LET THE GAMES BEGIN!!
Welcome back, my
friends, to the show that never ends!
Yes, come one, come all, to the annual fundamentalist Protestant
Republican book-banning convention, better known as the annual meeting of the
Texas State Board of Education, the fifteen folks who decide what our children
are taught.
For those familiar
with the proceedings of the Texas State Board of Education, its mission is
simple -- to indoctrinate our children in the evangelical, fundamentalist,
Protestant Republican way of thinking about the world. You don’t believe me? Well, here are some examples of the
close-minded bigots at work. A textbook
that referred to fossil fuels as being formed millions of years ago was edited
to remove the offensive passage. The
offense? Millions of years ago directly
contradicts creationism, which states that the world was created by God at the
snap of his fingers several thousand years ago, and that evolution is a
God-less atheist fraud being foisted upon our unsuspecting good little boys and
girls in order to lead them into a life of sin and decadence. Of course, those with an ounce of
intelligence know that Genesis is Hebrew mythology and, incredibly, is a
description of evolution (lower life forms first, ending with man) made
thousands of years before anyone even knew what evolution was. (If that does not convince the atheists that
there is indeed a God, I don’t know what will, as I refuse to say that it is
just a mere coincidence; surely, there must have been some divine inspiration
to make the early Hebrews write a mythology of the creation of man that science
would prove thousands of years later in evolution.) The problem with the creationist sect is that they have taken the
greatest treatise on morality ever written and twisted it to be the only
treatise ever written, to the exclusion of everything else. Let me say it once again -- the Bible is a
book, written by MEN (I can’t envision God with a big Bic pen and a big writing
tablet), and provides a general guideline on how to live a moral life. It is not, nor was it ever intended to be, a
complete and accurate history of mankind.
The fun doesn’t stop
with evolution, oh no. The Texas State
Board of Education banned an environmental science textbook because, get this,
it praised the Endangered Species Act and talked about global warming. Yup, more of that evil, liberal, atheistic
do-gooder Communist stuff. Only an
ignorant, uneducated doofus was say that protecting endangered species is a bad
thing, but apparently, there are many ignorant, uneducated doofuses here is
Texas, and they are making decisions for all of us. It is actually in the Bible that Adam was given the responsibility
to care for God’s creatures. I don’t
know about you, but exterminating species does not seem to me to show much
caring. Again, we have a very
narrow-minded right-wing extreme that is willing to interpret their own sacred
text in such a way as to justify their political viewpoints, even if it
directly contradicts the sacred text!
Oh, and global warming? Facts
are facts. The Earth has warmed over
the past century, like it or not. Get
over it.
Want another
one? One textbook that mentioned that
Muslim terrorists do not accurately reflect Muslim teaching was objected to as
being too kind to Muslims. Of course,
those that personally know Muslims know that that statement is true, that
radicals are no more a reflection of Muslim teachings as Timothy McVeigh was a
typical American White man. But, it
doesn’t fit into the extremist political agenda, so out it goes.
I know those of you
who do not live in Texas are saying, “So what?” Here’s “What” -- the Shrub has promised to export our fine Texas
educational system to the rest of the country.
Yes, you too can have your schools controlled by a fanatical group of
evangelical Protestant Republican extremists.
(Can you say, “John Ashcroft?”)
Let’s flash back to the early 1930s, and the takeover of the German
government by the National Socialists?
Remember what they did to the German youth? Yes, that’s right, they restricted what they were allowed to
learn to conform to the Nazi doctrine, and a within a decade had brainwashed an
entire population to believe that Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals were evil and
had to be slaughtered. Oh yeah, I
forgot -- the same right-wing, Protestant, evangelical, Republican extremists
who are wrestling control of our public schools are the same ones who say that
the Holocaust never happened, that it was an invention of bleeding heart
liberals.
So, do you know how
to do the goose step?