textbooks

Today, People For the American Way released a new report entitled "Barton’s Bunk: Religious Right ‘Historian’ Hits the Big Time in Tea Party America" written by PFAW Senior Fellow Peter Montgomery that exposes David Barton's shoddy pseudo-history and why it matters: 

Barton’s growing visibility and influence with members of Congress and other Republican Party officials is troubling for many reasons: he distorts history and the Constitution for political purposes; he encourages religious divisiveness and unequal treatment for religious minorities; and he feeds a toxic political climate in which one’s political opponents are not just wrong, but evil and anti-God.

Scholars have criticized Barton for presenting facts out of context or in misleading ways, but that hasn’t stopped him from promoting his theories through books, television, and, yes, the textbooks that will teach the next generation of Americans. He promotes conspiracy theories about elites hiding the truth from average Americans in order to undermine the nation from within. Last summer, he declared that liberal and media attacks on the Tea Party were just like attacks on Jesus. In February, Barton spoke at the Connect 2011 Pastors Conference, where he said that Christians needed to control the culture and media so that “guys that have a secular viewpoint cannot survive.” Said Barton, “If the press lacks moral discrimination, it’s because we haven’t been pushing our people to chop that kind of news off.”

Barton’s work is not just an academic exercise. It is meant to have a political impact. For Barton, “documenting” the divine origins of his interpretations of the Constitution gives him and his political allies a potent weapon. Barton promotes a false reality in which anyone who opposes any element of his political agenda stands in opposition to both the Founding Fathers and to God. He believes that everything in our society – government, the judiciary, the economy, the family – should be governed according to the Bible, and he promotes a view of the Bible and Jesus that many Christians would not recognize. Opponents, even Christians, who disagree with Barton about tax policy or the powers of Congress are not only wrong, they are un-American and anti-religious, enemies of America and of God.

President Obama is a particularly frequent target of Barton’s. In January, one of his WallBuilders Live radio shows was titled “Why is Obama Trying to Remove God from the United States?” In March, right-wing “news” service WND quoted Barton accusing Obama (falsely of course) of being “engaged in a pattern of ‘willfully, deliberately’ repudiating America's Christian heritage.”

Those are the kind of accusations long favored by the Religious Right, and they are destructive. Claims that political opponents are evil and are actively trying to destroy Americans’ freedoms poison the public arena, make constructive civic discourse nearly impossible, and have the potential to incite acts of violence.

Elected officials who endorse Barton give his claims credibility they do not deserve. He in turn gives cover and a veneer of legitimacy to right-wing politicians interested in putting their notions of a nation created by and for Christians into public policy. Both Barton and his backers are undermining understanding of, and respect for, vital American values and constitutional principles like separation of church and state and equal treatment under the law.

And last night, Peter appeared on "The Last Word" with Lawrence O'Donnell to discuss Barton and his influence:

A proposal in the California State Senate that incorporates the state’s important LGBT historical figures into the social studies curriculum is stirring up intense anger on the anti-gay Right. Known as the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive and Respectful (FAIR) Education Act, S.B. 48 ensures that schools discuss the contributions made by “gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans” along with a multitude of other groups, including “Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, [and] European Americans.” But the militantly anti-gay group Save California is fiercely resisting the measure.

Save California, which is led by Randy Thomasson, already runs the “Rescue Your Children” campaign against public schools. The group’s “ten reasons to leave your government-run school” includes “#1 homosexual-bi-trans indoctrination;” “#2 abortion indoctrination;” “#3 condom/birth control indoctrination;” “#4 anti-God, pro-evolution indoctrination;” and “#9 Anti-Christian indoctrination and widespread rejection of religious and moral values.” Thomasson was also a strong opponent of California’s Harvey Milk Day, which he called a “moral crime,” saying “teachers, principals, and schools that push Harvey Milk's values are responsible for the degradation of children as human beings.”

Thomasson now tells WorldNetDaily that SB 48 will lead to “the worst school sexual indoctrination ever”:

Randy Thomasson of the family-promoting SaveCalifornia.com said parents "don't want and children don't need 'LGBTIQ' role models in school."

"S.B. 48 micromanages public schools by forcing teachers, administrators, local school boards, textbooks, and instructional materials to promote a gaggle of sexual lifestyles that disturb parents and confuse kids," Thomasson said. "This costly state mandate targets children for sexual brainwashing, behind the backs of parents, teaching boys and girls to admire those who engage in homosexual, bisexual or transsexual behavior."

