The liberals got caught flat-footed in the Texas textbook wars. Texas and California drive the content of many textbooks since they have the largest public school populations. Textbook manufactures go where the money is, and less populated states can get what Texas and California decide what goes in their textbooks. It’s possible that a public (government) school in Massachusetts could get history textbooks written by whoever controls the school boards from these two distant states. But this isn’t always the case since technology has made it easier to tailor books to specific markets. Even so, liberals are going crazy and using the new Texas guidelines to clamp down on what goes into their state’s textbooks. Of course, they have to misrepresent the guidelines to accomplish their goal of further historical revisionism. Here’s an example:
“State Senator Leland Yee has introduced a bill that would require the California Board of Education to pay special attention during its textbook reviews for any of the changes approved by the Texas Board, and then report those findings to the state secretary of education and the state legislature, presumably so that those textbooks can be altered or rejected.”
What in particular is stressing many liberals like Mr. Yee (D-San Francisco)? That America’s founding fathers were “guided by Christian principles.”
I suspect that Mr. Yee has not read the Texas standards. This is not uncharacteristic of knee-jerk, ideology-driven Leftists. How many Congressmen who voted for the 2700-page healthcare bill ever read it? We have admissions from Attorney General Eric Holder ((Attorney General Eric H. Holder admitted to a congressional committee that he had not read the 10 pages of SB 1070: “I’ve just expressed concerns on the basis of what I’ve heard about the law. But I’m not in a position to say at this point, not having read the law, not having had the chance to interact with people are doing the review, exactly what my position is.”)) and Janet Napolitano (see here), head of Homeland Security, that they did not read the Arizona immigration law. Of course, this did not stop them from condemning it. The same is true for the new Texas textbook standards. How many times have you read that the standards minimize the notion of separation of church and state? Here’s what the guidelines say on the subject:
Examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America and guaranteed its free exercise by saying that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, and compare and contrast this to the phrase “separation of church and state.”
Yee and his fellow-historical revisionists don’t want students to “compare and contrast” because they don’t want students to realize that they’ve been conned.
To make the point that liberals have little idea of even recent history when it comes to the subject of religion and America’s early founding, Texas Board of Education Member Cynthia Dunbar, a professor at Liberty University School of Law, played a game of historical “gotcha” when she delivered her invocation. It included the following:
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 to the Charter of New England . . . or to the Charter of Massachusetts Bay . . . or to the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut . . . the same objective is present: A Christian land governed by Christian principles. . . . I believe the entire Bill of Rights came into being because of the knowledge our forefathers had of the Bible and their belief in it: freedom of belief, of expression, of assembly, of petition, the dignity of the individual, the sanctity of the home, equal justice under law, and the reservation of powers to the people. . . . 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.
After hearing Dunbar’s invocation (you can view it here), the left-leaning Texas Freedom Network wrote the following in response: “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.” What Dunbar quoted was an excerpt of a speech that Chief Justice Earl Warren gave at the 1954 National Prayer Breakfast (for the full story, see here). Time magazine published an article about the event (see here). As reported by Time, those in attendance included President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon (who read from John 15), Cabinet members, Congressmen, diplomats, and businessmen. It has always been the goal of liberals to keep these historical facts hidden from children. They might ask embarrassing questions.
A 1982 article in Newsweek Magazine stated, “[F]or centuries [the Bible] has exerted an unrivaled influence on American culture, politics and social life. Now historians are discovering that the Bible perhaps even more than the Constitution, is our founding document.” ((Kenneth L. Woodward, “How the Bible made America,” Newsweek (December 27, 1982), 44.)) Time magazine said something similar in 1987: “Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea. That good idea combines a commitment to man’s inalienable rights with the Calvinist belief in an ultimate moral right and sinful man’s obligation to do good. These articles of faith, embodied in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution, literally govern our lives today.” ((Time (May 25, 1987).)) Our nation’s values were rooted in the Bible. Of course, this does not mean that all Christian Americans followed the biblical precepts that they claimed to believe, but they could not deny history.
