Cynthia Dunbar

Janet Porter of Faith2Action returned to her native Ohio last year to pass the patently unconstitutional “Heartbeat Bill,” which would criminalize abortion in the majority of cases. Despite success in the State House the GOP-controlled State Senate has refused to even put the bill up for a vote, with the Republican Senate President criticizing Faith2Action for making “exaggerated and inflammatory statements.” While it looks like Porter’s Heartbeat Bill won’t make it to the floor of the State Senate, that didn’t stop her from organizing one last rally in the Capitol to push for its passage.

While the last Heartbeat Bill rally featured prominent anti-choice activists such as Lou Engle, Jim Garlow and Wendy Wright, her rally on Saturday included less renowned (but just as extreme) conservatives like Linda Harvey and Timothy Johnson.

Cynthia Dunbar, a former member of the Texas Board of Education who is now a law professor at Liberty University, in her address to the rally made the specious claim that “94% of the quotes of the Founding Fathers contemporaneous to our nation’s founding came either directly or indirectly from the Bible” and maintained that legislators shouldn’t worry about passing the unconstitutional Heartbeat Bill since “Roe v. Wade is not law at all.” “Guess what legislators,” Dunbar said, “you don’t have the freedom to make any laws if they are contrary to what God has said in his Holy Scripture.”

Watch highlights of Dunbar’s speech here:

Porter in a last ditch effort in WorldNetDaily said she is tired of sending teddy bears and flowers to legislators and instead now will send them postcards with a rhinoceros on it, saying Republicans who don’t back her bill are RINO’s:

After 53 co-sponsors out of a 99-member House, multiple rallies, billboards, bumper stickers, yard signs, television, radio and full-page print ads, five 5,000 red heart balloons, heart chocolates, heart cookies, heartbeat teddy bears, 2,200 red roses, an airplane that flew over the statehouse and demonstrating more support than any bill in America, IT’S TIME FOR A VOTE.

There are two basic methods of persuasion: the carrot and the stick. We have given these senators so many carrots, they have spit them out in our face. Perhaps it’s time for another approach.

They didn’t like the teddy bears and roses, so let me introduce a more direct approach, one that will not let them get away with further delay and more excuses. On neon-pink postcards, the 23 Republican members of the Ohio Senate are being asked a very simple question: Are they Republican or Republican In Name Only (RINO)?

…

Why does an Ohio bill affect you? Because when Ohio protects children with beating hearts, other states will follow. Mississippi already has. They already passed a version of Ohio’s Heartbeat Bill through their House, but, unfortunately, their Senate killed it. We can’t let them do it here.

Someone has to break through the wall of Roe to protect unborn children, and there is no one closer than Ohio, who can send the most pro-life law in America to pro-life Gov. John Kasich for his signature with ONE SENATE FLOOR VOTE.

• Towleroad: FOX News: A Gay Man in Virginia Was Named Prom Queen Because He Was Indoctrinated by Sesame Street.
• Lee Fang @ Think Progress: Did The Cable Industry Pay Ralph Reed Millions Of Dollars To Orchestrate Tea Party Opposition To Net Neutrality?
• Daniel Williams @ Dallas Voice: Houston bigot Dave Wilson sends out another anti-gay mailer attacking Annise Parker.
• Texas Freedom Network: Cynthia Dunbar’s Reading List.
• Colby Hall @ Mediaite: Exclusive: Glenn Beck’s Last Day On Fox News Will Be June 30th.

During the "Religious Liberty and the LGBT Agenda" panel at The Awakening 2011 that Brian mentioned in the last post, former Texas State Board of Education member Cynthia Dunbar admitted that the right-wing activists on the Board used the recent update to the state's social studies curriculum as an opportunity to counter the fact that "we have a Biblically illiterate society."

As she explained, they included in the new curriculum a requirement that students must learn about "the law's of nature and nature's God" so that they will be taught that "the 'laws of nature' is the will of our maker and because of the fallen state of man, we have to have the 'laws of nature's God' revealed through the Holy Scripture":

The Texas Freedom Network has been doing amazing work covering the battle over curriculum standards in Texas .. and nothing better explains just what is going on than this post from TFN today highlighting the prayer delivered by right-wing Texas State Board of Education member Cynthia Dunbar to open the Board's debate over what the next generation of Texas students will learn about separation of church and state:

Even before the Texas State Board of Education took up its expected debate today over what students will learn about separation about church and state in their social studies classrooms, board member Cynthia Dunbar, R-Richmond, made her position clear. She offered the board’s opening prayer this morning and removed any doubt about what she and other far-right board members want students to learn: America’s laws and government should be based on the Christian Bible.

Laying out in blunt language the “Christian nation” vision of American history that the board’s powerful bloc of social conservatives espouses, Dunbar threw down the gauntlet:

“I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the savior have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses.”

