It's not bad enough that Texas school board fundys are trying to prove
to teh world just how stupid they are scientifically, now they have to
prove how absolutely stupid they are in teaching history.


How the Religious Right Is Pushing Propaganda in Texas Social Studies
Classrooms

By Dan Quinn Thu Apr 30, 2009 at 05:44:53 PM EST

We are delighted to welcome Dan Quinn, Communications Director of the
Texas Freedom Network, as a guest front pager. His post is a reminder
that the culture war remains hot as a wildfire and is being waged on
many fronts. -- FC

In March the Texas State Board of Education succeeded in opening public
school science classrooms to creationist attacks on evolution. Having
done what it could to muck up the science curriculum, the board's far-
right bloc is now moving to politicize the state's social studies
classrooms. How? By stacking an important "expert" curriculum panel with
religious extremists like David Barton and the Rev. Peter Marshall --
two prominent names in the movement to destroy church-state separation
and convince Americans that the country should be run on conservative
Christian biblical principles.

Christian conservatives who control the Texas board appear set to name
both Barton and Marshall -- along with conservative American University
law professor Daniel Dreisbach and three others -- to the "expert" panel
despite their lack of formal academic training in the social sciences.
Worse than being absurdly unqualified, however, are extremist political
agendas promoted by the two.

Founder of the Christian-right advocacy group WallBuilders, Barton also
served as vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party from 1997 to 2006.
His tenure there saw the state GOP lurch ever further to the right. The
Texas GOP platform, in fact, has become a biennial exercise in
extremism, with attacks on church-state separation (a "myth"), science
and science education, gay and lesbian families, and reproductive
rights. Barton also worked in 2004 for the Republican National
Committee, recruiting conservative pastors into the GOP.

Barton is a self-styled "historian" although he lacks any formal
training in the field. In addition to attacking separation of church and
state, he argues that the nation's laws and public policies should be
based on Scripture. He says, for example, that the Bible forbids taxes
on income and capital gains.

Barton also acknowledges having used in his publications and speeches
nearly a dozen quotes he has attributed to the nation's Founders even
though he can't identify any primary sources showing that they really
said them. Even so, those dubious quotes have become regular ammunition
in theist arguments that the Founders never wanted church-state
separation, instead intending to create a Christian nation based on the
Bible.

Barton also seems to have associated with white supremacist groups in
the past. In 1991, for example, Barton spoke at events hosted by groups
tied to white supremacists. He later said he hadn't known the groups
were "part of a Nazi movement." Perhaps, but it's disturbing that
someone characterized as a social studies "expert" didn't know he was
speaking to white supremacists not just once, but twice. This "expert"
also can't meet a basic academic standard of providing primary sources
to back up his "research" into what he claims the Founders said and
believed.

Almost as worrying for supporters of public education should be that
Barton's WallBuilders Web site suggests as a "helpful" resource a group
called the National Association of Christian Educators/Citizens for
Excellence in Education. Helpful? That organization urges Christian
parents to abandon public schools, calling them places of "social
depravity" and "spiritual slaughter."

Marshall, who runs the Massachusetts-based Peter Marshall Ministries,
also has called on Christian parents to take their kids out of public
schools. This supposed social studies "expert" also calls President
Obama "wicked" and displays venomous contempt for people of other
faiths. Last year in a call for a new "spiritual revival," for example,
Marshall attacked Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, even calling
mainstream Protestantism "an institutionally fossilized, Bible-rejecting
shell of Christianity that is completely impotent against militant
Islam."

Marshall's rhetoric is particularly heated on the subject of Islam:

"If the Western world continues down this pathway of cultural
accommodation the inevitable result will be the eventual triumph of
Islam in our societies. Its victory will not come suddenly, as if an
Islamic dagger had been stabbed into the heart, but slowly, from the
bleeding of a thousand cultural cuts inflicted over the years."

The LGBT community fares little better, with Marshall blaming tolerance
of homosexuality for everything from wildfires in California to
Hurricane Katrina.

During a hearing on his confirmation as chairman of the Texas State
Board of Education recently, creationist Don McLeroy told senators in
Austin that he believed the social studies curriculum revision would be
even more controversial and divisive than the battle over science
standards had been. Now we know why.

http://tinyurl.com/dd95t2

--- Xnews/5.04.25