1801 to Danbury Baptists addressing religion on a national level containing the phrase “separation between church and state” which led to the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

• President (from Texas) Lyndon B Johnson’s Great Society will be degraded for “the unintended consequences” such as affirmative action.  President Johnson helped to push through the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act but Republicans describe these laws as Republican triumphs. Americans remember Barry Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, won five Deep South states because of his opposition to the Civil Rights Act.
• Added Ronald Reagan (in place of Jefferson) but does not mention his 1966 campaign to become governor of California, endorsed repeal of California’s Fair Housing Act, saying, “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so.”  Reagan embraced the racist apartheid government of South Africa, he cut federal low income housing funds by 84%; initiated tax cuts for the rich and trickle-down economics which only trickled up to the wealthy.
• Removed Thomas Edison “… Thomas Edison was more responsible than anyone else for creating the modern world, no one did more to shape the physical/cultural makeup of present day civilization. Accordingly, he was the most influential figure of the millennium.”
• Removed Albert Einstein noble prize winner in physics.
• Added that Italians and Germans, not just Japanese, were placed in U.S. camps during World War II, to dispute the idea that imprisoning the Japanese was motivated by Republican racism.
• Voted against including the late Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy
• Voted against the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor
• Intentionally dismissed role models for the state’s large Hispanic population, excluding leading Hispanic civil rights groups such as LULAC and MALDEF and other Latino figures in history as Cesar Chavez
• Added the importance of the National Rifle Association

The new textbook “standards” are not about learning, but a laundry list of southern fundamentalist cultural grievances.   The civil rights movement is downgraded and the peaceful Martin Luther King Jr. will now be “balanced” by lessons on the Black Panthers.   The TBOE also included adulterer Newt Gingrich’s flash-in-the-pan Contract with America as historically important. Teachers in Texas will be required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation’s Founding Fathers.  One amendment required students to learn about the “unintended consequences” of the Great Society, affirmative action, and Title IX programs, and another replaced references to “democratic societies” to references to “republican societies.”

Mavis B. Knight, a TBOE Democrat from Dallas said, “The social conservatives have perverted accurate history to fulfill their own agenda.”

“This is a board controlled by extremists who have determined to turn Social Studies classrooms into a tool to promote their ideology,” said Dan Quinn, spokesman for the Texas Freedom Network. “They’ve been successful in turning what should be a curriculum document into a political manifesto.”

The Board members “are not being guided by any sort of rigorous academic standards. This is a purely political fight for them,” said Ed Brayton, editor of the Michigan Messenger. Brayton is also the President of Michigan Citizens for Science, and has written extensively about the Texas school board on his blog.

Many historians have criticized these proposed revisions to the Texas social studies curriculum, saying that many of the changes are historically inaccurate and that they would affect textbooks and classrooms far beyond the state’s borders.

The Board of Education’s right-wing agenda has been aggressively pushed by Fox News in recent weeks, with the network claiming that liberals in the state are trying to remove mentions of Christmas and Independence Day from textbooks. The claims were so outrageous that the Texas Education Agency put out a press release debunking them. McLeroy may have gone too far: He recently lost his primary re-election battle

 

Make no mistake, the extremism of the Texas School Board is evident by the guidelines they voted for and which will likely “serve as a template for textbook publishers, who must come before the board next year with drafts of their books” as explained by the New York Times. “Because the Texas market is so large, books for the state’s students “often rocket to the top of the market, decreasing costs for other school districts and leading them to buy the same materials.” “The books that are altered to fit the standards become the bestselling books, and therefore within the next two years they’ll end up in other classrooms,” said Fritz Fischer, chairman of the National Council for History Education.

At the center of the Republican agenda are the children of Texas, where SAT scores rank 46th in the nation. Now because of politics, Texas children’s education will surely be subpar with those of other states who cherish the history of the United States and our honorable 200 year history which Texas Republicans are choosing to distort.

Any American may contact the Texas Education Agency  email teainfo@tea.state.tx.us and voice their concern.  Anyone may sign up to join the Thomas Jefferson Movement, which enables interested Americans to stand up to the school yard bullies and bring 21st Century education to the public schools of Texas and the United States.

Texans should also consider supporting and electing Judy Jennings and Rebecca Bell-Metereau to the State Board of Education to stand up and oust the Republican’s right wing distortion of history.

Tags Don McElroy Education Politics News Texas Texas Board Of Education Texas Changes Texas Constitution Texas Curriculum Texas Education Board Texas School Board Texas School Books Texas Schools Texas State Board Of Education Texas Textbook Texas Textbook Massacre Texas Thomas Jefferson Textbooks Textbooks In Texas Textbooks Texas Thomas Jefferson

Filed under: American Injustice