… seem to be running the Texas Board of Education. On Friday, March 12, 2010 this body decreed that some changes be made to the Texas curriculum. (The New York Times ran the story on Saturday.) This matters because Texas is the biggest textbook buyer in the United States — and publishers want to make their books palatable to their biggest potential market.
One of the problems with this is that the Texas Board of Education is deeply politicized, and has been for quite some time. Its conservative members want to rewrite history, and apparently aren’t swayed by historical evidence. The Times reports that one of the members of the Board thinks that the separation of church and state doesn’t exist :
“I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.”
Well, let’s see… hmm. Gosh. What about this? “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between church and State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.
What kind of disgraceful person might write incendiary words like these?
None other than Thomas Jefferson. (The full text of Jefferson’s January 1, 1802, “Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association” is available here.)
Jefferson, as you might remember, appears on various bits of American currency, and there’s a memorial in Washington dedicated to his memory. Why? Because, among other things, he was the chief author of another little document, the Declaration of Independence.
But — this is where the Texas Board of Education really hits its stride — a member of the Board has managed to have Jefferson “cut from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century.” Why? Because Jefferson believed in the separation of church and state!
So not only is the Board willing to re-intepret history in ways that contradict the historical record — but they’re willing to erase the historical record when it does not suit them.
If those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, what fate for those who seek to destroy it?
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