The History Con May be Over
By Gary DeMar
The liberals got caught flat-footed in the Texas textbook wars. Texas and California drive the content of many textbooks since they have the largest public school populations. Textbook manufactures go where the money is, and less populated states can get what Texas and California decide what goes in their textbooks. It’s possible that a public (government) school in Massachusetts could get history textbooks written by whoever controls the school boards from these two distant states. But this isn’t always the case since technology has made it easier to tailor books to specific markets. Even so, liberals are going crazy and using the new Texas guidelines to clamp down on what goes into their state’s textbooks. Of course, they have to misrepresent the guidelines to accomplish their goal of further historical revisionism. Here’s an example:
“State Senator Leland Yee has introduced a bill that would require the California Board of Education to pay special attention during its textbook reviews for any of the changes approved by the Texas Board, and then report those findings to the state secretary of education and the state legislature, presumably so that those textbooks can be altered or rejected.”
What in particular is stressing many liberals like Mr. Yee (D-San Francisco)? That America’s founding fathers were “guided by Christian principles.”
I suspect that Mr. Yee has not read the Texas standards. This is not uncharacteristic of knee-jerk, ideology-driven Leftists. How many Congressmen who voted for the 2700-page healthcare bill ever read it? We have admissions from Attorney General Eric Holder ((Attorney General Eric H. Holder admitted to a congressional committee that he had not read the 10 pages of SB 1070: “__I’ve just expressed concerns on the basis of what I’ve heard about the law. But I’m not in a position to say at this point, not having read the law, not having had the chance to interact with people are doing the review, exactly what my position is.”)) and Janet Napolitano (see here), head of Homeland Security, that they did not read the Arizona immigration law. Of course, this did not stop them from condemning it. The same is true for the new Texas textbook standards. How many times have you read that the standards minimize the notion of separation of church and state? Here’s what the guidelines say on the subject:
Examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America and guaranteed its free exercise by saying that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, and compare and contrast this to the phrase “separation of church and state.”
Yee and his fellow-historical revisionists don’t want students to “compare and contrast” because they don’t want students to realize that they’ve been conned.
To make the point that liberals have little idea of even recent history when it comes to the subject of religion and America’s early founding, Texas Board of Education Member Cynthia Dunbar, a professor at Liberty University School of Law, played a game of historical “gotcha” when she delivered her invocation. It included the following:
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 to the Charter of New England . . . or to the Charter of Massachusetts Bay . . . or to the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut . . . the same objective is present: A Christian land governed by Christian principles. . . .
I believe the entire Bill of Rights came into being because of the knowledge our forefathers had of the Bible and their belief in it: freedom of belief, of expression, of assembly, of petition, the dignity of the individual, the sanctity of the home, equal justice under law, and the reservation of powers to the people. . . .
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.
After hearing Dunbar’s invocation (you can view it here), the left-leaning Texas Freedom Network wrote the following in response: “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.” What Dunbar quoted was an excerpt of a speech that Chief Justice Earl Warren gave at the 1954 National Prayer Breakfast (for the full story, see here). Time magazine published an article about the event (see here). As reported by Time, those in attendance included President Eisenhower, Vice President Nixon (who read from John 15), Cabinet members, Congressmen, diplomats, and businessmen. It has always been the goal of liberals to keep these historical facts hidden from children. They might ask embarrassing questions.
A 1982 article in Newsweek Magazine stated, “[F]or centuries [the Bible] has exerted an unrivaled influence on American culture, politics and social life. Now historians are discovering that the Bible perhaps even more than the Constitution, is our founding document.” ((Kenneth L. Woodward, “How the Bible made America,” Newsweek (December 27, 1982), 44.)) Time magazine said something similar in 1987: “Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea. That good idea combines a commitment to man’s inalienable rights with the Calvinist belief in an ultimate moral right and sinful man’s obligation to do good. These articles of faith, embodied in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution, literally govern our lives today.” ((Time (May 25, 1987).)) Our nation’s values were rooted in the Bible. Of course, this does not mean that all Christian Americans followed the biblical precepts that they claimed to believe, but they could not deny history.