Craig's Fire

It takes a lot to piss me off – but Jefferson is the darling and hero of many “normal” conservative, and certainly among the top 5 founders – maybe Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Adams………Franklin, etc.

But the far right Texas School book people just decided to write him OUT of history as far as his importance….
Their reasoning? Obviously that he was a Deist and a man of the Enlightenment – in other words, he failed their religious test!

“Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She wants to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas….
The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards. We’re just picking ourselves up off the floor. The board’s far-right faction has spent months now proclaiming the importance of emphasizing America’s exceptionalism in social studies classrooms. But today they voted to remove one of the greatest of America’s Founders, Thomas Jefferson, from a standard about the influence of great political philosophers on political revolutions from 1750 to today.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/13/texas-textbook-massacre-u_n_498003.html

Why does it seem that Texas, a state which 1/2 the folks want to leave the Union anyway, has such an outsized (See: GW, etc.) effect on this country?

They are also removing stuff about civil rights and lots of other things the far right doesn’t like to think about.
Sorry, my conservative friends, but I don’t want to hear you tell me in the future how we are falling further and further behind the rest of the world…when we can’t even teach our kids about honest history.