Saturday, September 13, 2014

Coming to a school near you

If you did not grow up in the South, as I did, you can hardly conceive the level of ignorance. It is not a myth that Baptist preachers told their congregations that if Al Smith was elected president in 1928, the pope would sneak over from Rome in a secret tunnel to enter the White House and tell Smith (a Catholic) how to run the country.

Earlier, the Klan in Georgia told a similar story about the Bishop of Savannah. (My grandfather, from an old -- in fact, the oldest -- Southern family of European descent, had taken a second wife from an Italian-American family, and so T.C., my grandfather, ended up on a peacemaking mission to get the Georgia Grand Dragon to tone down his vile attacks on Catholics. This was around 1912.)

By the time I came along most younger Southerners with any pretensions to education no longer believed in the tunnels, although their attitude toward Catholics was as hateful as ever. The level of hatred of Catholics has cooled a little, although if you listen to "To Every Man An Answer," which is available on radio in almost every community in the country, you will find it still exists, along with even greater hatred of Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists, Muslims, Jehovah's Witnesses and a complicated but basically hateful attitude toward Jews.

All this is by way of introducing a report on the Texas Board of Education mandate that textbooks, to be acceptable in Texas public schools, must subscribe to the old Southern standards of ignorance. This concerns you because Texas is the largest purchaser of schoolbooks, and publishers tend to make the rest of the country follow Texas practice. (It seems to me that it would be a good idea for a foundation, or even a money-making business, to produce and sell non-Texan schoolbooks, but so far that hasn't happened.)

Texas young'uns are to learn that separate-but-equal really was equal, that Islam spread by conquest but Christianity by the gentle force of its message, that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War and many similar delusions held by most Southern rightwingers today. A big push is on to sneak the Ten Commandments into the public schools, despite the fact that, as the report notes, the Founders explicitly excluded the first four commandments from our governmental framework:
The Framers, for instance, were not influenced by the first four Commandments, which deal with matters of religious belief and practice. In fact, notable framers such as James Madison led the battle against government punishment for unorthodox religious belief.
And, as the report does not say, had nothing to say about the rest. Ox-coveting is not mentioned in the Constitution, and, if rightwing Christians were honest with themselves, they would acknowledge that their economic ideas not only permit but require ox-coveting. 

The report by the Texas Freedom Network Educational Fund is scornful. On the chance that you think I have been too scornful, I invite you to look at this loving, Christian message from Robby Gallaty, senior pastor at the Baptist church down the road from where I grew up, in which he calls for murdering homosexuals.




9 comments:

  1. Harry wrote: "if rightwing Christians were honest with themselves, they would acknowledge that their economic ideas not only permit but require ox-coveting. "

    Definition of covet: "to desire wrongfully, inordinately, or without due regard for the rights of others:"

    Private property and the free market enforces the anti-coveting commandment. You covet your neighbor's ox. Then get off your ass, make some money, and go buy your own.

    ReplyDelete
  2. My reading of our history is that the free market has rewarded, richly, those who found themselves in a position to desire property without due regard -- or any regard -- for the rights of others.

    And not just ours. Think of the enclosure of the commons.

    But please explain how the free market does what you say.

    ReplyDelete
  3. All this is by way of introducing a report on the Texas Board of Education mandate that textbooks, to be acceptable in Texas public schools, must subscribe to the old Southern standards of ignorance.

    I bet you went no further than that steaming pile of Wonkette merde, and didn't trouble yourself with reading the report.

    ---

    My reading of our history is that the free market has richly rewarded everyone.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Everyone? The handloom weavers? African slaves? Sharecroppers?

    Being murdered is not a definition for 'richly reward.'

    ReplyDelete
  5. I read the executive summary (and lived it, too, in my early years). Did you? Did you find the criticism of neo-Confederate lies to 'stink'?

    ReplyDelete
  6. I read the executive summary ...

    Typical of a progressive to stop with an executive summary that fluffs your pre-conceived notions.

    Read one of the actual reports, like the one on American Government. Its criticisms, all of them, are of nothing more than failing to genuflect before progressive shibboleths.

    Here is one example of how awful the textbooks are: Some textbooks reinforce negative stereotypes of Islam as a violent religion spread exclusively by conquest.

    Did you find the criticism of neo-Confederate lies to 'stink'?

    Yes.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Islam has never spread exclusively by conquest. As RtO has often noticed, Islam has some (unobvious to me) very strong appeal to its adherents. Missing that has contributed to the misguided US poicy toward Muslim countries.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Islam has never spread exclusively by conquest.

    That is quibbling. If one is considering the history of Western Civilization, Islam's spread was exclusively by conquest. And if one was to take a survey of threatened and actual violence since the end of the Cold War, Islam would feature prominently. Regardless of appeal to its adherents, Islam is a religion which, in fact, retains violent and totalitarian characteristics that all other religions have long since jettisoned.

    That this report criticizes a textbook for relaying those facts says more about the progressive shibboleths of the report than the textbook itself.

    No surprise Wonkette hyperventilated.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Everyone? The handloom weavers? African slaves? Sharecroppers?

    Being murdered is not a definition for 'richly reward.'


    Wow, you really got me this time. I completely forgot that no one has ever been murdered without capitalism being the murderer. Or that there was no such thing as slavery without capitalism.

    I must be reading those Texas history books.

    Worth noting: you are arguing a null.

    And by everybody, I meant everybody. In comparison to every other economic system ever tried.

    Which excludes nullities.

    ReplyDelete