Charles "Buddy" Hardin Holly. I will except no other entry. Ok, maybe Stevie Ray Vaughn.

It's especially odd since most right-wingers like to quote Jefferson selectively to support their mission. He was an advocate of a relatively weak central government, but exactly what he had in mind is not what right wingers have in mind by "small government." Southern right-wingers are also often anti-catholic, so the inclusion of Aquinas is curious.

Aquinas and Calvin aren't lightweights, either historically or intellectually (for their age), but at the exclusion of the enlightenment and the roots of the US Constitution? Madness.

This is getting so much national news coverage that there's no way any parent in Texas who isn't already a crypto-fascist theocrat (of which there are more than a few) will be ok with this. So their options are to pull their kids out and send them to private school or to let them swallow this tripe knowing that it's going to stunt their intellectual development and put them at a handicap when they try to study history or anything, really, at university.

What about Mr Pepper The Clown?

hold on, what influence did thomas acquinas have on the revolutionary groups in europe and in america?

These people believe that dinosaurs and man co-existed.

Adding Aquinas to the Enlightenment isn't a stretch for them.

isn't adding those two two lads a little like asking people to study the impact of pantera and genghis khan on the texas board of education's decision to alter the standards?

I'd like to see any of them actually read Aquinas.

My guess is that throwing the Angelic Doctor in there along with Calvin is a sop for some conservative Catholic interest or another. Traditionally, it's been the Baptists who have spear-headed the attempts to break down the wall of separation between church and state in Texas, but as their numbers have dwindled they've been making common cause with right-wing Catholics, especially on things like "school vouchers," which would greatly benefit Catholic schools.

It's funny, though, because I'm sure there are still lots of fundamentalist Baptists here who privately think Catholics are barely even Christians. When I was a kid in Texas I remember the fundies' end-time speculations quite often centered on the Pope as a candidate for the Anti-Christ.

To my mind the most maddening thing about this whole fiasco is the contempt the board members have for public education. They want to inject their religious and political biases into the curriculum, but they're just as happy if that move drives moderates and liberals away from the public schools, because they want to defund and deligitimize the entire system of public education.

This is from a Texas Freedom Network review of Board Member Cynthia Dunbar's book:

In her book, One Nation Under God (Onward, 2008), Dunbar (on p. 100) calls public education a "subtly deceptive tool of perversion." She charges that the establishment of public schools is unconstitutional and even "tyrannical" because it threatens the authority of families, granted by God through Scripture, to direct the instruction of their children (p. 103) Dunbar, who has home-schooled her children and sent them to private schools, bases that charge on her belief that "the underlying authority for our constitutional form of government stems directly from biblical precedents." (p. xv)

You're bang on about the Baptist versus Catholic thing. In my Texas town there was near-universal suspicion of the Catholics by the Protestants. Not animosity per se, but they were regarded as very much a foreign entity.

I find it pretty amazing that publicly insisting on having one's own kids in private schools wouldn't easily disqualify a person from getting elected to the state board.

It's how they do. Got something you want to destroy? Get elected to the board that controls it.

It's worked for Republican Congressmen for years.

And let me add, fuck you Cynthia Dunbar. Seriously, fuck you. When your children grow up and treat you like a leper, fuck you. And let me add... fuck you.

Bruno wrote:


I find it pretty amazing that publicly insisting on having one's own kids in private schools wouldn't easily disqualify a person from getting elected to the state board.

The idea of that is probably that they pay taxes and therefore they can serve...and it is in Texas.

There are two administrators for the school district that I teach who homeschool their kids. Each of these folks pull 80/90 grand of tax payer money, yet won't have their kids go to the schools that they administer. Interesting.

Re: the textbook BS - more reason than ever for districts to avoid buying textbooks. I've taught American History for years and the books we've had are dreadful. Fine for a first year teacher, but after that it is important to develop your own lessons.

Were I forced to use the rightwing, anti-Jefferson version, I'd have my majority Mexican-American kids and parents have their say w/ our own school board.

I'll predict that there'll be a narrow-minded TX version and a more rational version for the rest of sane America.

Texas - at least it's not Utah.

To be honest though, Buttars is notoriously crazy, and I doubt this has any chance of becoming law.

McLeroy's latest proposed revisions to the textbooks.

Perhaps the most horrifying one is the one making Thomas fucking Kinkade a set text.

Thomas Kinkade, perfect. McLeroy et al. have no interest in our actual history; they want to luxuriate in a Kinkade warm-and-fuzzy fantasy.

What a sad little creep McLeroy is. He's apparently going to try to insert as much nonsense into the curriculum as possible before his term is up.

Ginger Yellow wrote:

Perhaps the most horrifying one is the one making Thomas fucking Kinkade a set text.

I am sad to say that my mother has a Thomas Kinkade painting above the fireplace. She also insists on reading the daily mail.

Every time we are home for a family event (rare nowadays), my brother and I fight over which poor bastard gets it when they die. It doesn't go down particularly well with the parents.

Our equivalent is a woman named Trisha Romance. They look like massive, expensive Christmas cards.

I'd imagine Amor has a few of her more important works around the living room.

I had to look up Kinkade on Wikipedia, and found an amusing quote from Joan Didion:

"A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire."

Kinkade's weirdest project is "The Village at Hiddenbrooke, A Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light™ Community" in Vallejo, California, for people who actually want to live in one of his houses, not just look at them in a painting.

Vallejo is one of the Bay Area communities that has been hit particularly hard by the by the crisis; the area was in the nationwide top ten in terms of foreclosure rates.

I would imagine that good deals are available in Hiddenbrooke right now.

I bet you're right, ursus. I remember reading that the city had declared bankruptcy a few years ago.

I'm interested in the proposed focus on eugenics, which doesn't seem to fit in with the general crazy. I know that US eugenics policy in the twenties was pretty vile, does the proposed amendment accurately describe it?