The Texas Board of Education’s ongoing battle over rewriting its social studies curriculum has gotten its fair share of attention from the national media. But the religious right has been fairly quiet on the subject outside of the Lone Star State.
This weekend, Mike Huckabee will step into the fray, delivering national exposure to a conservative market. Mathew Staver of Liberty Counsel and dean of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University law school, will be a guest on Fox News’ Huckabee show to discuss the curriculum revisions.
But Dan Quinn of the religious right watchdog Texas Freedom Network said if a Liberty Counsel news release about Staver’s appearance is any indication, the show will no doubt misrepresent the efforts of the curriculum writing committee and unfairly portray its members as a “bunch of anti-Christian bigots.”
That’s because right-wing fundamentalist members of the Board of Education want to ignore the committee’s curriculum standards in an attempt to insert dubious stories and language that promotes the idea that America was founded as a “Christian nation. Liberty Counsel is an evangelical Christian advocacy organization that champions issues that break down the barrier of separation of church and state.
Accusing “people of trying to rewrite the past,“ the news release says Staver and Huckabee will be discussing academic attempts to “remove references to Daniel Boone, General George Patton, Nathan Hale, Columbus Day, and Christmas.” It also said the committee was trying to include “the cultural impact of hip hop music, ACLU lawyer Clarence Darrow, and the Hindu holiday of Diwali.”
Quinn called the news release a “blatant distortion of the truth.”
Last month, members of the Board of Education proposed a litany of amendments to the draft history curriculum that the writing committee of teachers, scholars and community members had spent almost a year writing. (The board of education will continue its review of the proposed standards in March. It’s scheduled to make a final vote in May.)
As an example of the news releases’ distortion, the committee suggested moving discussion of Hale, an American Patriot hanged by the British, from the 1st grade curriculum to 4th grade because it thought the gruesome topic was more appropriate for older students. “The right began to scream, but in most cases they were just putting them in a different spot,” Quinn said.
The topic of Christmas had already been part of a 6th grade geography class on world religions that included two Christian holidays (Easter and Christmas), two Jewish ones (Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah) and the Muslim observance of Ramadan. In an effort to streamline the curriculum guidelines, the committee proposed listing only one tradition from each religion. Rosh Hashanah and Christmas were dropped. But Staver and Huckabee may have a short discussion on this subject seeing as Christmas was put back in after conservatives on the board objected.
What seems to have been forgotten in all the discussions is that curriculum guidelines are not comprehensive laundry lists of every topic and person who should be taught in class. Rather, they are descriptions of broad concepts that the students are supposed to master. And there are no doubt hundreds of men and women who helped define this nation who students should learn about.
Religious conservatives have called for removal of plenty of names and topics too, but their motivations appear to be more for ideological reasons.
As for the issue of hip hop, well, Quinn said, it was pretty clear at a discussion in January that board members didn’t even have a clue to what hip hop was, confusing it with “gangsta rap.” In the end, board members left in hip hop, but they also included country western music. (I’m thinking of sending board member Don McElroy a copy of Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues for the lyrics, “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”)
Regarding Clarence Darrow, board members objected to his work as an ACLU attorney in the Scopes Monkey Trial.
Conservatives also proposed removing César Chavez (labor organizer and civil rights leader) because of his leftist ties. And Thurgood Marshall (the nation’s first black US Supreme Court justice who, as a young attorney, successfully argued the public school desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education) should be removed from textbooks because his contribution to this nation‘s history was insignificant. “There is a big difference for removing a name for structural reasons, rather than political perspectives,” Quinn said.
Huckabee, who has said he doesn’t believe in evolution - or more specifically, that his family didn’t come from apes - isn't likely to give this a thoughtful analysis. Rather, he’ll probably jump on all the right buzz words - Christmas, ACLU, liberals and socialists - to motivate his conservative viewers.
And since Texas is the second biggest purchaser of textbooks in the country, the battle has national significance, influencing the textbook purchases in other states.
“It’s not like Vegas,” Quinn said. “What happens in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas.”
Huckabees’ show airs at Fox News at 8 p.m. Saturday and 2 a.m. and 8 p.m. Sunday (EST).
