-- this time in Texas. Due to the success of Wendy Davis's filibuster of legislation that would have virtually ended legal abortion in Texas, the governor felt the need to call a special session of the legislature to push it through. According to Katherine Haenschen,, who is liveblogging the session, one "Senator Bob Deuell made the charming remark that low-income abortion
seekers are "unsophisticated patients" who need the legislature's help. Yes, Senator Deuell actually said that poor and less-educated women need the legislature to make decisions for them." So far the Democrats opposing the bill have been focusing on procedural issues.
But what has captured the most attention for the national audience is that women wanting to watch the session from the gallery are being searched for tampons and sanitary napkins, which when found are being confiscated-- unlike, say, guns, which are legally allowed in the chamber. Progress Texas has duly produced this graphic (which is flashing madly across Facebook, thanks partly to the Daily Kos, and partly to women tired of such now-commonplace ironies):
What a month it's been. First Utah goes after pregnant women, and now Texas seems determined to handicap its children by teaching them alternate history as if it were fact.
The New York Timesreported today that the Texas Board of Educated is planning to indoctrinate its children and youth with lies, using textbooks that rewrite history-- US history and world history both. It sounds as though the article barely scratches the surface of the School Board's collective fantasies; the examples it gives center on the US Constitution, US history, and the US's "Founding Fathers." Dominated by fantasists (who all seem to be Republican) voted 11-4 on "conservative"- recommended content of future textbooks. It's hard to believe conservatives have become such crackpots. My father was a conservative and a fundamentalist Lutheran, but I've no doubt that he'd have found this appalling.
There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.
The conservative members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.
"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."
The American Revolution was... religious? It was fought on... religious grounds? I can't begin to imagine how any details of that could even be invented. How in the world are the writers of the textbook going to be able to pull off making such whacko assertions? But since they're apparently writing Thomas Jefferson out of their history, I guess they can do anything.
But I have to wonder. After this kind of "education," will any high-school graduate of a Texas high school ever be considered qualified enough to be admitted to any institutions of higher learning anywhere (except, of course, the online mail-order degree-mills)?
Here's more-- in which we learn that St. Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin were really the authors of all the revolutions that tore apart Europe for more than half a century of its modern history:
Even the course on World History did not escape the board's scalpel.
Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among the conservatives on the board because he coined the term "separation between church and state.")
"The Enlightenment was not the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based," Ms. Dunbar said.
Mavis B. Knight, a Democrat from Dallas, introduced an amendment requiring that students study the reasons "the founding fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring the government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion above all others."
I had to double check the URL to make sure I hadn't found The Onion instead of the Statesman.
If you click on the link above, you will indeed find that one right wing Republican candidate for state school board (in fact, the incumbent) is accusing his right wing Republican opponent of being soft on terrorism because he once had a law partner who once represented the government of Saudi Arabia. Of course, as this lengthy magazine piece in tomorrow's NY Times makes clear, the Texas State Board of Education routinely makes decisions that any sane person would assume were meant as satire.