…

In a letter to Rep. Alan Lowenthall, chairman of the Senate Education Committee where the vote – six Democrats in favor and three Republicans opposed – was recorded, Thomasson's organization had opposed the plan.

"On behalf of the millions of parents we serve and the children they love, please oppose S.B. 48, which is the most radical sexual indoctrination ever of children in California public schools, which are supposed to be about academics," the letter said.

…

"The California public schools are no longer safe places for boys and girls morally," he told WND. "This new bill, S.B. 48, reflects the desire of the Democrat state legislators to recruit boys and girls to support the homosexual-bisexual-transsexual agenda both personally and publicly."

The Texas State Board of Education’s right-wing spin on U.S. history has earned the state a “D” from a conservative education think tank. Mary Tuma of the Texas Independent notes that the Thomas B. Fordham Institute is a “national conservative group calls for a ‘radical’ overhaul of U.S. history standards at K-12 public schools nationwide,” but even the self-declared “right-of-center” group couldn’t deny the drastic manipulation of the education curriculum by the far-right SBOE. The new education standards, outlined in the Right Wing Watch In-Focus: Texas Textbooks, downplay the roles of the civil rights and labor movements, whitewash slavery and Japanese internment, utilize a Religious Right view of the Constitution and the nation’s founding, and embrace a partisan Republican reading of history (among other changes) in an attempt to remove the alleged “liberal bias” of history textbooks.

The Fordham Institute lowered Texas’ rating from a C to a D due to the SBOE’s “blatant politicizing,” saying that “history is distorted throughout the document in the interest of political talking points.” According to the report, the new Texas standards are “inculcated” with “right-wing policy positions” and promote the Religious Right’s interpretation of government as the “Biblical influences on America’s founding are exaggerated, if not invented.” The report states:

Texas’s heavily politicized 2010 revisions to its social studies curriculum have attracted massive national attention. Indeed, both in public hearings and press interviews, the leaders of the State Board of Education made no secret of their evangelical Christian right agenda, promising to inculcate biblical principles, patriotic values, and American exceptionalism. And politics do figure heavily in the resulting TEKS.

…

While such social studies doctrine is usually associated with the relativist and diversity-obsessed educational left, the right-dominated Texas Board of Education made no effort to replace traditional social studies dogma with substantive historical content. Instead, it seems to have grafted on its own conservative talking points. The lists of “historically significant” names, for example, incorporate all the familiar politically correct group categories (women and minorities are systematically included in all such lists, regardless of their relative historical significance). At the same time, however, the document distorts or suppresses less triumphal or more nuanced aspects of our past that the Board found politically unacceptable (slavery and segregation are all but ignored, while religious influences are grossly exaggerated). The resulting fusion is a confusing, unteachable hodgepodge, blending the worst of two educational dogmas.


Complex historical issues are obscured with blatant politicizing throughout the document. Biblical influences on America’s founding are exaggerated, if not invented. The complicated but undeniable history of separation between church and state is flatly dismissed. From the earliest grades, students are pressed to uncritically celebrate the “free enterprise system and its benefits.” “Minimal government intrusion” is hailed as key to the early nineteenth-century commercial boom—ignoring the critical role of the state and federal governments in internal improvements and economic expansion. Native peoples are missing until brief references to nineteenth-century events. Slavery, too, is largely missing. Sectionalism and states’ rights are listed before slavery as causes of the Civil War, while the issue of slavery in the territories—the actual trigger for the sectional crisis—is never mentioned at all. During and after Reconstruction, there is no mention of the Black Codes, the Ku Klux Klan, or sharecropping; the term “Jim Crow” never appears. Incredibly, racial segregation is only mentioned in a passing reference to the 1948 integration of the armed forces.


In the modern era, the standards list “the internment of German, Italian and Japanese Americans and Executive Order 9066”—exaggerating the comparatively trivial internment of German and Italian Americans, and thereby obscuring the incontrovertible racial dimension of the larger and more systematic Japanese American internment. It is disingenuously suggested that the House Un-American Activities Committee— and, by extension, McCarthyism—have been vindicated by the Venona decrypts of Soviet espionage activities (which had, in reality, no link to McCarthy’s targets). Opposition to the civil rights movement is falsely identified only with “the congressional bloc of Southern Democrats”—whose later metamorphosis into Southern Republicans is never mentioned. Specific right-wing policy positions are inculcated as well. For example, students are explicitly urged to condemn federal entitlement programs, including Texas-born Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” and to mistrust international treaties (considered threats to American sovereignty).

