The plan in Texas to rewrite history textbooks to fit a right-wing agenda could pass this week. The Guardian profiles the evangelical Christian lawyer behind the push, Cynthia Dunbar, who has plenty of interesting ways of looking at history.
Dunbar was elected to the state board of education for her evangelical Christian credentials, but no real surprise there because we already know that Texas has a large number of crazies in positions of power. A proponent of home and Christian private schooling, Dunbar says that sending kids to public schools is like "throwing them in to the enemy's flames." But because of the sheer number of the state's textbook purchases, the changes suggested by Dunbar could eventually reach most of the states in America.
The Guardian quotes Dunbar as saying:
"There seems to be a denial that this was a nation founded under God. We had to go back and make some corrections."
What kind of corrections? Some pretty big ones!
# Remember that thing called the slave trade? Well, it turns out what you learned was all wrong, because it wasn't some evil buying and selling of human beings, it was simply "Atlantic triangular trade."
# The Civil Rights Movement created "unrealistic expectations of equal outcomes" for minorities in America. And Martin Luther King, Jr? Pretty much a Black Panther.
* George Wallace has been slandered by the history books, he was the white MLK. We had it bad, my fellow white people, we had to sit in the front of the bus, we had to get better service at restaurants, etc.
http://gawker.com/5540483/meet-the-crusader-behind-texas-textbook-whitewashhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/16/texas-schools-rewrites-us-history