Right-Wingers Write Jefferson Out of Texas Schoolbooks

As long as history is written by human beings, it will always be a subjective enterprise. But what’s going on in Texas is the manufacture of a creation myth of the United States, crafted through the prism of right-wing Christianity — not just a simple coloring of history as seen through one facet of the prism that illuminates the historical record.

At issue are the textbooks to be used in the state’s public schools, shaped by the curriculum guidelines passed by the State Board of Education. The New York Times talked to several school board members, including:

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 conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

Right.  Jefferson, the Founding Father most responsible for the First Amendment, had nothing to do with inspiring the French revolution — or the American Revolution, for that matter.

Here’s what happened when one of the 15-member panel’s five Democrats attempted to introduce a little balance, according to the Times:

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.”

The new curriculum will also downplay the history of racism in the U.S., and, according to board member Mary Helen Berlenga, a board member who stormed out of the school board meeting, virtually write Latinos out of history.

As I wrote here yesterday, there’s a truly dangerous trend afoot in the lack of a common notion of reality. Then I wrote of the siloing of media via cable and internet, which leads to completely ideologized versions of the news. In Texas we see what happens when a body acting on behalf of the public is dominated by people of a very particular mindset — a mindset based on a paranoid, chauvinistic mindset that has been advanced as gospel truth through five decades of right-wing propaganda. For more than 50 years, the right wing has built institutions to advance this worldview, and its philanthropists have given generously to its “visionaries,” funding them not project-by-project, but bestowing operating budgets on right-wing institutions, and often providing hundreds of thousands of dollars in research support to right-wing authors.

The result is an alternate universe built on a handful of Big Lies. The only possible antidote is a similar level of support to truth-tellers.

Well, a girl can dream, can’t she?