…

Slavery, so central to the history of Texas, is mentioned only in passing. And then, of course, the other seven strands “cover” the same period yet again. In the high school U.S. history course, the pattern is the same. Scattered examples and lists of names quickly move through late nineteenth-century politics, the emergence of the United States as a world power, Progressivism, and the 1920s; on to the civil rights movement, the Reagan era, 9/11 and beyond. Once again, the other strands revisit the same ground from different perspectives, adding more isolated factoids and ill-matched lists of names. Then, the government and economics courses (themselves subdivided into the usual strands) “cover” the subject yet again, each strand and course offering further fragments of material in a historically incomprehensible jumble.

The zealous opposition to anti-bullying initiatives in schools from Religious Right groups is based on the premise that such programs are surreptitious ways to “promote homosexuality” or disseminate “homosexual propaganda” in schools. On WallBuildersLive, faux-historian David Barton and co-host Rick Green brought on Brian Camenker of the stringently anti-gay group MassResistance to discuss ways “homosexual activists” are the real bullies and manufactured the whole problem of bullying in the first place. With more scrutiny given to the problem of the pervasive harassment of LGBT students (including the case of one Minnesota teenager who committed suicide last week), right-wing groups and leaders have become even more fanatical in their hostility to anti-bullying programs.

Green and Camenker, who described gay-rights groups as “fascist,” agree that “homosexual activists” invented the problem of bullying and became the bullies themselves:

Camenker: It often takes parents standing up to the homosexual activists and it’s hard to do, but you’re right. This is a very aggressive, fascist type of movement and these guys define the term ‘bullies.’

Green: I think you’re right and the perception I guess and maybe a lot of teachers, principals, superintendents out there have bought into this perception is that they are only the ones being bullied, the homosexual lobby is, so they’re hypersensitive to the other side of it.

Barton later claims that “homosexual indoctrination” is found in the entire public school system and tells parents that they “better get on top of what’s being taught to your kids.”

Barton: There’s a whole lost of this that goes on that parents don’t even hear about but it is going on. All this bullying stuff, as Brian pointed out, it’s not the schools that are doing bullying, it’s the people from outside the schools coming in and saying “oh you got a bullying problem and we need to teach a course for you.” The people living there didn’t see any problem. But it’s these outside agenda-

Green: They’re the very thing they say they’re going in to stop is what they’re doing themselves.

Barton: They generate and start. It goes back to the question Jesus asks, “What’s it profit you to gain the whole world and lose your soul?” The question I gotta ask is, what’s it worth to you to gain everything you want and lose your kids?

Because unless you’re willing to monitor what’s going on in that classroom, I guarantee you they are getting homosexual indoctrination. I don’t care whether you’re in a rural area or not, because this is so much a part of textbooks, so much a part of curricular stuff, so much a part of what goes on with other kids. We see it too often in lawsuits, we hear of accounts like this, and we hear of dozens of other accounts where nothing’s ever done. You better get on top of what’s being taught to your kids.

• Ian Millhiser @ Think Progress: Sen. Mike Lee Calls Child Labor Laws Unconstitutional.
• Joe.My.God: GOProud Pleads Its CPAC Case To Fox.
• Jillian Rayfield @ TPM: Birther Texas Rep. Pushes 'Religious Or Cultural Law' (Read: Sharia) Ban.
• Robert Steinback @ Hatewatch: AIM’s Kincaid Takes Up Banner for Racist Organization.
• Sahil Kapur @ Raw Story: Tea partiers push to remove criticisms of Founding Fathers from textbooks.
• Towleroad: GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter to Introduce Legislation Attempting to Impede Repeal of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'.

Via the Texas Freedom Network, we see that the Texas Eagle Forum has endorsed a position staked out by Elijah Abraham, an evangelical Christian convert from Islam, calling for the banning of Muslims from serving in the military , running for public office, or serving as government employees:

In the U.S., there are Muslim training camps across the country actively planning attacks on American soil. Young Americans are being converted to Islam in our jails, our military, public schools and universities, and in churches that preach Liberation Theology. Muslims have gained two seats in the U.S, Congress and have won seats in state and local races. Public school textbooks are becoming pro-Islam and anti-Christian. Muslims are buying Fortune 500 companies and high tech companies. There is a Dow Jones Islamic Index. Islamic banks, insurance companies and mortgage companies are springing up across the country. Our open borders welcome Muslims.

