Tuesday's Brain: Christianists Gone Wild!

[elfs]

Congresswoman's 'partner' rides

Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconson) is gay, and has been in a long-term relationship with a woman named Lauren Azar. Recently, Ms. Baldwin took a military flight over to Europe for one of those "fact finding missions" congresscritters are so keen on, and she took Ms. Azar with her.

This has Jim Brown of the American "Family" Network's panties wadded so tightly that he is demanding an apology from Defense Secretary Robert Gates as well as a policy change to make it clear that homosexual partners will not be granted the same travel assistance rights as spouses of heterosexual congressbeasts.

The comments to this article are just precious.

Textbook Critique: American Government, Institutions and Policies

James Q. Wilson and John J. DiIulio, Jr.'s high-school level textbook, American Government: Institutions and Policies is used in high schools throughout the country. I'll have to look into whether or not it's used in our district, although it's a few years out until I have to worry about it. The Center For Inquiry (which Wikipedia describes as " a non-profit educational organization with headquarters in the United States whose primary mission is to encourage evidence-based inquiry into paranormal and fringe science claims, alternative medicine and mental health practices, religion, secular ethics, and society") has written a report (warning: PDF) showing that the textbook is exceptionally skewed toward the right in its portrayal of politics. And I mean exceptionally.

For example, one photo caption (page 111) reads: "Students pray in front of a high school in Virginia. The Supreme Court will not let this happen inside a public school." This is an outright lie. Students are free to pray, to form student prayer groups, and to participate in prayer, in a public school, so long as doing so does not disrupt classtime. The school may not organize or promote such prayer groups, but that's wildly different from the students exercising their First Amendment rights to association and religious expression.

On page 112, the same lie is repeated: "Since 1947 the Court has applied the wall-of-separation theory to strike down as unconstitutional every effort to have any form of prayer in public schools, even if it is nonsectarian, voluntary, or limited to reading a passage of the Bible." This is the Christian Dominionist version of history, the one where disallowing the school's authority to impose religion is the same as declaring all religion expression unconstitutional.

Another example is the textbook's dealing of Bowers v. Hardwick and Lawrence v. Texas, the cases that ultimately led to the Supreme Court's strikedown of laws criminalizing private sexual activity among same-sex partners. From page 150:

The benefit was to strike down a law that was rarely enforced and if introduced today probably could not be passed. The cost was to create the possibility that the Court, and not Congress or the state legislatures, might decide whether same-sex marriages were legal.

To call the law it overturned "rarely enforced" is to trivialize the way state legislators used the persistence of sodomy statutes as support in their argument to deny gay couples any civil protections whatsoever. The paragraph depicts the ability of the courts to oversee fundamental rights as "a cost"; those in favor of same-sex marriage might see the matter differently. For a textbook to take a position one way or another is inappropriate.

The textbook also takes a long look at what went into writing the First Amendment, making outrageous and Dominionist-type claims that the First was written by those who recognized that citizens needed to be protected from their own sinfulness. It's an extended subtle riff on the notion that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation. I won't quote from it; download the report and read section IV on page 16; it's outrageous stuff.

If you've got kids is High School, maybe it's time you took a close look at what they're studying. This has been a hell of an eye-opener. I knew the biology textbooks were bad, but the history textbooks?

Comments

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

This surprises me not at all. Textbooks are written to sell textbooks, which means that they need to appeal to the markets that buy the largest number of textbooks, which are Texas and California. And by CA I don't mean San Francisco, either.

[voidrandom.livejournal.com]

The U.S. political text you really want to see used is "The Irony of Democracy" by Dye and Zeigler. It a marvelous description of the U.S. system using elites theory as the organizing concept. Completely true and guaranteed to get people upset about it. http://www.powells.com/biblio/65-9780155061217-0

[solarbird]

Hey, the press noticed!

[denelian.livejournal.com]

i thought it was the winners who wrote history?

and they haven't won YET. *I* am still fight the far right...