“Whether we look to the first charter of Virginia, or the charter of New England…the same objective is present — a Christian land governed by Christian principles.”

“I like to believe we are living today in the spirit of the Christian religion. I like also to believe that as long as we do so, no great harm can come to our country.”

This post reminded me that I had footage of Dunbar delivering a prayer for education at Janet Porter's May Day 2010 prayer rally earlier this month during which she proclaimed that the government had become destructive to the rights of its citizens and that it was time for "we the people to stand up and make the changes" while seeking forgiveness for having "trained generation after generation to not know that it's the providential hand of God" that has made America great and asking God to invade our school system to overcome the false idea that there are areas of instruction or knowledge "that can be found absent and devoid of the presence of the most high God": 

Faith 2 Action's Janet Porter continues to move ahead with her organizing for the "May Day: a Cry to God for Our Nation in Distress" prayer rally at the Lincoln Memorial on May 1:

Porter called on Christians to take part in a 40-day fast prior to the event. She said participants will give up something important to them in the days leading up to May Day.

"We just want God to know we're serious about standing in the gap for America," she said. "We are calling the remnant to come and repent. It's a two-fold plan to not only pray but to proclaim what our founders believed – that we are one nation under God."

Vision America President Dr. Rick Scarborough added, "We need to let God know we're serious about turning back to Him and fasting from something – whether it's television, dessert or food – will provide the breakthrough we desperately need as a nation."

...

Pro-family leaders across denominational boundaries have joined together for the effort including: Dr. James Dobson, American Family Association President Tim Wildmon, Concerned Women for America President Wendy Wright, Liberty Counsel Chairman Mat Staver, NRB President Dr. Frank Wright, Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin, Dutch Sheets, David Barton and many members of Congress.

Porter has explained that the event is designed to break the curse that our nation is under for having elected President Obama, and now she's picking up some interesting new supporters for her effort:

Porter said Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer who serves on the Texas State Board of Education, will attend and ask God for forgiveness for how the nation has removed Him from American schools.

"She is going to come to May Day and repent for how we have taught our children lies, not only in revisionist history but also evolution, how we've kicked God out of school," Porter said. "She will repent on behalf of the education system, and she's also going to welcome God back in."

Dunbar played a central role in Texas' recent rewriting of its social studies requirements in order to make them better reflect the conservative worldview and, given her views, it is no surprise that she would team up with the likes of Porter:

In 2008, Cynthia Dunbar published a book called “One Nation Under God,” in which she stated more openly than most of her colleagues have done the argument that the founding of America was an overtly Christian undertaking and laid out what she and others hope to achieve in public schools. “The underlying authority for our constitutional form of government stems directly from biblical precedents,” she writes. “Hence, the only accurate method of ascertaining the intent of the Founding Fathers at the time of our government’s inception comes from a biblical worldview.”

Then she pushes forward: “We as a nation were intended by God to be a light set on a hill to serve as a beacon of hope and Christian charity to a lost and dying world.” But the true picture of America’s Christian founding has been whitewashed by “the liberal agenda” — in order for liberals to succeed “they must first rewrite our nation’s history” and obscure the Christian intentions of the founders. Therefore, she wrote, “this battle for our nation’s children and who will control their education and training is crucial to our success for reclaiming our nation.”

After the book came out, Dunbar was derided in blogs and newspapers for a section in which she writes of “the inappropriateness of a state-created, taxpayer-supported school system” and likens sending children to public school to “throwing them into the enemy’s flames, even as the children of Israel threw their children to Moloch.” (Her own children were either home-schooled or educated in private Christian schools.) When I asked, over dinner in a honky-tonk steakhouse down the road from the university, why someone who felt that way would choose to become an overseer of arguably the most influential public-education system in the country, she said that public schools are a battlefield for competing ideologies and that it’s important to combat the “religion” of secularism that holds sway in public education.

On a related note, Rev. Paul Blair of Reclaiming Oklahoma for Christ has put together this video urging people to attend the May Day event and "appeal in penitent prayer to the King of Kings for revival in our land":

The right-wing members of the Texas School Board have made no secret of the fact that their mission in drafting the new social studies curriculum standards for state public school has been to highlight the supposedly Christian foundation of our nation and the deeply Christian views of the Founding Fathers.

Apparently, the views and writing of the man who drafted the Declaration of Independence do not adequately serve that purpose, which is why both Thomas Jefferson and the Enlightment have now been dropped, as the Texas Freedom Network, which is liveblogging the debate, reports:

9:30 – Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She wants to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas (replacing with “the writings of”) and to Thomas Jefferson. She adds Thomas Aquinas and others. Jefferson’s ideas, she argues, were based on other political philosophers listed in the standards. We don’t buy her argument at all. Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock points out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted to students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Could Dunbar’s problem be that Jefferson was a Deist? The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards.