The challenge to America is to stop the spread of Islam in the U.S. before it is too late.

SOLUTIONS:

1. Congress MUST outlaw Shariah and international law
2. Eliminate Muslim government employees
3. Outlaw Muslim terrorist organizations, such as The Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR, etc.
4. Muslims should be ineligible to run for political office
5. All Muslim military personnel should be removed from the U.S. armed forces
6. Monitor mosques
7. Shut down terrorist training camps in the U.S.

Texas Eagle Forum also announces that it "will push for a bill against Shariah law during the 2011 legislative session, which opens in January in Austin."

• The American Family Association will be webcasting the Values Voter Summit live - you can watch it here.
• Several Religious Right groups have "delivered 20,000 petitions from Americans to the Republican leadership in Congress demanding that it feature family values in its soon-to-be-released legislative agenda."
• Some rare good news: people don't think that Glenn Beck should be in a position as a religious leader.
• The insanity regarding Texas textbooks just never stops.
• Mike Huckabee has endorsed Rand Paul.
• Rob Schenck and Pat Mahoney secured all the copies of the Koran that Terry Jones intended to burn and transported them back to Washington, DC for safe-keeping.
• The Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation has changed its name to the "Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network."
• Marco Rubio teams up with David Barton.
• The new head of the Idaho Values Alliance doesn't want to talk about Bryan Fischer.
• Finally, I have to say that all of the revelations about Christine O'Donnell that are coming out are not really all that surprising.  After all, what do you expect from someone who worked at Concerned Women for America, which was founded by a woman who believes that "Christian values should dominate our government. The test of those values is the Bible. Politicians who do not use the Bible to guide their public and private lives do not belong in office."

• Joe.My.God: Texas GOP Platform Calls For Making It A Felony To Perform Gay Marriages.
• Wonk Room: Texas Can’t Afford To Buy New Far-Right Textbooks, But Rick Perry Still Resists Federal Aid.
• Alvin McEwen: Is the LGBT Community Plotting to Make Children 'Crossdress?' Of Course Not.
• William Saletan: If it's OK to Reject Blood from Gay Men, What About Blacks?
• Bruce Wilson: Leading Biblical Law Advocate "Jubilant" To Endorse Angle For Senate.
• Iowa Independent: National Organization for Marriage heading to Iowa.
• Finally, the quote of the day from Janet Jenkins' attorney Jennifer Levi regarding the Liberty Counsel's continuing efforts to represent Lisa Miller in court despite the fact that she reportedly fled the country in order to avoid court orders: "It doesn’t make sense for a lawyer unable to communicate with a client to pursue very important issues at the appellate level. Clearly, they have a broader legal agenda in continuing this legal fight, which is all but dead."

For years, Cathie Adams has been the President of the Texas affiliate of Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, until she was elected Chair of the state Republican Party last year.

So I guess it should come as no surprise that Gov. Rick Perry would attend a Texas Eagle Forum event at which Don McLeroy received a "Patriot Award" for his efforts to remake the state's textbooks and curriculum ... or that Perry would use his appearance to demand to know whether voters worship government or God: 

Gov. Rick Perry painted the upcoming election as a religious crusade to take back the soul of the country during a Thursday night speech to the conservative Texas Eagle Forum.

While Perry has invoked God and country before, his 14-minute speech to the 500 gathered, most of them delegates to the Texas Republican state convention, was stronger and more strident than previously.

"We will raise our voices in defense of our values and in defiance of the hollow precepts and shameful self-interests that guide our opponents on the left," Perry said to the receptive audience.

He said the November election is bigger than "red states and blue states, conservatives or liberals, stimulus or budget cuts."

"We are in a struggle for the heart and soul of our nation," Perry said.

"That's the question: Who do you worship? Do you believe in the primacy of unrestrained federal government? Or do you worship the God of the universe, placing our trust in him?"

...

Featured at the event was national Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly, who said she is heartened by shifts in public attitudes. She cited the diminished influence of big media, the majority of Americans considering themselves conservatives and anti-abortion, and the overall pervasive feeling that come November, "conservatives know they can win."

The group presented its Patriot Award to State Board of Education leader Don McLeroy, who led the board for the past two years as it tackled curriculum standards for English, science and social studies.