Tags: evolution, johnny cash, mike huckabee, texas board of education
It is about time somebody stood up for equality in our nations schools....
what is the bible?
Your Web site is basically the "same old same old" theocratic/religionist tripe about the Founding Fathers.
First, being able to produce quotations suggesting they were believers, does not actually mean they were sincere believers. For each "believing" quote you can produce, I can produce one showing they were NOT believers; here are some of them. It's not possible for either side to win this using a "duel of quotations."
Second, the site implies they were Christian fundamentalists of the modern type. But this is literally impossible. Christian fundamentalism was a product of the mid-19th century. The FFs all lived decades before it ever came into existence.
Third, if you REALLY want to use the FFs' writings to figure them out, going by mere snippets and quotes is not helpful ... while looking at WHOLE WORKS is. Jefferson e.g. rewrote the gospels so as to remove what he viewed as rigid Christian dogma and mythology. Also, Thomas Paine wrote an entire work that attacked religious institutions, i.e. Age of Reason. Obviously neither of these men was friendly with the kind of Christian dogmatism your site promotes. James Madison wrote extensively on what he intended "religious freedom" to mean.
Fourth, if "equality" is what you want to promote in schools, the only viable way to do that is NOT to proselytize to children AT ALL. Once you promote Christianity over anything else, you "make favorites" and thus automatically relegate everyone else to "secondary status" ... and that is most assuredly not what "equality" is about. If you want to teach your kids religion, you're more than free to do so; you need not march it into the halls of public schools.
Fifth, if what you and your fellow religionists want is -- as I suspect -- to proselytize for your own version of Christianity in public schools, and to use the FFs as anachronistic, retroactive shills for it, that's fine. You're entitled to want to do so. All I ask is that you just admit it! Of course, once you've made this admission, you essentially make it impermissible ... but no good purpose is served by being dishonest. It's time for Christians to stop "lying for Jesus" just because they feel entitled to do so.
Sixth, even if it were true that the FFs were Christian fundamentalists, that doesn't mean we must also all be Christian fundamentalists. A lot of the FFs were slave-owners, too ... does that mean we should re-institute slavery and buy some slaves of our own? Sorry, but times change, and society changes with it. As horrific and bone-chilling as it may sound for me to say it, we are not living in the FFs' world any more; we need not do everything they did, merely because they did it.
I looked in the website linked in the comment above.
What he seems to be saying is that because the Founding Fathers spoke of God and Jesus and because they wrote of them in their journals that they were the same kind of Christians that today's conservative evangelicals would recognise.
They were not.
Christianity has re-invented itself many times since the first century and God-talk (theology) has changed countless times.
The men who wrote the US Constitution were talking of God in the language of the dawning Enlightenment. Few if any of them would have recognised the free market, right-wing, big brother in the sky of modern evangelicalism, much less the God of the six day creationists.
Some of them were Unitarians - a heresy according to most Evangelicals, some were Freemasons - a demonic lie according to the fundamentalists (just read those Chick tracts).
These men were what they were, products and makers of the intellectual and religious climate of their day. Their notion of God and of the Bible was the same.
We do not live in their age. It is time to recognise them and move on.
Anyone concerned about the preservation of religious freedom should keep an eye on the Texas SBOE. We are truly under assault from evangelical fascists down here.
The most destructive of the ultra-right-wingers' efforts have been in the area of science education, but they are attempting to rewrite history to reflect their bigoted beliefs. They have truly made Texas the laughingstock of the nation. It's a shame that these people have hijacked the Christian faith and turned it into a nationalist political movement.
Most of the founding fathers were Deists. This comment by John Adams is representative of their feelings:
"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole cartloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity."
Huckabee's an outrageous liar and he's associated with a despicable propaganda outlet for the racist Rupert Murdoch.
It's obvious he doesn't take the idea of Hell or Judgment day seriously.
In Texas, if a man gets a divorce, will his ex-wife still be his sister?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pItVGYa863k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1m4mATYoig
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YPmt8TUoX4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMqTEfeqvmM
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