9:40 – We’re just picking ourselves up off the floor. The board’s far-right faction has spent months now proclaiming the importance of emphasizing America’s exceptionalism in social studies classrooms. But today they voted to remove one of the greatest of America’s Founders, Thomas Jefferson, from a standard about the influence of great political philosophers on political revolutions from 1750 to today.

9:45 – Here’s the amendment Dunbar changed: “explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.” Here’s Dunbar’s replacement standard, which passed: “explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone.” Not only does Dunbar’s amendment completely change the thrust of the standard. It also appalling drops one of the most influential political philosophers in American history — Thomas Jefferson.

The New York Times Magazine has a long article on the battle over textbooks in Texas and the related question of just how religious were the Founding Fathers and how much of a role they intended religion to play in our government. 

The article is quite long, but I just wanted to highlight a few sections about the views and agendas of Texas Board of Education members Don McLeroy and Cynthia Dunbar:

I met Don McLeroy last November in a dental office — that is to say, his dental office — in a professional complex in the Brazos Valley city of Bryan, not far from the sprawling campus of Texas A&M University. The buzz of his hygienist at work sounded through the thin wall separating his office from the rest of the suite. McLeroy makes no bones about the fact that his professional qualifications have nothing to do with education. “I’m a dentist, not a historian,” he said. “But I’m fascinated by history, so I’ve read a lot.”

...

McLeroy is a robust, cheerful and inexorable man, whose personality is perhaps typified by the framed letter T on the wall of his office, which he earned as a “yell leader” (Texas A&M nomenclature for cheerleader) in his undergraduate days in the late 1960s. “I consider myself a Christian fundamentalist,” he announced almost as soon as we sat down. He also identifies himself as a young-earth creationist who believes that the earth was created in six days, as the book of Genesis has it, less than 10,000 years ago. He went on to explain how his Christian perspective both governs his work on the state board and guides him in the current effort to adjust American-history textbooks to highlight the role of Christianity. “Textbooks are mostly the product of the liberal establishment, and they’re written with the idea that our religion and our liberty are in conflict,” he said. “But Christianity has had a deep impact on our system. The men who wrote the Constitution were Christians who knew the Bible. Our idea of individual rights comes from the Bible. The Western development of the free-market system owes a lot to biblical principles.”

For McLeroy, separation of church and state is a myth perpetrated by secular liberals. “There are two basic facts about man,” he said. “He was created in the image of God, and he is fallen. You can’t appreciate the founding of our country without realizing that the founders understood that. For our kids to not know our history, that could kill a society. That’s why to me this is a huge thing.”

...

In 2008, Cynthia Dunbar published a book called “One Nation Under God,” in which she stated more openly than most of her colleagues have done the argument that the founding of America was an overtly Christian undertaking and laid out what she and others hope to achieve in public schools. “The underlying authority for our constitutional form of government stems directly from biblical precedents,” she writes. “Hence, the only accurate method of ascertaining the intent of the Founding Fathers at the time of our government’s inception comes from a biblical worldview.”

Then she pushes forward: “We as a nation were intended by God to be a light set on a hill to serve as a beacon of hope and Christian charity to a lost and dying world.” But the true picture of America’s Christian founding has been whitewashed by “the liberal agenda” — in order for liberals to succeed “they must first rewrite our nation’s history” and obscure the Christian intentions of the founders. Therefore, she wrote, “this battle for our nation’s children and who will control their education and training is crucial to our success for reclaiming our nation.”

After the book came out, Dunbar was derided in blogs and newspapers for a section in which she writes of “the inappropriateness of a state-created, taxpayer-supported school system” and likens sending children to public school to “throwing them into the enemy’s flames, even as the children of Israel threw their children to Moloch.” (Her own children were either home-schooled or educated in private Christian schools.) When I asked, over dinner in a honky-tonk steakhouse down the road from the university, why someone who felt that way would choose to become an overseer of arguably the most influential public-education system in the country, she said that public schools are a battlefield for competing ideologies and that it’s important to combat the “religion” of secularism that holds sway in public education.

Ask Christian activists what they really want — what the goal is behind the effort to bring Christianity into American history — and they say they merely want “the truth.” “The main thing I’m looking for as a state board member is to make sure we have good standards,” Don McLeroy said. But the actual ambition is vast. Americans tell pollsters they support separation of church and state, but then again 65 percent of respondents to a 2007 survey by the First Amendment Center agreed with the statement that “the nation’s founders intended the United States to be a Christian nation,” and 55 percent said they believed the Constitution actually established the country as a Christian nation. The Christian activists are aware of such statistics and want to build on them, as Dunbar made clear. She told me she looks to John Jay’s statement that it is the duty of the people “of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers” and has herself called for a preference for selecting Christians for positions of leadership.