This is your Texas new textbook review and adoption on ultra-hard conservative crack right here.
In an article published last weekend on the right-wing website FreedomOutpost.com, Ames boasted that new social studies textbooks publishers will submit in April must be based on those deeply flawed standards. His article offers a guide for the kinds of textbook content he and other right-wing activists as well as some SBOE members will be looking for in the textbooks. Some examples:
- Ames wants textbooks to play down the role of slavery in causing the American Civil War by teaching students that the primary causes of the war were sectionalism and states’ rights. He points approvingly to SBOE member Pat Hardy’s statement in 2010 that “slavery was a side issue.”
- He gleefully points out that students will learn about “militant thugs and even cop killers” in the Black Panthers and other “militant black civil rights groups” when they get to textbook discussions on the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
- He insists that the textbooks must tell students about the “unrealistic expectations from civil rights legislation, resulting in the burning and looting of a number of U. S. inner cities.”
- He wants the textbooks to suggest that Republicans were responsible for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 even though northern congressional Democrats had long championed the measure, a Democratically controlled Congress passed it, and a Democratic president signed it into law.
- He expresses pleasure over the possibility that textbooks for high school U.S. Government might be forced to imply, despite numerous rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court to the contrary, that separation of church and state isn’t a key constitutional principle.
It wasn't for nothing that Ames posted that tripe on a "patriot organizing" site. Back in the day, we called them John Birch cells. Now they're "freedom outposts." Whatever they're called, it seems creepy to be inviting these lunatics to celebrate their racist, nativist leanings in the context of public education.
